180 x 120: designing alternate location systems

  • Authors:
  • Eric Paulos;Anthony Burke;Tom Jenkins;Karen Marcelo

  • Affiliations:
  • Intel Research, Berkeley, CA;University of Technology, Sydney, Australia;Intel Research, Berkeley, CA;San Francisco, CA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 2007 conference on Designing for User eXperiences
  • Year:
  • 2007

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Abstract

Using 180 RFID tags to track and plot locations over time, guests to an event at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) collectively constructed a public visualization of the individual and group activities by building a history of movement throughout the space over 120 minutes. The projected histogram builds over time, revealing crowd intelligence, patterns of group distribution, zones of intensity, and preferred locations. The real-time data is projected atop a geometrically constructed, three-dimensional tessellated screen whose texture and shape have been previously calculated using a model of expected user clustering and activity. The juxtaposition of real and expected data manifest itself in this group created visual artifact. This paper presents a structured design approach to location systems that ignores quality and reliability, celebrates the loss of privacy, integrates physical architecture into the output, and explores crowd generation of public digest artifacts. A resulting deployed system is described.