Category: Interactive Media

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AV Related Interactive Media

Cabspotting at Exploratorium

SF’s Exploratorium has launched a collaboartive art project called Cabspotting that tracks the movements of San Francisco taxis as they traverse the city, mapping their movemements.

This geo-spatial data is then mapped in real time onscreen and made available for others to manipulate and build their own visualisation projects using an open API.

The Exploratorium is involved in a multi-year project to explore alternate views of the Bay Area’s infrastructure. Entitled Invisible Dynamics, the project hopes to reveal radically surprising and inspiring views of the systems interconnecting the communities of the Bay. We are already familiar with the dominant street-map view of our city. This project will reveal other ways of seeing our environment, such as the view of the sewer infrastructure; the flow of water; the commercial activity of boats, trucks and planes; or the ecological activities of the marshes and wetlands surrounding the bay.

Cabspotting is designed as a living framework to use the activity of commercial cabs as a starting point to explore the economic, social, political and cultural issues that are revealed by the cab traces. Where do cabs go the most? Where do they never turn up? Cab Projects are vehicles for artists, writers, or researchers to explore these issues in the form of a small experiment, investigation or observation. These projects will be included on an ever-growing Cabspotting site to form a continually expanding view of the anthropological record created by this system.

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Interactive Media

Corporation For Public Gaming

I like this idea.

A Corporation for Public Gaming (CPG) could be established that would operate on a model similar to its broadcasting equivalent, providing grants to develop a diversity of games for the public good. Like CPB, the goal of the CPG would be to provide high-quality games, which “inform, enlighten and enrich the public.” A $15 million annual investment would be made for a three-year period with a review conducted at the end of year three followed by recommendations for continuance, modification, or termination of the program. Grants would be made available to qualified non-profits who could partner with commercial game developers, universities, museums, schools, or government entities. All grants would require a 15 percent set aside to support a rigorous evaluation of the game’s impact. A portion of the overall funding would go to universities to conduct research on how to improve the content, impact, and evaluation of such games. An alternative model would be to support serious games within the existing Corporation for Public Broadcasting, by increasing the appropriation and changing the allocation formula from the 75-25 percent split between television and radio to one that reflected the additional funding for games.

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AV Related Interactive Media

Redshift/Ontario Science Center podcasts & aggregators

In a post a few days ago I asked, rhetorically, how Ontario Science Center was doing with their weekly podcasts on their RedshiftNow site.

A few hours later, Ken Dickson, from the Ontario Science Center sent me an email with their visitation figures! He has very generously allowed me to share them with you. I also asked him a few follow up questions that reveals more nuanced detail about the figures as well as an insight into the production process of what are very popular museum-style podcasts.

In the month of March, there were 6,655 downloads of the various MP3 files.
In total, since it launched last June, we’ve had 35,264 downloads.

Downloads by month

Downloads by month


All episodes by time

All episodes by time

Last three months by episode

Last three months by episode

Interestingly, OSC reports that the majority of traffic that downloads these reports/podcasts does not come in though their website. Instead 40% comes from iTunes and the rest through XML and other subscriptions. Also, doing a search for the Redshift in Google reveals that the podcasts are quite well linked and appear in other aggregators.

So far in April, Ken reports, “we had 269 visits to the web page about the RedShift Report yet 2,911 downloads of the various episodes”.

Aggregation and smart aggregators are where it is at.

Museums need to be looking seriously at buidling these not just around collection content (many of us do that already – in Australia we have Collections Australia Network formerly AMOL (disclosure – the Powerhouse Museum hosts this)) but around other content as well. The 24hr Museum portal site in the UK – especially their children’s area – is a great example of aggregation – they have very effectively pulled together a ‘best of’ online museum interactives by deep linking to educational games on museum websites.

But their aggregation is manually done – real people, curating the ‘best of’.

