The Equator 'City' Project: Mixing Media and Showing Seams
Matthew Chalmers*
University of Glasgow
As part of the Equator interdisciplinary research collaboration
(www.equator.ac.uk), the City project has been exploring the
combination of media such as mobile devices and collaborative virtual
environments. We have built collaborative systems for cultural heritage
and tourism, for mobile games, and for environmental science. These
have generally involved online visitors to a museum or the city streets
interacting with on-site visitors to the museum or the streets.
Sometimes, the people online are also on-site. Overall, the project
explores the interconnection and interweaving of activity in
heterogeneous media which are usually treated in an isolated way. One
of the issues that has arisen in this work is the limits, errors and
boundaries that arise from the physical nature of each digital medium,
for example the spatiotemporal variation of 802.11 cells and of GPS,
and the discrete categories of user models. Usually these 'seams' are
either assumed to be non-existent or treated as problems to solve, but
we are exploring an alternative 'seamful' design approach where a
system interface reveals and exploits selected aspects of the
variability of infrastructure.
* Matthew Chalmers is Reader in Computer Science at the University of
Glasgow and Academic Co-Director of the Kelvin Institute.
