(MA) Project Proposal

Project Proposal – Sinan Atamer

1. Working Title:

This project is creating a GPS based smart phone application, which will enable the users to interact with the real world in a series of mini-quests that will take them around a specific city.

2. Aims + Objectives:

The aim of this project is to complete a fully running GPS based smart phone application that will enable the user to interact with the real world in a series of puzzle/quests where he will eventually go through several small objectives and each step will bring him closer to the imaginary parallel universe that we will create. The player will see this imaginary parallel universe through a series of artwork that I will make. My previous education as an illustrator should be helpful in this process.

The application will send the user around the city to complete a series of quests. It’s not decided yet whether or not for these quests to pop up whenever the player runs through a specific part of the town he lives in or he will be strictly sent to the places we want him to go, but basically as he completes these quests, he will get more complicated visions of several more buildings/monuments etc. that will give him the clues where to go next.

The objective is to help the user experience the fact that the real world might be unreal, and what he sees is not what everyone else does. The idea of perception is quite important here. Although the project has various aims since it’s a joint project, I personally want to see how art and games can effect the perception of reality, and how the player experiences these steps his feelings and his emotions throughout the process. The usage of a mobile phone or any other object as a “looking glass” to the other side is something worth looking into.

We also have to create a working program. We are aiming our project towards the Android system, as we’ve spoken with many people and most of the professionals in this area told us to avoid Apple software. The thing that may go wrong is the programming phase. We still haven’t found a proper programmer for android applications, although a search is still ongoing. Worst case scenario will be using barcode reader programs, which are open source and quite easy to use, but a GPS tracking version would be ideal.

There’s also the phase of creating and deciding what our “other world” will be, and creating the artwork for that.

3. Context:

Mobile phones are becoming context-aware, with GPS positioning, recognition of objects by infrared or wireless tags, and automatic interpretation of images. They’re offering opportunities to support new forms of learning and recreational activities through contextual support for field trips, location-based guides, and environmental studies and to assist everyday activities. There are many studies around this area, many of them trying to engage the user in small “treasure hunt” type games or mostly informative text based applications. The idea of combining a fully made game that makes the user engaged in both a storyline and a location based quest system is however, quite new. Adding the touch of an artist to a project like this and seeing the player’s interaction with the game and recording their experience is an unexplored zone.

There are many games that deal with location based programming. Geocaching is the most prominent example with a large community. It is nominally a single-player kind of treasure hunt which is usually played using hand-held GPS receivers with user-hidden boxes.

Tourality is a real life multiplayer GPS game for mobile phones that support JavaME and GPS (integrated in the mobile phone or as an external Bluetooth). The challenge is to reach geographically defined spots by running, biking or driving before others in realtime. So called 'Spots', 'Points of Interest' and 'Game-Templates' can be created with Google Maps by users in supported areas on the website. This user-generated content is the basis for outdoor games. Tourality offers a singleplayer and two multiplayer (player vs. player and team vs. team) modes. Currently the game is available as a free beta version.

Torpedo Bay uses the area in and around you to avoid being killed by various ocean warships (carriers etc.) To survive, you must move in your neighborhood to get more ammunition and health to stay alive. GPS enabled mobile handsets allow for real time location information.

There are also the University of Nottingham’s LSRI (Learning Sciences Research Institute) research projects. They involve with mostly smart phone or data pad applications. Their Mixed Reality Lab has been home to several projects that are involved in our area.

There’s also Blast Theory. Blast Theory is a Brighton-based artists’ group, whose work mixes interactive media, digital broadcasting and live performance. Works such as Can You See Me Now? (2001), a game of chase through real and virtual city streets, have seen Blast Theory mix video games and performance, with Can You See Me Now? and You Get Me (2008) being open to a worldwide audience via the internet. Recent work uses mobile technologies such as text messaging, MMS messaging and 3G phones with the aim of “exploring how technology might be considered to create new cultural spaces in which the work is customized and personalized for each participant”

4: Methodology:

The research methods we’re using are action reflection, and library based literature. We have also visited several places and met with couple of people who are working and/or researching in our area, they work with the Napier University, and the University of Nottingham. Making contacts like this enabled us a flowing web of information.