In some ways this blog and others like Walker Art Center’s, Ideum’s and many others are also manually curated aggregators of information around museums and particularly web and digital/new media.

So could/should we individually, or collectively build a ‘Google News’ of museums? Is the even possible?

And for those who are wondering how does OSC manage to create a weekly podcast?

You’d have to be really paying attention to get this, but in 2005 the podcast schedule was pretty haphazard. We were playing around. When a question came in and a researcher was available, I’d record one. We changed that for 2006. A bit of background: we’ve got a “current science” space within the Science Centre, and each week one of our researchers is assigned to keep it updated. Nowadays, as part of that “updating”, that same researcher is now also required to record a podcast with me. We meet early in the week, decided between the two of us what it’ll be about, go off and do our research and reconvene later in the week and make the recording.

This integration of new media platform content production into what is very much traditional museum content production seems to have been they key in getting the regularity necessary to make the podcasts a success.

From my earlier post I re-iterate that

podcasts need to be able to have a use value or life outside of the phsyical museum visit – otherwise you are unnecessarily limiting your audience for your podcast to the very small subset of users who happen to be a) internet and podcast savvy, b) own and can operate a mp3 player, and c) actually want to visit your museum – all at once

OSC has managed to create something that through in-cast branding reveals/promotes Redshift and OSC but whose enjoyment is not reliant upon OSC.

Anyone else like to contribute their experiences? Theories?

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Interactive Media

Just 1% of web users listen to podcasts

Charlene Li from Forresters whose blog I read regularly reports that –

Our survey showed that only 1% of online households in North America regularly download and listen to podcasts. And when you include all of the people who are just interested or have used podcasts, they strongly favor listening to existing content like Internet radio or broadcast radio, not necessarily new content. (And for newspapers thinking about podcasting, putting print stories into audio format just ranked ahead of original content from bloggers) I think this has something to do with 1) original content just isn’t as well known; and 2) existing content benefits from users that simply want to time shift it.

and later

Which leads me to my skepticism about the adoption and breadth of podcasting – measurement is still really hard to do (there’s some light at the end of the tunnel from firms like Podtrac and Podbridge, the latter of which has a way to track listens as well as downloads). Forrester projects that just 700,000 households in the US in 2006 will use podcasting, and that it will grow to 12.3 million households in the US by 2010. (See Forrester’s “The Future Of Digital Audio” report). Just to give you some context, we expect MP3 adoption to be almost 11 million households in the US this year, and grow to 34.5 million households by 2010. So that means in four years, about a third of those MP3 owners will be listening to podcasts on those devices. Podcasting will get easier and the content will get better, but it will all take time.

We know from experience that if the content is rich, useful and portable (in that order) such as the Sydney Observatory night sky podcasts then they will be downloaded. By portable I mean that in terms of museum spaces, podcasts need to be able to have a use value or life outside of the phsyical museum visit – otherwise you are unnecessarily limiting your audience for your podcast to the very small subset of users who happen to be a) internet and podcast savvy, b) own and can operate a mp3 player, and c) actually want to visit your museum – all at once.

Now I know that probably as much as 60% of traffic to the Museum’s website is not directly visit-related (in as much as the user is not immediately planning to visit the museum) and we know from overseas experience that this is as much as 75% in the case of the larger American museums, it seems a little foolish to tie museum-based podcasts to an explicit visit experience, however attractive that may be to museums whose primary measure of success is still predominantly phsyical visitation.

I’d be very interested to know the figures that Ontario Science Center’s RedShift get for their popular science podcasts.

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Interactive Media Social networking Web 2.0

Sharing & economic production

Interesting essay by Yochai Benkler from Yale Law Journal titled “Sharing Nicely: On shareable good and the emergence of sharing as a modality of economic production”. Benkler looks at carpooling, distributed computing (SETI@home, Folding@Home etc), open source etc and draws some interesting conclusions about the ways in which and motivations for sharing – and how technological changes have affected this. He ends looking at potential policy directions that might emerge from an understanding of sharing.

