geobloggers

Here’s the breakdown, first I’ll mention augmented reality, then I’ll ramble a bit, then I’ll make a point, or not, depending on how the rambling has gone. First the Augmented Reality part.

I’ve downloaded RjDj onto my iPhone, it’s basically two things 1) Awesome, 2) Sound processing software that samples your environmental soundscape and plays it back to you mixed, looped, pitch shifted and generally fucked around with. It’s hard to explain so here’s a couple of photo/video things to try and explain.

First, this is me walking out of Montgomery Muni Station in San Francisco. It’s all very motion sickness inducing and next time I’ll try and make a steady-cam version. Wobblyness aside, this is now what I hear with the Eargasm scene selected as I walk around. The Eargasm scene is like being enveloped in your own Dystopian Future Eno Soundscape.

Here’s one from YouTube, a more tranquil outdoor soundscape …

To really have a go Download RjDj, insert in-ear noise blocking headphones, select Eargasm, walk outside, walk around. Imagine you’re in your own futuristic movie. Go out of your way to stand on metal grills, walk past people talking, a busker if you can manage it and near people talking, oh and near people talking. Eargasm only works well outside, Echolon is better in the office, imho.

I’ve been doing this walking to and from work for about 2 weeks now and have gotten used to hearing in this new way, it’s both exciting and calming. And I consider this augmented reality because the earphones I use blockout virtually all noise, if I’m wearing them with no music going on I hear just my own breathing. When RjDj is running the sounds I hear are totally passed through software and processed, I’m still aware of what’s going on around me, it’s just different, more enveloped in textures and so on. Eno, Eno, Eno.

You should really try it!

Now for the ramble part …

On my old laptop (and backup drives) I have all my music, purchased over the years, ripped to mp3s. iTunes tells me I have something like 60 days worth of music. Given that I can listen to around 6 hours worth a day, it means that if I play a track twice there must be another track that I can’t possibly have time to listen to this year.

So I bought an iPod touch and didn’t put all my music on it, I created smart playlists that’d pick 60 tracks I’d rated highly but hadn’t listened to for a while, mixed with other unrated tracks. A bit Genius before Genius came out. I thought that was neat, going from half a gahbillion tracks to just 60 at a time.

Then I bought a new laptop and figured I’d have to get round to copying all my music over. But I just haven’t done it yet, now with the power of last.fm I’ve, ummm, transcended the need to own albums and tracks and music and stuff.

I feel as though I’ve invested enough time in listening, rating and so on music that last.fm plays my music collection back to me pretty well. If I need something new I just listen to the radio station of one of my contacts, or my neighborhood and so on. Loving or Banning tracks as I go.

(Apparently I like female vocalists and electronic)

Curiously listening to neighborhood radio, or radio from my contacts, always ends up at Jefferson Airplane, no matter how many times I ban it. Maybe it’s a function of my age, the age of the people I know, and where I live. Could be worse I guess, could be Starship.

Last.fm generally covers me for music in 3G saturated San Francisco, but I still found myself in situations where I’ve had no coverage to pick up last.fm and no music on my iPhone :( Just Melvyn Bragg and In Our Time to keep me going. And at this point, I’m stubbornly not putting any music on my laptop or iPhone. I am now Post-Album.

And this is where RjDj fits in. It creates musical compositions on the fly and fortunately I happen to really enjoy ambient soundscape, other people I’m sure would totally hate it.

The only thing that would improve it for me, is if analyzed the current tempo, pitch, overall level and activity of the sounds, then based on my listening habits on last.fm, pull in snippets of music I tend to like, little echos of tracks I remember played here or there.

It’d be like your own personal version of the best album on earth ever; Chill Out by the KLF.

What does this mean for photos?

This is a bit of a jump, but here goes. I take a lot of photos, not as many as some people, and way more than others. Sets of photos are like Albums and one off shots like Singles. Just like last.fm they have views, tags, favs and so on. Just like my music collection I have more photos than I can possible look at, realistically anyway.

Now I’m not going to stop taking photos any time soon, but …

In the same way RjDj samples the sounds around me, and delivers them back remixed and processed, and heck at the top of this post I even recorded one so it can be played back later … old habits die hard it seems. What if the same happened with vision?

Here’s a 3D(ish) model of the City above Montgomery Muni Station …

My iPhone has GPS, it knows, sort-of, where I am, and which way I’m heading … with a little of a delay. But enough to give me a wireframe of what I’m looking at based on the 3D data it can grab, with at least the augmentation level that RjDj gives me with sound.

More mood board stuff …

Google Earth, with it’s 3D models and Street View Bubbles …

Rez (HD xbox) …

(images CC gamescoreblog)

flickr.photos.search API for finding photos within a radius of a point …

“Buttons” the Blind Camera … Read More “The camera memorizes only the time and starts to continuously search on the net for other photos that have been taken in the very same moment” …

Myvu Crystal Personal Media Viewers for iPod/iPhone etc (640×480 resolution, apparently not as awful as the older models) …

Does this mean that I’m nearly at the point where I’ll just be able to walk around, with my augmented sound and augmented vision? A HUD that superimposes a wireframe of where I am, resamples and processes what I see (I happen to like film effects, Black & White and soft vingnetting please) and mixes in my own memories of older photos I’ve taken at that point, while sampling and saving other views for the future and pulling in my contacts, friends and strangers photos?

In the same way that I no longer bother to carry around Albums of music, and listen to Tracks. Will I no longer need to actively record new photos, Have I invested enough time and source material for a system to recommend images to me and sample new ones for me. It’s not quite here yet, in-fact as I say this stuff, I can feel myself thinking “But I’ll always need to take photos, what about those special moments of the children growing up” and so on …

… but at the same time, there was a point when I though it was very important to keep all my music forever, for all time, to never loose a single mp3 in a drive failure. Yet now, I’m happy to not have even one on my mp3 player. I’ve reached the point where I’m no longer interested in cataloging, keeping and finding missing tracks, I have a soundscape that could feasibly play at me 24 hours a day. Even with access to my old laptop and music library, I just fire up last.fm and type in an artist or tag for the mood I’m in and let it go, banning or loving tracks if I really need to.

On the vision/photo front, this isn’t supposed to be useful by the way, in the same way that I use RjDj to make a walk more interesting or immersive. This is augmenting reality for passive/interactive immersive experiences to make walking to and from work (or for the joy of it) more entertainingly enveloping.

What I’d like, is to be able to walk along the beachfront from my childhood and be played snippets of sounds from when I was young, superimposed with old family photos, mixed in with music generated from the sounds of the waves, and my own and other peoples photos being pulled in from having been taken at the same point, but in a style I happen to like. All on top of what I can actually see, I mean, I still don’t want to be knocked down while crossing the road.

This is unlikely to happen for me now … going that far back, as I don’t have easy access to all those old sounds and pictures. But a lot of us are recording them for the future. When Modesty, Zachary and Isobel grow up, there’ll be more photos of them and events than they can possible get through. I suspect taking photos to keep as personal memories and sharing in the way we currently do will be terribly old fashioned.

But just because I no longer buy Albums, I still need musicians to make some music to feed the machine. And that’s the way I’ll be taking photos and videos and sounds and stories, and I hope other people will, so there’s enough to feed the realtime vision/sounds/mood processing machines of the future. It will, however, be very different, and probably fairly soon, and hopefully I’ll have something to do with it if I can :)