Archives 2004 - 2005
2004-2005 | 2003-2004 | 2002-2003
Am-I-Able
This research brings together knowledge about social environments with social networking, architecture, and fashion and design. This is a field of research that can be applied to learning, health, leisure and sports, and the arts. Am-I-Able will provide a direct link to artists’ works with 3D materials, responsive and expressive fashion and technology (i.e. wearable computing), and will partner with new corporate partners who research new materials and innovative wireless technologies. Am-I-Able will also partner with NEWT (Network for Emerging Wireless Technologies), who will set up a wireless test-bed in Banff. TRLabs will be a core partner in this lab. Researchers will also partner with Theatre Arts at The Banff Centre to create experiences appropriate to young audiences (i.e. theatre for young audiences). Research is funded by the Department of Canadian Heritage and includes Simon Fraser University, Concordia University, TRLabs and other partners.
Am-I-Able will evolve into the Am-I-able To Network for Patterning Wellness & Personal Technologies, a project that will mobilize a Canadian community of art-science researchers, medical and sports professionals, new media industry, and non-profit organizations to develop and create effective wearable and responsive environments technology for the promotion of wellness in children and young adults. We see potential for breakthroughs in the intersection of personal technology and wellness brought about by the network’s innovations in human-centered design, creation and evaluation methods, and the development of new wearable, fashion, and responsive environments technologies.
Key Research Projects of the Am-I-Able Network as a Whole and Their Potential Benefits:
socio-ec(h)o
socio-ec(h)o focuses on research in ambient intelligence ecologies that support a range of social interactions in intelligent spaces. socio-ec(h)o will develop and model ecological structures that balance ubiquitous computing, intelligence, and user modeling (responding to specific audiences), for dynamic and multi-person interactions as they map to the different types of social spaces. We will develop an AmI technology and interaction platform that leverages everyday social behaviours such as conversations, group movements in space, and intimate and non-intimate pairings.
Pulp Fashion: Designing A-Wearable Bodies
Pulp Fashion is a research project in designing and developing “a-wearable” bodies. Using body area networks, wearable devices, wireless technologies, and communication metaphors, pulp fashion explores how we focus attention through non-verbal and gestural expression. Pulp Fashion models how we define ourselves personally, socially, and culturally through our bodies’ experience of itself. The research brings together a number of intersecting design methodologies. Outcomes of the research include wearable device design, wearable clothing design, software design of protocols for body area networks, and hardware design for interfacing body data to wireless devices such as PDA’s, cell phones, and personal PC’s.
Visualizing Human Dialogue: Softwear/Software
Visualizing Human Dialogue: Softwear/Software will create Am-I-Able smart and responsive materials, garments, jewelry and other objects, such as interior furnishings. We will seek ways of linking forms of data that derive from human communication with the communication and aesthetic capabilities of garments and the expression and rhythms of the human body. We will incorporate intelligence and responsiveness into fabrics or garments, allowing wearable wireless applications of CodeZebra “chat” visualization software, a JAVA visualization tool, as well as other conversation visualization tools. We will test the use of fashion-based interactive communications experiences in cyber café fashion shows, clubs, performances and everyday collaborations. We will develop six fashion prototypes, from garments to jewelry, featuring data visualization, personal and social communication and responsiveness to context. The research will consider forms of communication (indirect, subtle, direct), levels of interactivity, individual versus social expressions, and aesthetics (Donath 2002).
Health Watch
Biometrics research is one of the largest growing fields of contemporary research. This project will prototype a responsive communicative health data analysis technology that can be added onto PDAs and mobile telephones or integrated into garments, or other wearable devices. It can be used to support maintenance and provide preventive care in non-hospitalized patients. As a wellness system, this technology continuously monitors and analyzes data on key physiological parameters, offering the wearer and/or others designated by the network, constant feedback on medical/biometric status. It provides early warning of impending emergencies by providing the monitoring health care facility with information to initiate emergency response, and yielding stored historical data to assist in diagnosis and management. It provides the user with relevant information, such as when to take medication, or reminders to stretch, eat or change their activities. As well as reading the wearer’s biometric data, it provides GPS locations (Thrift et al. 2002). Researchers will design Health Watch to receive information from the immediate environment that could provide valuable information to the wearer, such as temperature, humidity and change in altitude. Complementary applications could include gaming applications that enrich game play through use of the wearer’s biometric data. As well, it can provide performance tools for athletes and performers.
Squirrel Tails: Reactive Fashion and Soft Computation
This project focuses on the research and development of visually animated textiles that will enable the construction of soft, reactive addressable displays. We propose to develop underlying technologies for constructing multi-pixel, fully addressable textile displays using traditional textile manufacturing techniques together with soft electronic circuits.
Fabrication methods will include spinning conductive yarns, weaving, embroidering, sewing and printing with inks. We will employ a combination of emissive and non-emissive display materials and technologies, in combination with conductive yarns, soft sensors, and switches, to develop artifacts that can enhance the natural expressive language of the body by encasing it in visually animated, reactive cloth.
