Never mind the increasingly ubiquitous surveillance-by-smartphone of where people are. Next up is keeping track of where they will be. University of Illinois researchers Long Vu, Quang Do, and Klara Nahrstedt have prototyped a system that analyzes the movements of people on the U of Illinois campus, then makes predictions about their future movements and social contacts:

The constructed model is able to answer three fundamental questions: (1) where the person will stay, (2) how long she will stay at the location, and (3) who she will meet.

In order to construct the predictive model, Jyotish includes an efficient clustering algorithm to cluster Wifi access point information in the Wifi trace into locations. Then, we construct a Naive Bayesian classifier to assign these locations to records in the Bluetooth trace and obtain a fine granularity of people movement. Next, the fine grain movement trace is used to construct the predictive model including location predictor, stay duration predictor, and contact predictor to provide answers for three questions above. Finally, we evaluate the constructed predictive model over the real Wifi/Bluetooth trace collected by 50 participants in University of Illinois campus from March to August 2010. Evaluation results show that Jyotish successfully constructs a predictive model, which provides a considerably high prediction accuracy of people movement. (ScienceDirect)

Full paper here.

Via New Scientist.

Doug MacCash of the New Orleans Times-Picayune caught this footage of me talking about Reality Ends Here when he and several other brilliant Engine 29 Annenberg Fellows paid a visit to the Game Office. Also included in this video: über-player Will Cherry, newly-minted player Celine Lam and footage from the excellent music video Deal, Space Bound.

Thanks to Lance Weiler and the rest of the DIY Days crew for helping us run a “bite-sized” version of Reality Ends Here/SCA Reality at this year’s conference.

The game as we ran it was very lightweight. We kicked things off by announcing in the conference program that a secret experience was afoot. We then left little black cards bearing the game logo in various locations around the venue. Everyone who knew about the game — initially just me, my co-designer Simon Wiscombe, and a handful of others — wore small pins bearing the game logo. Gradually, attendees noticed the logos and asked us what was going on. Doing so earned them special packets of game cards — and pins of their own. During the rare intervals in what was an extremely busy and inspiring event, we spotted attendees experimenting with different card arrangements and brainstorming project ideas:

The winning entry from the experience will be used as a special challenge for players of the real game at USC. We will post their work as soon as it is available and share it on the #diydays hashtag.

Congratulations to the winners, and thanks to all those who played!

Special thanks to the IndieCade organizers for asking us to appear at this year’s festival, and to all the players from the “real” game who showed up and helped make Deals with the general public.

Responsibility has yet to be claimed for the beautiful papercraft sculptures that have mysteriously popped up in Scottish libraries and arts centers, each accompanied by notecards featuring the Twitter handles of relevant authorities or personalities.

Tangible artifacts like these have so much presence. It’s hard to imagine augmented reality objects ever having this kind of impact.

This project is a great example of how “embedded” media objects and an active engagement with technology and network culture doesn’t always need to depend on glyphs, bar codes, scanners, cameras, smartphones, or headsets — as cool as all those things are.

Such projects remind us that just because we can do something 100 percent digitally doesn’t mean that we should. All media forms are tools in the transmedia artist’s toolbox, and every tool has its place. How much less effective would these sculptures be if they had been objects that you needed to download Layar or some other AR app in order to view? How much less presence would they have? How much less mysterious and thought-provoking would they be?

Yes, it’s true, AR people: embedded papercraft objects are better than embedded digital objects.

This is what differentiates the true media artist from the technofetishist. The former adopts whatever medium or combination of media that suits the needs of their project and maximizes impact. The latter always adopts the highest-tech solution, regardless of other options.

Anonymity affords a kind of honesty and directness that isn’t always possible when people know who’s doing the talking. It’s important to find ways to break free of the tyranny of our real identities. For me, privacy is only a part of the problem on the web. Services like Google+ address the diversity of our social lives, but still tend toward identifiable speech. I wonder what social media would be like if it was optimized to enable users to not only choose who they are posting to, but who they are posting as.

The talking statues of Rome (or the Congregation of Wits) provided an outlet for a form of anonymous political expression in Rome. Criticisms in the form of poems or witticisms were posted on well-known statues in Rome. It began in the 16th century and continues to the present day.

The first talking statue was that of Pasquino, a damaged piece of sculpture on a small piazza. In modern times the weathered fragment has been identified as representing the mythical king of Sparta, Menelaus, husband of Helen of Troy, and a major character in the Iliad, holding the body of Patroclus. In 1501, the statue was found during road construction and set up in the piazza; soon after small poems or epigrams critical of religious and civil authorities began to be posted on it. One story of the origin of the statue’s name, and of its witticisms, is that it was named to honor a local resident named Pasquino. A tailor by trade (in some versions of the story he is a barber or schoolmaster), this man’s career took him into the Vatican, where he would learn behind-the-scenes gossip. He would then spread this gossip, with acerbic commentary, for the entertainment of friends and neighbors. Upon his death, the statue was named in his honor, and people began postin g commentary similar to Pasquino’s on the statue. (wikipedia)