Community servers
Just walking down a city street we enter and exit dozens of wi-fi networks. Ill-equipped to detect them ourselves, the Trace project uses wireless enabled PDAs to map them out. Beautiful (yet rather useless) visualizations of various journeys. Made by the folks at Stamen Design. (Ooh! They’re hiring!)
Stamen Design is also behind Splatter, which should waste about . . . 10 seconds of your time. Far less time than I’ve spent staring at Sexy Mario.
Thanks to the inimitable Things Magazine.
March 24th, 2007 at 7:26 pm
Ever since Paul Dourish mentioned something like it at his job talk here at the iSchool, I’ve wanted a WiFi divining rod, that bends or vibrates in response to wireless signal. A small keychain version would probably be practical, but I really want a big one, made of real wood so a) I can walk around the neighborhood carefully following a big stick, and b) the sexual connotations are obvious.
March 25th, 2007 at 10:08 am
Actually, the Trace project you link to above (at http://tracemap.net) was originally done by Ali Sant and myself, not Stamen. But I haven’t worked on that project for a while, and I know Ali was talking to Stamen about alternate visualizations, so these may have emerged from their current work together. Or maybe Stamen just mocked these up based on our past meetings, I’m not sure. Anyway, the original black and white visualizations were simple but pretty compelling to watch change in real time as you walked around a WiFi-laden neighborhood. Part of the interest is in understanding the complexity of the built environment, the barriers and shadows that cause signals to fluctuate. I’d like to see these color visualizations in action, changing dynamically as I move down the street.