Institute For The Future

Amsterdam Restaurant Puts Flickr on the Walls

I came across this interactive experience, called "Playing Flickr 2.0", during some recent research I've been doing in the run-up to our Fall Exchange at the end of October. We've been excited about both context-aware environments and pervasive displays recently, not to mention gaming, and this project just tied it all up in a neat, beautiful and architecturally and interactively compelling package. I would say its one of the most elegant digital-urban experiences I've read about. To me, it just fell out of the future.

 

Playing Flickr 2.0 is simple: people text keywords to the system, and it pulls down Flickr photos and displays on the hugh wall displays. I can only imagine it must be like seeing the group subconscious projected, and I'm sure it creates all kinds of feedback loops into what people are talking about in smaller subgroups. Smart mobs? Yes, but maybe something more - could we call it "fractal crowds"?

 

I'm often disappointed in the general lack of sophistication I see in context-aware and ubiquitous computing visions and experiments that come out of industry labs. But there are so many great ones coming out of the arts community now, that I think we need to seriously sit down and think about what they mean for industry (Eric Paulos at the Intel Berkeley Lab has been doing some really great work in this area, especially with his Street Talk event last summer).