Interactive Experiences in Public Spaces: A Novel Floor Display System Based on Luminous Modular Units

We describe the design of an interactive concrete floor display for public spaces and discuss its implementation and areas of application. The primary purpose of our system is to provide new forms of collaborative interaction in long-term installations in both indoor and outdoor spaces. Our design is an expandable system of interconnected tiles, which control an array of RGB Light-Emitting Diodes (LEDs) based on user input. The LEDs are built into the tiles and arranged in a manner that simulates pixels on a computer screen, providing a natural visualization mechanism. Each tile acts as an independent node in a network, where motion sensors trigger specific actions and provide interactivity to the surface. A series of applications are illustrated, including promotional advertising and interactive games. The system was installed and evaluated on a university campus for four weeks where hundreds of visitors successfully interacted with the floor

Liberated pixels : alternative narratives for lighting future cities

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2010.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 165-171).Lighting and illuminated displays shape our relations to urban environments and to one another at night and increasingly during the day by transforming what Kevin Lynch referred to as the "image of the city" (1964). Today, the wide-spread availability of LEDs (light-emitting diodes) in combination with embedded, miniaturized computation offers different ways of designing ambient infrastructures. In this dissertation, I explore these alternatives by exploiting the programmable and responsive capabilities of LED-based, low-resolution systems. In short, I examine the alternative aesthetic and communications opportunities afforded by a new generation of lighting and display technologies in the city. I investigate the origins of lighting and displays to illustrate how they have evolved through a complex interleaving of the social and the material. This grounding leads me to develop three design explorations that focus on programmability, addressability, responsiveness, mobility and ad-hoc control. The first of these explorations, Urban Pixels, presents a wireless network of individual, autonomous physical pixels that can be deployed on any surface in the city. The second, Light Bodies, reconnects with the history of lights-on-people like lanterns that travel through the city with their users. The third, Augmented-reality (AR) Street Light, provides a layer of programmability for existing infrastructural networks. Together the historical perspective and design interventions lead to a framework of what I call "liberated pixels", a new generation of lighting and display technologies. Liberated pixels can be placed flexibly within any context and recruited in different situations for aesthetic and ambient information purposes. This vision captures the contingent and emergent nature of "sociomaterial assemblages" (Suchman 2007) to chart holistic technical, aesthetic, and social directions for future infrastructures of "imageability" (Lynch 1964) in the city.by Susanne SeitingerPh.D