Matterhorn from Willem van den Hoed on Vimeo.

8-bit City is an awesome Kickstarter funded project by Brett Camper. Videogame graphic inspired slippy maps built on top of Openstreetmap data.

The 8-Bit Cities project, which started with 8-Bit NYC, is an attempt to make the city feel foreign yet familiar, smashing together two culturally common models of space: the lo-fi overhead world maps of 1980s role-playing and adventure games, and the geographically accurate data that drives today’s web maps and GPS navigation. I hope to evoke the same urge for exploration, abstract sense of scale, and perhaps most importantly unbounded excitement that many of us remember experiencing on the Nintendo Entertainment System, the Commodore 64, or any other number of 8-bit microcomputers. Maps offer us visual architectures of the world, encouraging us to think about and interact with space in particularly constrained ways. Take some time to think about your surroundings a little differently. Set out on a quest. Be an adventurer

photo via ben cooper’s flickr

Deep inside the mountain is an 800m shaft, about 30m wide. During times of excess energy on the National Grid, water from the lake below is pumped up into the reservoir above the shaft. And when a surge of energy is needed on the grid, (say during a football match half-time), it’s released back into the lake, hurtling through the turbines and generating up to 1,320 MW from standstill in 12 seconds.

This isn’t all that surprising, after all it is how all watertowers work, but the name, Electric Mountain, the description of the semi-audible humming present at the site which is somewhere between hearing and feeling, gives the whole place a Tarkovskian type feeling of the Zone.

The wikipedia article about the Dinorwig Power Station has more details.

After we climbed out, I asked about the lake below. “You could say that it’s tidal, but with the television schedules, rather than the moon.”

Mind is blown.

via tom taylor

Untitled Map #3 by Luis Douradro

Google map showing all areas covered by Street View

BLDGBLOG posits some possible futures of trap rooms which are the architectural equivalent of a trap street in the context of in the of interior mapping of shopping malls and the like. A trap street (examples) is a

deliberate cartographic error introduced into a map so as to catch acts of copyright infringement by rival firms.

So you put deliberately false information into your cartographic work and then monitor the maps created by competitors and watch for your honeypot cartographic features to show up on work they claim to be their own. As mentioned in the post, as the mapping of interior space becomes more widespread the introduction of trap rooms, trap corridors, trap stair etc will become commonplace as firm seek to protect their work and the deals they have made for the interior geo-data. In turn, people we be left wondering how to occupy the spaces they see in some of their maps, but not others. The best bit comes at the end,

But I’m also curious about less practical things, such as what cultural, even psychological, effects the presence of trap rooms might actually have. Games could be launched, the purpose of which is to find and occupy as many trap rooms as possible. New paranoias emerge, that the room featured above your apartment on that new app you just downloaded is not really there at all; it’s a trap room, and you can’t sleep at night, worried that you actually have no neighbors, that you’re the last person on earth and every building around you is a dream. There are panic attacks by people walking home alone at 3am when they become overwhelmed with the suspicion that they are actually walking inside a trap hall—a corridor that has never been real—losing consciousness and falling to the ground as irrational fears become too much for them.

Approximately 1,376 Silos, Water Towers, and other Cylindrical-Industrial Buildings

by Jenny Odell

Be sure to check out the other satellite collections as well the ministry of approximate travel

what is approximate traveling? In order to travel approximately, I made use of any source of information I could find online, relying especially on Google Street View, photo databases (Panoramio, Picasa, Flickr), review sites (Yelp, TripAdvisor, CitySearch, Insider Pages), and virtual tours of monuments, restaurants, hotels, etc. I transported myself into one place after another, both by writing a travel narrative and by superimposing myself onto photos I found online. The people I “met” were disgruntled hotel reviewers, restaurant ravers, and anyone who took the time to upload their story in one form or another to a site like Google Maps.

Fata Morgana by Damon Zucconi

Engadget Coverage NY Times Bits Blog Coverage

At Google I/O, Googles developer conference, Android got lots of announcements and will be going to many new places – like your tv. In the presentations by executives they spent a good amount of time throwing digs at Apple, and prosthetising their openness.

Some of the interesting bits, first Android 2.2 FroYo and then Google TV (what!?)
Built in tethering, assuming your carrier supports it & wi-fi hotspot capability.

It runs apps 5X faster

Flash 10.1 runs on it – hot and at the expense of your battery say Engadget

Application updates are cleaned up – Update all now supported and can be set to automatically download

Purchase on the Web Marketplace and send to device over the air – very cool

Music store in the Marketplace – not much mentioned aside from downloading being demoed – potential very big deal here.

