tagged: imc at festivals

a sense of satisfaction to see someone i’ve been helping get on the research ladder accepted to a workshop and the paper we co-wrote going into the acm archive.

In order to sense the mood of a city, we propose first looking at festivals. In festivals such as Glastonbury or Burning Man we see temporary cities where the inhabitants are engaged afresh with their environment and each other. Our position is that not only are there direct equivalences between larger festivals and cities, but in festivals the phenomena are often exaggerated, and the driving impulses often exploratory. These characteristics well suit research into sensing and intervening in the urban experience. To this end, we have built a corpus of sensor and social media data around a 18,000 attendee music festival and are developing ways of analysing and communicating it.

“Sensing Festivals as Cities”, a position paper for ‘SenCity: uncovering the hidden pulse of a city’ workshop, accepted for publication in UbiComp '13 conference proceedings.

diary | 30 jun 2013 | tagged: imc at festivals · liveness · research · qmat

thanks to the promoters and the media and arts dtc, we had seven people running the crowd app attending the field day music festival in victoria park, london. science! fun!

…the analysis, however, is going to be less fun.

diary | 25 may 2013 | tagged: imc at festivals · liveness · research · qmat

of course, if you’ve just written a sensor logging smartphone app, and you have some bio-sensing data logging kit in the research group, you’re going to use it, right?

diary | 25 may 2013 | tagged: imc at festivals · liveness · research · qmat

the interactive-map-and-then-some app turned out to be a step too far for the organisation we hoped to make it their own, but there still was a festival and a need to determine just what smartphone sensors could tell you about the activity around a festival. and so another app was born, one to harvest any and all sensor data for real-time or subsequent analysis. the interaction, media and communication group i’m part of now being rebranded cognitive science, here is the cogsci crowd app, as it stands.

https://github.com/qmat/IMC-Crowd-App-Android
https://github.com/qmat/IMC-Crowd-Server

the UI presents a ‘crowd node’ toggle button, which corresponds to the app running a data logger and making a connection to a server conterpart. it’s called ‘crowd node’ because we hope this to be the beginning of a network of devices word amongst the crowd, from which crowd dynamics can be analysed in realtime, and interventions staged. being on android, this crowd node is a service running in the foreground, which means the app can come and go while the service runs. it maintains a notification, and while this is there, the phone won’t sleep until it powers down. the datalogger registers for updates from all the sensors available on that device, and constantly scans for wifi base stations and bluetooth devices. getting some kind of audio fingerprint should be a useful future addition to the sensing. the server connection mints session IDs that keep things anonymous while tracking instances of the app, and receives the 1000 line json formatted log files either in bulk afterwards or as they’re written. in time, this should be a streaming connection for realtime use, with eg. activity analysis and flocking algorithms running on the incoming data.

diary | 25 may 2013 | tagged: imc at festivals · research · liveness · qmat

a little bit of a more compelling demo than last shown. development of this app has proved pretty painful, part of which is engaging with openFrameworks and c++ at a level beyond demo, and part of which has been the flakiness of the ofxAddons i’ve tried to use. the 3D model loader ofxAssimpModelLoader turned into the bane of this project; a core component of the app, the scope of its ill-effects was never clear until the debugging got truly brutal. i also had to ditch ofxTwitter, but at least can contribute back my working of the search functionality into the immeasurably better codebase of ofxTwitterStream.

diary | 29 nov 2012 | tagged: open frameworks · imc at festivals · liveness · research · qmat

it doesn’t look like much at the moment, but this is the first step into my research group at university doing a study on real festival audiences at real festivals. i’m developing an interactive map / timetable app, which will have quite some interesting features and opt-ins by the time we’re done. the promoters we’ve been talking to already have an interactive map of sorts, i’ve already done some interesting things visualising live events, and of course there’s my phd on audiences and interaction.

diary | 10 aug 2012 | tagged: code · open frameworks · ios · imc at festivals · vj · liveness · research · qmat