[lit-ideas] Grow your own wallpaper
- From: "Julie Krueger" <juliereneb@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 7 Sep 2007 07:48:03 -0500
A pretty interesting fusion of art & technology .... can't wait to see what
this sort of thing "grows" (sic) into in 5 years or so!
Julie Krueger
http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2007/09/06/wallpaper_tec_print.html
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Electronic Wallpaper 'Grows' From Your Photos Tracy Staedter, Discovery News
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*Sept. 6, 2007* — Most people change their wall color or wallpaper every few
years or so. But now a new kind of technology could make those decorative
essentials obsolete.
A prototype software program converts pixels from cell phone
images<http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2006/09/22/elens_tec.html?category=animals&guid=20060922084500>into
unique flower shapes and then uploads them to a wall. Once on the
wall,
the flowers become autonomous agents, grow and interact with other flowers,
and then eventually die.
The lifelike wall not only represents the future of design but it also taps
into a person's underlying desire to care for something the way they would
tend to real flowers.
"In this way you take care of interior design, but in a more interactive
way," said Sara Ljungblad <http://www.viktoria.se/%7Esaral/> a Ph.D.
student of applied information technology at Göteborg University in
Sweden<http://www.gu.se/english>
.
Ljungblad developed the Autonomous
Wallpaper<http://www.viktoria.se/node/1317>system with the help of
programmer Marcus Forsmoo as part of Viktoria
Institute's Embodied and Communicating Agents
project<http://ecagents.istc.cnr.it/>,
which aims to steer away from science fiction scenarios of robots and create
software agents that are grounded in people's desires and interests.
*
A science museum embraces the interactive experience.*
*Get more Discovery News video here.* <http://www.discoveryvideonews.com/>
To use the system, a person takes a picture, be it of a mountain, a person,
a horse or a beach. It doesn't matter. The person uses the Bluetooth
connection on the phone to the computer. A special software program
developed at the Viktoria Institute analyzes the pixels in the digital image
and, based on certain visual properties, such brightness, contrast, or the
amount of red, blue and green, calculates a value.
That number is used to produce one of six predefined flower shapes.
The original image — let's say of a beach — is then contorted to fit into
the flower shape. So it looks like a flower, but has the blues and beiges of
the beach scene.
The calculated value also determines the flower's behavior. The flower
starts at the bottom of the wall and grows taller. It can merge with other
flowers to create new ones or, over time, eventually shrink back down,
disappear and "die."
"When you take a picture, you create the DNA for the agent flower. And then
when you send it to the system, it comes alive. It will live on this digital
wall among the other agents. You
affect<http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2006/10/12/moodskirt_tec.html?category=technology&guid=20061012103030>how
the flower will appear based on what kind of picture you take, but
then
you don't have control over it once you send it to the wall," said
Ljungblad.
It would almost be too obvious to develop a technology that literally allows
people to display their digital pictures on their wall, said Bill
Gaver,<http://www.goldsmiths.ac.uk/interaction>professor of design at
Goldsmiths College at the University of London.
"What's nice about this project is it's trying to deal with technology in a
way that isn't just about functionality or utilitarian task-based stuff,"
said Gaver.
The Autonomous Wallpaper allows creative interplay between the voice of the
person and the voice of the system, he said.
The tricky part is ensuring that the interplay is recognizable without being
too boring. In other words, the people using the system have to be able to
recognize how they've influenced the final creative product, but they also
need to be surprised enough so that they maintain an interest in using it
over a long time.
"The dream would be that not just for days or weeks but for months, you
would be motivated to take a picture you took on your phone and input it
into the system and say 'wow that 's really cool,'" said Gaver.
In the current prototype, the images are projected onto the wall, but a more
futuristic implementation could enlist electrolumiscent fabric or "electronic
ink"<http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2006/10/30/printer_tec.html?category=technology&guid=20061030091500>that
changes in the presence of an electrical current.
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*Related Links*:
Viktoria Institute: Autonomous Wallpaper <http://www.viktoria.se/node/1317>
Viktoria Institute's Embodied and Communicating Agents
project<http://ecagents.istc.cnr.it/>
Göteborg University<http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2007/09/06/www.gu.se/english>
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