Portage (2007-2008)
How can users of a public urban space engage in a multi-sensory, multimedia outdoor experience?
PORTAGE is transforming John Street, in the heart of Toronto's entertainment shopping district, into a Broad Locative Environment (BLE) - a space that will allow visitors to engage with outdoor multimedia installations and other mobile users.
Users will be able to navigate from Grange Park down John Street through a GPS and Wi-Fi-enabled virtual theatre. Along the way they will interact with installed musical sculptures, create and share interactive audio components, trigger swarms of electronic cicadas residing in city trees and view themselves on surveillance camera which they themselves control.
Through this installation Portage will investigate how cultural content delivery is made possible by emerging multi-capability mobile devices. These devices include cell phones, handhelds and PDAs with Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS and GSM access. Portage will also examine the processes by which these technologies can be used in conjunction with each other and with environmental sensors and displays to move the mobile experience beyond the phone and to create an interactive and immersive environment.
Alter Audio (2006-2007)
The Alter Audio Project contains a variety of digital musical experiences that allow users to engage creatively in sound and music composition in both urban and mountain environments. Users can engage in composition over time and a live musical collaboration. The project creates interesting theoretical, methodological, and technological questions. The Alter Audio project inquires into how different people see different meaning and environmental relevance in different types of sounds - music, ambient, effects, etc. The project tests how different individuals will combine sounds in response to the technical organization of the project, in response to working as individuals vs. as members of a collaborative team, and in projects that are live versus over time.
Scramble (2007)
How do you play a shared game on fields in two cities in real-time?
The Scramble Project, a collaboration between OCAD's Mobile Experience Lab and Concordia University, is a co-located word game where players in Toronto and Montreal simultaneously rearrange letters on a virtual field based on their movements on a physical field. The object of the game is simple: to spell a word. The challenge is for players to position themselves by physically moving to place letters in their correct order while coordinating their movements with other players in a separate city. The physical field can be anchored to anywhere the two teams decide.
