The Blind Architect
By Thomas Leerberg
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AimThe Blind Architect is a proof of concept, which proposes a way to augment the physical surroundings of the designer. The goal is that the designer can change physical location without loosing his traditional creative context and that he can keep his personal artifacts and their digital representations mobile and dynamic. In this way The Blind Architect suggest a way to use ‘augmented reality’ and ambient media to make the embedded spaces manifest in the real world.
The interaction designer and psychologist Wendy Mackay has defined the concept of augmented reality as a way to approach the disconnection between electronic information and the physical world. She writes: “Augmented Reality adresses such problems by reintegrating electronic information back into the real world. The various approaches share a common goal: to enable people to take advantage of their existing skills in interacting with objects (of) the everyday world while benefiting form the power of networked computing.”(1) She goes on to suggest further research: “Augmented reality applications also present interesting challenges to the user interface designer. For example, when superimposing virtual information on the real objects, how can the user tell what is real and what is not?”(2) The computer scientist Ramesh Raskar has, together with colleague Kok-Lim Low, responded to Mackay’s suggestion by defining the concept of Spatially Augmented Reality (SAR) where “… the user’s physical environment is augmented with images that are integrated directly in the user’s environment, not simply in their visual field. For example, the images could be projected onto real objects using digital light projectors, or embedded directly in the environment with flat panel displays.”(3) While another ground at the Sony laboratories and at Tokyo Institute of Technology has responded to Mackay’s suggestion by developing techniques of Human Computer Interface (HCI) through tagging and tracking, they write: “... a user of wearable computers can dynamically create a data item such as a voice or a photograph and can attach it to nearby physical objects or locations … If one user attaches a data item to the particular physical context (e.g., location), this effect immediately becomes visible from other computers.”(4)
Together with the suggestion from Mackay the to groups mentioned here offers a direction that we have followed in The Blind Architect.
ConstructionThe Blind Architect is constructed by overlapping a real and a virtual design space and by using personal artifacts in real space as the interface with the virtual space. Data from the virtual design space is projected onto a table and that data is manipulated through interaction with the artifacts on the table, which are tacked and traced by simple radio transmitters and a radio receiver under the table.(5) The tracking data is distributed locally to a controller that manipulates the virtual design space and distributed remotely to similar SAR environments, where the interactions causes manipulation in other design spaces. This forms the basis for exchange, sharing and collaboration of design spaces both real and virtual, while maintaining a personal workspace.
The Blind Architect has another feature with a direct influence on the workspace. Through interactions with the artifacts on the table, the local workspace is augmented by ambient media like sound, smell, texture, wind or temperature. This ambient media constructs a design environment or atmosphere, where gestures are represented as a direct change in the physical surroundings, as the lights change, the temperature rises or the sound level increases. The control of the ambient media could also be expanded to include the interactions from other workspaces, so the physical environment of one designed can be changed by another designer at a remote location in a collaborative design process. Further, there is the possibility that the entire construction is mobile. It can then be placed in the normal surroundings of the architect or even replace these entirely and in that way augment the standard office cubicle.
Thereby it was focused on interaction design (HCI) to Topos and design spaces in general – in both cases with alternative ways of interaction than sight, as it was the case with the immersive projections that were already developed. In that way The Blind Architect took a critical position towards the primacy of vision – especially screens and keyboard – either by eliminating screens and keyboards altogether or by multiplying them to the extend that every surface is a screen and every object is a keyboard. Compared to The Virtual Architect it constructed a design space filled with real artifacts, and did in this way propose a way to take both The Virtual Architect and Push one step further away from a purely immersive solution toward an augmented solution.
DiscussionThe Blind Architect was constructed in the context of the WorkSpace project at Aarhus University, and aimed, in that respect, to propose further scenarios for the application Topos. This was done through developing a shared design environment and by proposing an augmented application of Topos as a supplement to the immersive applications that were produced already.(6) Further, it was a focus on ambient media and how that category of media may be used to augment the traditional work environment.
The video prototype is a joint experiment between two overlapping PhD. projects (Thomas Leerberg and Tina Henriette Kristiansen), which both deal with the architectural consequences and possibilities of a computer embedded reality – both immersive and augmented.
On the video and image material, a short video shows the different elements of the construction in the augmented box.
(1) Mackay, Wendy E. (1998), 'Augmented Reality: Linking Real and Virtual Worlds, A New Paradigm for Interacting with Computers', in Proceedings of AVI´98, ACM Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces, New York, NY: ACM Press. p. 1.
(2) Mackay, Wendy E. (1998), 'Augmented Reality: Linking Real and Virtual Worlds, A New Paradigm for Interacting with Computers', in Proceedings of AVI´98, ACM Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces, New York, NY: ACM Press. p. 9.
(3) Raskar, Ramesh, Greg Welch & Henry Fuchs (1998), 'Spatially Augmented Reality', in proceedings of First International Workshop on Augmented Reality, San Francisco, November 1, 1998, San Francisco, CA: . p. 1. See also Raskar, Remesh & Kok-Lim Low (2001/2002), 'Interacting with Spatially Augmented Reality', in Proceedings of The First ACM International Conference on Virtual Reality, Computer Graphics and Visualization in Africa (Afrigraph), November 2001, (www.merl.com, Cambridge, Massachusetts).
(4) Rekimoto, Jun, Yuji Ayatsuku & Kazuteru Hayashi (1999), 'Augment-able Reality: Situated Communication through Physical and Digital Spaces', www.csl.sony.co.jp, Tokyo: Sony Computer Science Laboratory.
(5) Similar to the kind used as anti-theft devices in stores. The tracking technique is already well established.
(6) See http://www.daimi.au.dk/workspace/index.htm
© Thomas Leerberg, 2004
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