Public Media Interfaces II:
Echologue

Last Update: September 2007

  
 

Echologue



 
This is a public interface for sensing and displaying socio-cultural characteristics of a place based on its sonic features. The goal is to build a medium that can reflect its surroundings like a smart mirror, highlight the salient details and patterns in the environment and contribute to our understanding of the perception of social places. This interface senses ambient sound, records deliberate user input and displays a visualization of the activity in that space as its output. The design explores the utility of sound for envisioning new social, cultural and entertainment uses of public places and help us shape our relationships with each other with new social interfaces embedded in urban settings. This medium informs the audience by visualizing the different aspects of the crowd that is otherwise anonymous to each other. The audience listen a sound collage made of the voices of people telling where they are from and if they can go back or not. As users of the system, we hear words as they are explicitly spoken to the system. The information is used to create a visual representation (based on audio analysis) for designing visuals that display patterns of activity at these location.


The project explores the possibility of building a system that can make a different kind of image of the place from the voices of people. Similar to a smart mirror, it proposes an intelligent display that can help the space be about its people passing by. By transforming the ephemeral qualities of the sonic space into a visual landscape, the system highlights salient patterns of the every day and explores the context of a space’s use from the perspective of its inhabitants.

 Unlike the traditional format of the screen real estate (e.g., 3:4 or 16:9), this project proposes a modular and flexible system that can be deployed 2D on a wall or self-standing in 3D space. The goal is to extend the concept of a screen from the “screen as skin or surface” metaphor and present a screen that is double sided and embodied in a form that works in relation to the surrounding architecture.

Screen as Visualization
The display intends to become a visualization by its very shape. By providing its users the ability to change its shape, the screen actually becomes a reconfigurable object that can be transformed with the interaction of its users.

Sentient Media
Unlike screens designed to become passive displays, the system will be designed to exhibit a sentient nature. With the ability to display a list of provocative statements it will be able to take a more active role in provoking its public to come closer and participate. With the use of bent sensors the system will recognize its own shape and direct its content accordingly. The users will be able to change the angle of the panels and control the topology of the graphics. For example, they can bend a certain tile and reverse the flow of the graphics. They can make it stop, go up, or down by changing the structure of the display.





 
  The interface consists of a series of double-sided LED array panels (6-8 tiles) that are interconnected with flexible bindings. Each panel is a 9 ”x 9 ” square(made of triangles) that has a mount used to fix it against the wall or stay on the ground or suspend from ceiling. With the use of bent sensors, the system recognizes its own shape and direct its content accordingly. The users can change the angle of the panels and control the topology of the graphics. For example, they can bend a certain tile and reverse the flow of the graphics. They can make it stop, go up, or down by changing the structure of the display.. This research grew out of our research for the Flexible Urban Displays
during the self-organizing bus stop project .

Special thanks to Sajid Sadi for his support and supervision
and Elysa Wane for her contributions during her UROP research.		  

 

This project has being installed at the Cambridge Public Library (Main Branch) and at the Ars Electronica Festival (Part of Pixelspaces 07 exhibition), Linz, Austira. For more information, please download my thesis "Social Sensing and Its Display", which discusses the current design in a broader theoretical framework.

Download: S.M. Thesis (PDF)