Submitted by Mike Grenville on Wed, 19 Nov 2003 22:17

An experiment in location-based wireless co-creativity is to be trialled in December in London's Bloomsbury. The goal of the Urban Tapestries project is to discover if annotation and story-sharing can become an integral part of urban living. It will use a combination of off the shelf devices such as PDAs and smart mobile phones.

Urban Tapestries allows users to author their own virtual annotations of the city, enabling a community’s collective memory to grow organically, allowing ordinary citizens to embed social knowledge in the new wireless landscape of the city. Users will be able to add new locations, location content and the ‘threads’ which link individual locations to local contexts, which are accessed via handheld user devices such as PDAs and mobile phones.

Many attempts at designing wireless location-based services have focused on providing tourist information or re-purposed material drawn from existing print and broadcast media. Real city life is richer and more complex than this, relying as much on social networks, personal experiences and chance interactions and connections.

The material for the project was developed by a variety of experts and people who are involved or interested in the Bloomsbury area. They included a taxi driver, a poet, light and sound artists, a writer, a historian, a visual artist and more. They were encouraged to produce content in any form - be it a fictional story, factual information, audio, pictures, drawings, linked favourite cafes or bars, personal anecdotes, a map of shortcuts or quiet places – it was up to them.

Proboscis believe that pervasive wireless/mobile platforms should attempt to reflect this richness and complexity, rather than re-purposing solutions designed for a different age. The peer to peer and multiple points of connections offered by internet-based networks present wholly new ways of inhabiting the city and communicating with the people around us in everyday situations.

The Urban Tapestries model relies fundamentally on communities, not on service or network providers. It is intended to be a pervasive rather than ubiquitous service, rooted in locale and community. A local Urban Tapestry could be as small as a street, or as big as a district. It proposes that the kinds of information about the city that we need on an everyday basis are far more likely to come from our neighbours and colleagues than from large corporations or the media.

Although using off the shelf devices, one of the challenges the project faces is the lack of familiarity with mobile devices such as PDAs and Smart phones – people may understand their basic funtionality, but have significant problems accessing higher capabilities.

Proboscis has built the system architecture (with map data provided by Ordnance Survey), and client applications for wireless PocketPC PDAs (HP iPAQs) and Symbian smartphones (SonyEricsson P800s – with France Telecom R&D). The 802.11b mesh network supporting the wireless iPAQs is Locustworld's MeshAP. Orange are providing GPRS mobile access and smartphones for the Symbian client.

The project is a partnership with Hewlett-Packard Labs, Orange and MEDIA@LSE and is being funded by the Department of Trade and Industry, Arts Council England and the Daniel Langlois Foundation. Collaborators include France Telecom R&D, Locustworld and Ordnance Survey. Additional sponsors include Sony Europe & Garbe (UK) Ltd.

Booking of places on the free Public Trial of Urban Tapestries in London is now open

Information on the trial

Booking availability