Memory Rich Clothing: Garments that Display their History of Use (or Second Skins that Communicate Physical Memory)
This project focuses on the research and development of reactive garments that will display their history of use. We will employ a variety of input and output methodologies to sense and display traces of physical memory on clothing. Leaving a persistent trace on objects puts us in touch with the past and informs future choices. A worn object carries the evidence of our identity, and digital technologies will allow us to shape and edit that evidence more easily. With repeated use, a person's patterns will be stored and accumulated: the object becomes part of a network of objects that serve as evidence of someone's presence and impact on the world (Schutte 1998).
Mobile Digital Commons Network
The Mobile Digital Commons Network (MDCN) will provide Canadians with an understanding of the scope and potential of mobile networks, content and technology. Wireless and mobile technologies establish local connections that constantly reposition and reorient users in digital networks. These new communication conduits create diffuse territories that are defined by connections between users, creating new experiences of space and place.
Key Research Projects of the Mobile Digital Commons Network as a Whole and Their Potential Benefits:
Global Heart Rate (The Banff Centre, Locative Media Lab, Concordia University)
This project will research and produce a large-scale designed experience for players and learners in specific outdoor environments – both urban and natural – that is networked over distance and amongst time zones. Physically, Global Heart Rate will take place in Banff with mobile players in Montreal using the Digital Cities infrastructure.
These participant-driven and mobile experiences utilize the structure of a game to disseminate interactive knowledge about a particular area, such as Banff’s wealth of natural history, seeking to make the experience fun and useful for applications such as ecotourism. Banff will use the Creative Crossings network (Canada, Finland and United Kingdom) to showcase the results of this project, as well as opportunities at Banff Centre, Banff Television Festival and through other partners in Alberta.
Digital Cities (Concordia University, UQAM, Hexagram, McGill University, The Banff Centre, York University, Locative Media Lab)
For the Mobile Digital Commons Network (MDCN), we will expand and build on a newly established urban database, TRANS.ACT 1.3. This database will form part of a website serving as the central communication tool for the Wireless Commons. The infrastructure developed for Digital Cities will also support and be shared by Cityspeak, Sonic Scene and the Mobile Cartographic Command Centre.
Cityspeak (UQAM, Concordia University, Hexagram)
Cityspeak is an investigation of how data acquired from an urban environment’s virtual networks can be used to investigate the same urban space’s physical environment. Using the Digital Cities hotspots in Montreal (the Wireless Commons), CitySpeak will select several locations in the city that are rich nodes of both virtual and real-world traffic and sample the geo-encoded data related to these particular locations.
Sonic Scene (McGill University, Concordia University, Hexagram)
Using the Digital Cities hotspots in Montreal and implanted, custom built transmitter tags, Sonic Scene will explore and create personalized, mobile audio and sonic experiences in the city and develop wireless networking strategies for communicating one’s sonic experience to others. Sonic Scene is an artistic intervention into the city that aims to develop experiential, cultural content, based in sound, for public wireless activity. Furthermore, by considering the current impact of “private” listening practices on public space through urban research at McGill Communications, Sonic Scene aims to initiate the networking and sharing of one’s private sonic space in an inventive and aesthetic milieu.
Mobile Cartographic Command Centre (MC3) (Locative Media Lab, Concordia University, Hexagram, The Banff Centre)
The MC3 is a mobile, educational installation that converges all geo-annotation data being produced by the Mobile Digital Commons Network’s (MDCN) projects into a single location, visually constructing a continually evolving cartographic model of the Wireless Commons. The MC3 is an outreach project that disseminates the Network's research to the public “on the street.” As well as visualizing the MDCN project’s cartographic data, MC3 will transfer and repurpose vast databases of digital information from the "expert user" field of GIS to the emerging field of “locative media,” thereby making “inaccessible” data accessible via the Montreal and Banff Wireless Commons, as well as online through the MDCN website.
Evaluation: Understanding Social Collaboration in the Mobile Environment (The Banff Centre, York University, UQAM)
Evaluation: Understanding Social Collaboration in the Mobile Environment is a project framework that underlies all of the specific content and technology projects and deliverables that make up the network. Many characteristics of new media network culture point towards collaboration, community participation, the user as participant not spectator, the remapping of private and public discourse, space and identities, constant user feedback and modification, among others. In these environments, participants modify technologies to suit their purposes, rather than those of the inventor (the Internet itself testifies to this). The Evaluation project has a commitment to active collaboration with other networks and projects as well as making use of mobile tools and social networks in the research process. This project is directly relevant to the core goals of the Mobile Digital Commons Network (MDCN).
Playing With Science: Collaborative Science Toys
With youth and partners from research universities, education, broadcast, and software development, the BNMI is creating a video archive, live events, and interactive Web toys that will enable young people to learn about science and new media culture. This project links directly with the 2003 Research project, RACOL (Remote Advanced Community of Learners).
WestGrid
The Banff Centre contributes to WestGrid research on collaborative processes, tools, and creativity and research in advanced visualization. This research includes virtual reality creation by artists, multi-sensory visualization design, data visualization and semantics, as well as presentation research. The Western Canada Research Computing Grid is Canada’s first comprehensive grid, an integrated system of high-performance computing facilities, data storage capability, collaborative work sites, high-speed networks, and human resources that, together, provide a unique shared research infrastructure designed for and by research groups across Alberta and British Columbia.
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