Computational Culture

We have the first release of our BLUETUNA application ready-to-distribute. This tiny application allows to find and meet people having similar music taste. It is based on bluetooth and therefore working only in proximity of about 10-50m. The nice effect of this limitation is a multitude of future social interaction patterns reshaping the current socio-cultural environment. Arianna Bassoli, member of our joint research effort, is currently working on a series of workshops regarding these issues (check our previous posting about WAIT and BETWIXT).

Yesterday while commuting back to home I just started to scan bluetooth devices in my personal proximity. While crossing different transitional spaces I frequently checked for bluetooth devices using the BLUESCAN application which is an example included in the Mobile.Processing SDK. I am really excited about this kind of ecological studies “in the wild”.

First experiments revealed that in these transitional spaces I was able to catch about 2-4 active bluetooth devices. People enabled short information about nicknames, information about the manufacturer and blank entries. We will extend this kind of research in order to spot the most promising locations for installing our BLUETUNA HOTSPOTs in the future. These hotspots will act as open server for music and meeting people in urban and rural places.

You should spend some time on this awesome talk. The topic is about semantic tagging of images which is not boring at all. The author has created several online games to motivate users to volunteer for high-quality tagging. The talk includes further information such as captcha hacking, joy-of-use, interaction design. It is computational culture at its best, here is the GoogleVideo.

By the end of 2005 I met Arianna Bassoli, a former member of the MIT medialab Europe, at ISMIR, the world’s leading conference on music information retrieval. We had a great dinner and found out that we both are interested in mobile technologies and music. Over the time and some emails we formed a joint project - BluetunA - which combines the ideas of Arianna’s previous work in the tunA project and my Ph.D project MPEER. We had some co-authored papers and met again -at a real place- in Brighton at the Mobile Music Technology Workshop.

We are still working on our project, we have to do it virtually, Kaiserslautern - London is just too far to share daily work at the same place. Instead of waiting for an official funding for BluetunA we go ahead with great students pushing the project to new frontiers. In-between Arianna organized two awesome workshops about interdisciplinary research on interesting phenomena on the borderline between technology and human beings in urban places. If you have the chance to meet here there, give it a try: inbetweeness.org