Stream music from your desktop – iTunes library etc – This is Simplify Media tech, a recent Google acquisition

Google Mobile AdSense – which of course make sense. Multiple ad formats from any support Ad Network, openness.

Google TV – Getting TV and the Web married, another vector for Google Ads, on your TV. Set top box UI is, um, Googley. Is that a mouse pointer I see? Yes.

Put Android Apps on your TV – If the app doesn’t require phone specific stuff it should run today.

And now your regularly scheduled mobile updates ie. non Google I/O stuff

View past graffiti after it has been cleaned up

Graffyard uses QR codes to show the visual history after graffiti has been painted over. Its a nice example of encoding the visual of the city onto itself. One can imagine a future where city walls have a secondary digital presence and all advertising, graffiti and signage takes place via a persistent visual augmented reality system. The city becomes a contiguous blank canvas, a physical platform encoded with embed tags for the reality we want to see. Maybe.

African Churches Embrace Mobile

Reminders to come to services, tithings and sharing of bible passages for study all via SMS

Nokia’s New Strategy

Marko Ahtisaari who heads up design and user experience answers some questions about how Nokia is moving to react to the mobile world that is seemingly running away from them. He focuses on a very narrow definition of mobility, which may be right, or not.

“I still think the whole industry is missing a trick,” said Mr Ahtisaari during a meet-the-press session in London yesterday. “All the touchscreen interfaces are very immersive. You have to put your head down. What Nokia is very good at is designing for mobile use: one-handed, in the pocket. Giving people the ability to have their head up again is critical to how we evolve user interfaces.”

Heads up vs. heads down is a very interesting distinction and one that raises many interesting points about mobile device usage in the public sphere. I think if Nokia can move forward with a singular, focused direction they will be positioning themselves strongly for a good segment of the market. Im not sure if that segment will be a big enough percentage to keep them afloat, and it would represent a distinct turn from the all things to all people position they have put themselves in. What about this though – more than 50% of Nokia smartphones use touch interface ?

UNLIMITXT

Speaking of heads down staring into the glowing screen – A series of photos exploring peoples relationship to their mobiles. More focused than the Flickr Lost in Text pool, which is also quite good.

The dconstruct conference website

Stretch the window down to less than 800px wide and you got the mobile version. Very elegant.

More than a third of Android users rolling on 2.1

Data compiled from a 2 week period of users accessing the Android Marketplace. Please take with a grain of salt.

Airports now on the small glowing screen

More evidence of the trend of mobile screens replacing public displays. Not sure I want to try to download an app while I’m racing through a terminal to make a connection just to see what gate my flight got moved too but, hey.

Mobile Tech Up & Comers

A nice roundup of technologies and ideas that are shaping the products of tomorrow. Links to examples for each in the article. Do note that four of the five listed here have a strong locative component.

1. AR browsers for mobile: Layers of data embedded in the real world around you that you can toggle between. Applications for real estate, food & entertainment, retail. This use of augmented reality will become how we live; not just an app. But will we be holding up our phones for long?

2. Augmented Mobile Profile: A social user interface implementation of your public profile. Real time information about the people around you and their entire “clouded” identity–from business card to playlists, Facebook profile to thought capitol on Slideshare. One of the ultimate social/mobile integrations I’ve seen.

3. The Active Idle Screen: Replaces your current homescreen with personal and valuable information (weather, trivia, sports scores, horoscope, etc.) in addition to advertisements for deals/coupons. Will reach the lowest common denominator audience.

4. QR codes without the QR: Recognizing that camera phones are crappy, we can analyze the photos. Take a picture of something and you receive contextual results around it. Mixed with geotargeting, this becomes very powerful. (Reviews, Where to buy, etc.)

5. Data Conformity: Location-based content and services are the promise of mobile marketing. But it has to work across all devices, content providers, and mobile carriers–one of today’s greatest challenges. When the great aggregator arrives, it will help to bring data conformity and data consistency.

Worldwide Mobile Browser Share

Displayed very nicely as a world map

Location Based Mobile Cinema

The film unfolds as the viewer visits different parts of the city. The more they travel, the more of the film they see. Whats great is the creators have released the technology behind it as open source, in addition to the first GPS film Nine Lives. This has to be better than the lame 3D that seems to be in fashion at the multiplex.

$12.7 Billion by 2014 in Location Based Services
A number thats as good as any and comes from Juniper Research. Whatever the numbers are predicted to be, location based services, hyper local advertising, geo targeted marketing and anything that has to do with exactly where you are at a given point in time – especially when you are not at your desk at work or in front of the television at home – is going to be a big deal. Period.

