We'll start this post with a small quote from peripheralfocus's description of its Palpable City project:
The project allows walkers to feel the spatial form of the urban grid at their location as vibro-tactile rhythms on their body.
Tactile displays are usually applied to provide orientation information in unusual phenomenal environments, such as virtual reality, deep sea diving, and zero gravity environments. In Palpable City, this process is reversed; instead of providing a stable spatial reference in unusual conditions, the technology is used to make the usual experience of space unusual.
Not surprisingly, this does remind me of sonic city:
Sonic City is a new form of interactive music instrument using the city as an interface. It enables users to create a real-time personal soundscape of electronic music by walking through and interacting with urban environments. Paths are considered as musical compositions and mobility through the shifting contexts of a city as a large scale musical gesture.
There is some kind of potential here, imagine, in a place memory kind of way, that we could upload our own shape files for these haptic navigation systems to pick up on, creating a vibro-tactile mesh of intermingling information out in the world. Public space could become an opt-in sensorial labyrinth of meta data, a meaningful texture, a corporeal techno-braille, similar in some ways to François Sudre's depiction of a world where everyone is fluent in his Universal Musical Language of "Solresol". For example, those fluent in Solresol would be able to recognize and read the literal meaning created by the coincidental arrangement of colored garments in a crowd, or would be able to carry on 2 distinct but simultaneous conversations, one through conventional words, and the second through the newly developed musical words.
Can we think of Palpable City as an experiment in Augmented Reality? Could these haptic data streams be delivered live? to redirect traffic, or to keep people away from a dangerous chemical leak? or to sell them junk food?
What is the granularity level we can achieve with these sensations? Will we all have personalized 'ringtones' in the haptic future?
Palpable City link via
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