Passing Glances

2003
Prototype for an Interactive Urban Display System

Passing Glances is a system prototype that was developed in collaboration between members of the Networks and Telecommunications Research Group (NTRG) at Trinity College Dublin and the Story Networks Group at Media Lab Europe in 2003.

The system aims to provide a framework for commuters to actively engage with locations that they encounter while they are in transition, passing through the city. Users send images and textual content to a public display system as SMS / MMS via a mobile phone or other mobile device. The display incorporates incoming content into a collage with other media based on keyword associations stored in a central database. As the system expands over time, incorporating more and more content sent to the given location, the narrative that emerges from the system subtly reflects the transitory / temporary communities that pass through the site through the themes that emerge from users' input.

Passing Glances was set up for user studies inside of the Media Lab Europe building in Dublin, using a simple projection onto a wall within a communal workspace.

The prototype for Passing Glances generated conversations about how to gear such a system towards the construction of meaningful, emergent narratives while retaining an essentially open framework. The database that lay at the heart of the system would need to be able to evolve in response to the system's use, so that the system's semantics (in terms of image-word pairings as experienced by the passing audience) would encourage more frequent engagement with the project.

The prototype also prompted a consideration of whether or not the site for this system needed to be static (a fixed location such as a bus station or the facade of a building) or whether it could be incorporated into mobile locations such as buses or trams. Further considerations of networking several instances of the Passing Glances system (set up in remote locations) pushed the project towards a more distributed, placeless communication system.

The core of the prototype was designed using a Flash frontend and a Max / MSP backend (communicating via flashserver) that received incoming messages from an SMS server via UDP.

Passing Glances was developed by Sven Anderson, Fionnuala Conway, Jennica Falk, Katherine Moriwaki, Cati Vaucelle, and Alison Wood under the supervision of Glorianna Davenport and Linda Doyle.

Publications:

Ambient Urban Interludes: Passing Glances by Vaucelle, C., Moriwaki, K., Doyle, L., Anderson, S., and Davenport, G. In Proceedings of Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems CHI ‘04 Vienna, Austia, 24-29 April 2004. ACM Press.

Texting Glances: Ambient Interludes from the Dublin Cityscape by Catherine Vaucelle, Glorianna Davenport, Alison Wood, Sven Anderson, Linda E. Doyle, and Jennica Falk. In eNARRATIVE 5, Hypertext. Narrative. Art. Technology. 2003.

For more information on Passing Glances, visit:

Cati Vaucelle's Passing Glances project page.
Katherine Moriwaki's Passing Glances project page.