Output details

Method and apparatus for providing information about a real world space

The aim of the work is to understand how ubiquitous computing can support new narratives and performance by fusing the physical and the digital. The patent is a result of research into instrumented spaces, experiences of place and locative media by three of us in my team at HPL. It builds on a notion from computer science called pre-emptive caching and pheromones. It describes the delivery of narratives based on the routes of people passing through a space.

The patent enables crowd sourced and cumulative experiences that ebb and flow with the movement of people through a space. Like pheromones the trails decay over time to keep the impact of the aggregation current. Locations of ‘scenes’ in a locative story could be determined by the fading trails of passers by. The flow of people through a city can reveal fictional narratives based on the aggregation of their trails. A simple use for heritage trails would be the effect of a recommendation system: "most other people who passed through here had visited there".

Our research has been encapsulated in a series of platforms that have encouraged and engaged media and performance artists to explore and deliver locative narrative. The current platform is Appfurnace from Calvium Ltd. Previous locative narratives were generically called mcapes. The previous Mscape platform http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mscape was built and hosted between 2002 and 2009 and seeded the launch of the Pervasive Media Studio in Bristol, an organization I co-authored in 2008. The research of which this patent is an outcome has introduced a number of performance and media artists and members of the public to locative media storytelling including those working with Historic Royal Palaces, BBC, The Guardian, RSC, Yosemite National Park, Disney and KQED in San Francisco. http://www.sfgate.com/business/article/HP-pioneers-digital-storytelling-IPaq-Pocket-PC-2576311.php