Social sharing and exchange is becoming a common modality of producing valuable desiderata at the very core of the most advanced economies—in information, culture, education, computation, and communications sectors. Free software, distributed computing, ad hoc mesh wireless networks, and other forms of peer production offer clear examples of such large-scale, measurably effective sharing practices. I suggest that the highly distributed capital structure of contemporary communications and computation systems is largely responsible for the increased salience of social sharing as a modality of economic production in those environments. By lowering the capital costs required for effective individual action, these technologies have allowed various provisioning problems to be structured in forms amenable to decentralized production based on social relations, rather than through markets or hierarchies.

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Interactive Media Young people & museums

australian children’s television workshop – kahootz

The australian children’s television workshop, already pretty famous with kids as the creators of round the twist, yolngu boy, lil elvis jones plus much more, are also producers of a clever and versatile piece of 3-D software for students and kids called kahootz.

The philosophy behind Kahootz is to promote creativity, problem solving, and sharing of projects and so actw have deliberately limited the assets (worlds, objects, etc) available within the program. The project files are typically only a few kb which ensures that bandwidth issues dont prevent file exchange via the kahootz online community. (Reminding me of the days before mp3 when MIDI was the way of sharing music online: the midi file contained just the instructions: which sounds/notes to play, how and when to play them. The actual sounds only exist on the users sound card).
You can however import jpegs, so designing and populating a virtual gallery is a justaddwater museum student activity.
This software and its community site represents a substantial and very elegant set of experiential learning opportunities with a focus on design process, collaborative problem solving, and sharing the interactive outcomes.

Some terrific work is being produced and there are genuine exchanges and collaborations taking place, within Australia, and globally. It’s a cool and easy game building engine too, however as yet you can’t export an executable file.

Users can import jpegs, so it’s a great environment for kids to design and populate their own virtual gallery. Some interesting work has also been done blending kahootz and other apps eg vegas/imovie and using chromakey to combine real actors with virtual characters and environments.

Kahootz is a powerful set of 3D multimedia tools that allows students and teachers to be creators, designers, inventors and storytellers. Kahootz is also an active, online community. Kahootz students and teachers can publish their work and exchange, share, collaborate, de-construct and explore with other schools in the Kahootz community.
Students can share Kahootz narratives, inventions, designs and projects with classrooms around the world.
Students of all ages can create fantastic three-dimensional environments that allow them to use animation extensively, add sounds to events and objects, link from one scene to another and navigate through their created world. They can also export their Kahootz creations as AVI or QuickTime movies.
Kahootz facilitates non-text based learning, develops visual literacy skills and allows students to create and construct their own text. It can be used in the maths and science classroom to develop measurement, spatial awareness, estimation and thinking skills. Kahootz helps students demonstrate their understanding of a range of artistic concepts, can be used to enhance cognitive skills across the curriculum and promotes higher level thinking through construction and design.

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Interactive Media Young people & museums

Wonder Wall software

Michigan State University have started selling licenses form their nifty Wonder Wall software which uses Flash Communication Server, MySQL and PHP to create a lovely familiar and child-friendly interface for an online forum.

This may be something to consider for the childrens’ microsite.

Wonder Walls are a breath of relief from textual discussion boards, chat, and IM. A Wonder Wall is like a bulletin board. Well suited to relatively short important and/or fun messages and images. Wonder Walls are colorful. They are spatial. Messages can be placed alongside or on top of other messages. Wonder Walls are a little goofy – when two cursors collide, we hear thunder. Kids especially love Wonder Walls. Grown up kids do too. The moderator can answer questions asynchronously, or pop in live and broadcast audio to all who are connected.

Wonder Walls are not intended to replace text-based discussion boards. Wonder Walls help build community and encourage participation in a different way. They are oriented towards fewer, more important words worthy of attaching to a bulletin board for the (password protected) group to see. Moderators create and assign many different Wonder Walls during a semester, each dedicated to a particular topic, question, or week.