I’m in the process of recording every single idea in my sketchbooks, an habit gained as an artist. I’m also trying to add everything to my blog, however I’m a bit unused to such recording methods, and some stuff left behind time to time. We have weekly meeting, even though its on random days of the week, where we sit down and chat about what ideas came to mind.

The process of this project will be recorded digitally on the blog, and the project experimentation will be recorded on video. We will have a player with the game interact with it while we experiment and see how it works.

Some ideas that came to mind so far are the idea of making a 3D world using Google Earth’s street view. I wanted to collage on a full street where the viewer could turn his vision around using the phone as a looking glass, but this may be a far fetched idea. Other things that might be considered are using sound based games to make the player interact with the phone more, and putting him in funny situations, like where he would have to shout in a library (where he will be pinpointed by the GPS) to “calculate” the trajectory of something the quest requires, or using the phone as a mirror to find a vampire in a room where the phone would recognize the walls from its camera and view the 180 degrees opposite on its screen. Although I keep coming up with different ideas like this, we will be really limited with the programming capabilities, so they’re left for later.

5. Outcomes:

The final presentation will be a fully working application/game on the android phones. There will also be a series of artworks made for the project, and hopefully a video documentary of a user working through the game.
7. Work Plan:
- Find a programmer
- The research part, finding a city to build our game on (probably Edinburgh since its feel is old and mystical)
- Creating the game, the quests, the layers, mostly the written part.
- Creating the artwork.

8. Bibliography:

Walter Benjamin - the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction

Christine Boyer - The city of collective memory

John Seeley Brown - The Coming Age of Calm Technology

Gaston Bachelard – The Poetics of Space

E.H Gombrich – The Uses of Images

John Carroll - Making use - Scenario based design of human computer interactions

Lev Manovich – The Language of New Media

Christiane Paul – Digital Art

John Berger – Ways of Seeing

Manuel Castells - the information city

Manuel Castells - The internet galaxy

Steven graham - Splintering urbanism: Networked infrastructures, technological mobilities, and the urban condition

Steve Shafer - Ten Dimensions of Ubiquitous Computing

Malcolm McCullough - Digital ground

(EN) Something to listen while drawing

(MA) The Mind's Eye, and Realism

Some things to read and think about;

The mind's eye;
The phrase "mind's eye" refers to the human ability for visualization, i.e., for the experiencing of visual mental imagery; in other words, one's ability to "see" things with the mind.


And Representative Realism;

Representational realism, related to indirect realism, is a philosophical concept, broadly equivalent to the accepted view of perception in natural science. Unfortunately, the meaning of the theory is dependent on the user's interpretation of words like 'perceive', 'reality' etc. such that in the longstanding debate between representational (indirect) and naive (direct) realists each side will always claim that the other has not understood their position. Thus, readers of this account must ask what the writer(s) believe(s) their words to mean.

Representational realism states that we do not (and cannot) perceive the external world as it really is; instead we know only our ideas and interpretations of the way the world is. This might be said to indicate that a barrier or 'veil of perception' prevents first-hand knowledge of the world, but the representational realist would deny that 'first hand knowledge' in this sense is a coherent concept, since knowledge is always via some means.

An indirect realist believes our ideas of the world are interpretations of sense data derived from a real external world (unlike idealists). The debate then occurs about how ideas or interpretations arise. At least since Newton, natural scientists have made it clear that the current scope of science cannot address this. Nevertheless, the alternative, that we have knowledge of the outside world unconstrained by our means of access through sense organs that does not require interpretation would appear to be inconsistent with every day observation.

Aristotle was the first to provide an in-depth description of indirect realism. In On the Soul he describes how the eye must be affected by changes in an intervening medium rather than by objects themselves. He then speculates on how these sense impressions can form our experience of seeing and reasons that an endless regress would occur unless the sense itself were self aware. He concludes by proposing that the mind is the things it thinks. He calls the images in the mind "ideas".

Indirect realism has been popular in the history of philosophy and has been developed by many philosophers including Bertrand Russell, Baruch Spinoza, René Descartes, and John Locke.

Representationalism is one of the key assumptions of cognitivism in psychology.