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Share/BookmarkNetworked Chessboard

photo by Tom Igoe

Michael Lewis proposed an idea for creating a physical chess board that can be linked to the online world. I had bounced a similar idea a while back when working on the augmented reality table for Hackday NYC. I imagined using fiduciary markers as modular playing pieces with a screen based system. This would allow an unlimited number of games you could play. For this project though we decided to take a more conservative approach that upheld the aesthetics and materiality of the timeless game of chess.

One of the exciting advents for the game of chess is that it’s expanded to an online environment where players from different countries and across many miles can now meet on the Web and play in tournaments or with family and friends. However one of the difficulties with online chess is that players still lose certain qualities that you get with the physical board. Our game brings these two worlds together by allowing players to see on a physical chess board what moves their online opponent player is making. In our discussions with chess venues near NYU players mentioned that this could have great value for teachers as well as be an innovative development for the game. Something that is unique about our board is that it doesn’t require expensive technology such as projection and tracking as do other augment reality chess boards.

 

Share/BookmarkRay Ray and the Market

I met Ray Ray this summer through my good friends and neighbors at the McKibbin lofts. Not only is Ray Ray and amazing illustrator and artist, he has a strong integration with the cycles of food and its affects on ourselves and our environment. Ray Ray coordinates the composting efforts at the Fort Greene farmers market, so you can find him out there every Saturday until about noon.

This weekend I road out to the market to meet up with Ray Ray and get some veggies. Often times we’ll get food from a greenmarket and then have a McKibbin community dinner Sunday night. As I arrived, Ray Ray was just finishing up loading all the compost donations into the truck to be hauled off to a community garden. Over the summer, there was such an overabundance of compost that Ray Ray organized some of market farmers to take some of the compost back to use at their own farms.

After he’d finished loading, we made a round at the market. Ray Ray knows everyone by name at the market and if he doesn’t know them, he would by the end of the day. I see that as a sign of a true locavor. Someone that knows not only about where their food is coming from, but the people who are growing and distributing it. We visited his friend at DiPaola Turkeys. We had actually bought a turkey from this guy at the Union Square market for Thanksgiving. He was very adamant about the fact that their farm only had one type of livestock. I didn’t find out if this was for economic reasons or specific environmental or health reasons.

We got some apples for a pie from Red Jacket Orchards. The guy

 

Share/BookmarkJuncture LA

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Juncture Website
“Juncture is a participatory, public space, media environment about historical memory, cultural identity, and collective recognition in Los Angeles. The core content component of the environment is the Remapping-LA interpretive media database, containing thousands of historical images, videos, and sounds enriched by layers of metadata including temporal and geographical information, descriptive texts, and extensive tagging…”

“Junction is a colaboration between REMAP/UCLA, California State Parks, Walt Disney Imagineering, and CENS/UCLA.”
(more…)

 

Share/BookmarkMonumento 872

What began as a simple end of the year party ended in a culmination of art, music, community, history, technology, and last but not least—tacos. UCLA’s TFT course in Interactive Multimedia teamed with REMAP to explore the history of Los Angeles through the integration of cutting edge Nokia N83 mobile devises and Cisco Systems WiFi grid. We used these devises to map Los Angeles in innovative ways using GPS and REMAP’s massive image database. (more…)