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Urban Botanical
Garden:
The 'Urban Botanical Garden' is an application
for a situated display embedded in a bus stop. It is designed as part
of the smart
mobilities project initiated by the MIT Design Lab and RATP
(French transit authority for public transportation). The bus
stop is presented in Paris between October 7 -14, part of the "Le
bus, 100 ans de mouvement" exhibition.
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The garden application provides a context for a variety of services
grouped around the garden metaphor. The application offers two different
interaction modalities. Users waiting inside the bus stop engage via
a touch screen interface while pedestrians waiting outside interact
with a 6ft. custom LED display.
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- The garden has a self-organizing
structure. By using different sensing modalities, the plants respond
to pedestrians and the environment. We use cameras and microphones to
detect motion and the ambient sound to generate and position of the
plants and make them reflect the changes happening around them.
- The garden has an asynchronous communication interface. Pedestrians
leave audio, video or sms/mms messages for each other. Each message
left on the garden is represented as a leaf, which can either be viewed
or downloaded via mobile phones by others.
Here, the messaging can be structured in a threaded way as users choose different
plants to leave their messages.
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- The garden hosts
a series of services offered by RATP. The current implementation demonstrates
the potential use of a trip planner and a contact agent to assist the
pedestrians waiting at the bus stop
Below is two screen
shots from the application interface:
Left: Main screen
Right: Browsing Messaging Plants
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Future
Work:
After this initial implementation, I am exploring different kinds of
services that can be offered in public media interfaces. My current
focuses are:
- building
new kinds of social sensors that will let the garden reflect its environments
via its relation with its users.
- designing collaborative applications around the same interface, where
communities can be formed around the garden by communal care
giving or content development/sharing experience. I will also be thinking
on different formats to embed the garden in public space in which the
context is not necessarily a bus stop.
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Credits
Garden Application:
Orkan Telhan (Sociable Media Group)
David Bouchard (Ambient Intelligence Group)
in collaboration with Sajid Sadi (Ambient Intelligence Group)
Project Credits:
William J. Mitchell, Federico Casalegno,
Marcel Botha, David Bouchard, Mirja Leinss,
Miguel Menchu, David Raul Poblano,
Orkan Telhan, Sajid Sadi.
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