Helpful Guide for appropriate technology usage

Covers your basic situations of office, home, in car and the great outdoors. For instance usage of MacBookPro in the Great Outdoors should be avoided – the start up sound is bear for “bring it”.

Photo by Alastair Blackwood

The Box is back in the UK. For a period of over a year the BBC monitored their very own 40 foot shipping container as it travelled around the world carrying goods across oceans via intermodal transport. It was all to try and tell the story of globalization through the one defining symbol of the interconnected system of global trade – the intermodal shipping container.

It started it’s journey loaded with Scotch Whiskey headed for Shanghai China, and visited ports in Singapore, Bangkok, New York and Los Angeles and long stay at idle in Yokohama. Along the way it provided the context for discussions about piracy, the decline of the global economy and it’s effect on global trade and highlighted to the kinds of goods being made for cheap overseas and shipped to the west.

Love the idea of making maps into envelopes, even with the limitations of having to send all snail mail south-easterly to get the return address and the recipient’s address properly positioned.

Like when Reason magazine did custom magazine covers with aerial photographs for each of their subscribers homes – in June 2004

Senex Prime on flickr

I don’t remember seeing this in particular at the Swiss EXPO.02 but a number of artists working together under the name Waterproof “imagined a(n) (im)possible scenario wherein the water level in Switzerland rises to 1400 meters (4600 feet), turning the landlocked, Alpine country into an island nation, its rocky peaks rising above a vast ocean.”

The series of images over at Pruned show an imaginative take on how the Swiss might deal with their new situation.

via Pruned

Proximity is a simple iPhone app that works as an alarm clock except the alarm is not set for a time but rather a location. It is aimed at commuters and others that end up sleeping while they are moving in some sort of transport. It is a great mobilization of two things that are usually understood as fixed: You sleeping in bed and your alarm clock on the bedside table are in a fixed location. A standard proximity sensor that is fixed in location sensing when moving things get closer than a pre-selected distance threshold.

I really like the transposition of a specific location where one would usually have a specific time, attaching an alarm to a where rather then a when. It is a bit of genius.

Proximity by Geoff Pado

Walking home the other day I decided to play Mariolife, a real life GPS game on my iPhone. Playing in this case, is walking around in the real world gathering up virtual coins and mushrooms and rescuing princesses. In my quest to gather up coins I found myself walking on streets I had never walked, at least with any kind of noticing, and running into bits of street art I had not yet seen as well. My real life adventure was being guided by the placement of coins that existed only on the screen of my iPhone. So in spending a couple of hours wandering around collecting virtual coins and real street art (in photos) I realized that there was something really special about the collision of very different real world expereinces that was happening here.

Mariolife on iTunes

82 x 82 cm burned square, the size of one pixel from an altitude of 1 km.

A real life dead pixel by Helmut Smits. Digital display technologies affecting the real physical world with it’s intentions of affecting the digital representation of the physical world. See also.

tokyo jogging is a mashup of wiimote and google streetview. Lets you “run” in Tokyo, in your web browser.

The possibilities of this are pretty interesting. Combined with the tv screen on the treadmill or exercise bike at the gym you could run world famous marathon routes and in places where running isn’t usually feasible, say, run the length of the New York Thruway.

via @oliver76

Extrapolating from this situation, BLDGBLOG speculates further:

Of course, one wonders what citizenship this baby would have been given if they had been flying over the middle of the ocean, for instance, or across the tangled borders of an enclave or exclave. A complicated mathematics of trajectory, speed, and height is unleashed by terrestrial scholars below in order to find the exact location of the plane at the moment of childbirth.
Like something out of Borges, imperial trigonometricians are called in for consultation. Their calculations take days and arguments break out.
Perhaps the child goes on to be famous – a political leader, a poet, a revolutionary, the next pope – and his or her exact aerial origin becomes increasingly important to find out. Weather data and wind speed, the weight of fellow passengers, tiny aerodynamic imperfections in the wings, and even gravitational anomalies in the earth’s crust are brought to bear: how fast was the airplane traveling?

BLDGBLOG: Air Born

Since seeing this first post on the Shape of Alpha on the code.flickr blog many many weeks ago I have thought about what it means nearly everyday. Future geographical boundries are becoming more flexible as we define them with our metadata. We are where we think we are, even if that particular there isn’t exactly right. These zones are the questionable locales located between conventional boundries as defined by geographical coordinates recorded in maps and property deeds and the line we have drawn for ourselves, collectively, where once place ends and another begins.

Very nice animation showing the activity on the maps at OpenStreetMap.org

If you look closely you can see the edits I made in Jersey City last year.