180 x 120: designing alternate location systems

Using 180 RFID tags to track and plot locations over time, guests to an event at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) collectively constructed a public visualization of the individual and group activities by building a history of movement throughout the space over 120 minutes. The projected histogram builds over time, revealing crowd intelligence, patterns of group distribution, zones of intensity, and preferred locations. The real-time data is projected atop a geometrically constructed, three-dimensional tessellated screen whose texture and shape have been previously calculated using a model of expected user clustering and activity. The juxtaposition of real and expected data manifest itself in this group created visual artifact. This paper presents a structured design approach to location systems that ignores quality and reliability, celebrates the loss of privacy, integrates physical architecture into the output, and explores crowd generation of public digest artifacts. ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: DUX
• Authors: Eric Paulos, Anthony Burke, Tom Jenkins, Karen Marcelo
• Keywords: DUX 2007, Human Computer Interaction, RFID Tags, San Francisco Museum Of Modern Art, Three-dimensional Tessellated Screen