For slightly more info check out their short paper from Siggraph.

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AV Related Interactive Media

Incredible “Realtime-Mind-Music-Video-Re-De-Construction-Machine”

From Germany comes this truly amazing piece of software art called Scrambled Hackz.

What it does, as explained in the video, is match audio input (eg from a microhpone) with video samples taken from music videos in real time and dynamically combine them. This has the effect of creating a realtime live ‘remix’ of the input audio by whatever video is on the music video server.

The possibilities are endless – I can imagine plugging an audio input of one artist’s (X) music into a video collection of other artists’ (Y & Z) music videos . . . . and getting X performed by a mash of Y & Z.

Its probably best to just watch the video and read the site for a proper explanation and demo.

I hope that someone sensible brings Sven out to Australia to perform/demonstrate.

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AV Related Interactive Media Web 2.0

How to fix big media

Here’s some interesting discussion on audience co-creation, but Haque’s concept of the ‘competence trap’ is perhaps even more interesting in terms of what is going on in the socio-cultural shift that is taking place.

“That is because most companies undergoing massive disruptions in their industries fall into what Haque calls a “competence trap.” They keep trying to do what they do best and insisting that it is still valuable, even though the changing environment calls for a new set of skills. A company suffering from a competence trap is like a fish trying to swim on land by flapping its fins in the air, when what it should be doing is trying to use its fins to drag itself through the mud.”

From How To Fix Time Warner:

The competence trap Time Warner must avoid is the notion that media content is something that is made by professionals, instead of a catalyst for the creation of more content by the amateurs in the audience. Comparing the quality of this consumer-generated content to the content made by the professionals is beside the point. The value of content is increasingly coming from the fact that it allows people to express themselves and create relationships with other like-minded spirits. Rather than resist this emerging consumer behavior, Time Warner should embrace it and encourage it.

Beyond that, Time Warner should give the army of amateur video directors out there access to sophisticated Web-based video editing tools to help raise the bar (and potential audience) of all the amateur video out there. The best stuff could be repackaged as regular DVDs or streamed over the Web with ads, with the amateur directors getting a cut of the revenues. One good thing about the audience creating its own content is that the production costs all but disappear.

Any media executive reading this might be scratching his head right now and wondering how he is supposed to charge for his content if he is going to give it away for free. But that kind of thinking just leads to another competence trap. It is the old product mentality coming through. Remember, this is now a relationship business, and relationships are usually two-way things. What that means is that increasingly, the content itself will have less value than what people can do with it. “In the very near future,” predicts Haque, “the content will only be valuable if it can be bundled in new ways.”

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AV Related Interactive Media

Massive Passives

IBM’s Saul Berman on the Massive Passives -> read his article at IBM.

The most clever description of how to describe the varying levels of the adoption of new technology by consumers came from Saul Berman, Partner, Media & Entertainment, IBM Business Consulting :

Massive Passives: The majority of the public is still very slow to accept new technologies into their lives that’s why broadcast television isn’t going away as we know it anytime soon.

Gadegtiers: These are the early adopters, the folks who run out and constantly buy the latest gadgets (myself included). While they only make up 5 to 10% of the public, they are just disruptive enough to put a dent in traditional media models. Generally this group is highly educated, affluent, male, and young . . . the most desirable advertising demographic. As they say, PVRs don’t need to be in 90% of homes, just 10% to have dramatic affect on the broadcast business model. In case you are keeping track, PVRs are at about that 10% threshold right now (of course this will vary from market to market).

Kool Kids: This group is obviously the younger generations who have never known what it is like to live in a “scheduled” media environment. I would estimate that anyone under the age of 25 possesses very strong “on-demand” media habits. As they grow older, these new media habits will grow more pervasive throughout society.

(summary from Beyond TV)