CityWall, Ubuntu and Vegetarian Cafes

Wandering around one of the squares in Helsinki this evening, I stumbled across an interesting installation in the side of a building, called CityWall. It's a large touch screen interface that displays photos taken around the city by inhabitants and visitors. You can interact with the display by 'grabbing' the photos with your hands and manipulating them as if they were real photos on a flat surface.


Shruti playing with the CityWall installation.

The interaction is quite intuitive doesn't present any real difficulty when using it. On occasion it would get a bit confused and stop responding for a second or two, or zoom a photo to fill the entire screen with nothing more than an accidental flick of the wrist, but on the whole it's very easy. The display is kind of tucked away under an awning, and I only noticed it because of the light being emitted from the screen. When we were playing with it, I noticed that lots of other people gathered behind us to watch, and a few stepped forward to have a go too. What's nice is that more than one person can use the system at a time, and the screen is wide enough to accommodate three people stood side-by-side.

From an HCI point of view, the project spans a lot of ground. The interface, while not entirely novel (see the Multi-Touch interface as pimped by Jeff Han for the most recognisable example), isn't something the general public are likely to have come across (yet, at least. The pending release of the iPhone will bring two-fingered touch screens to the masses). The user-generated content is another aspect, although it is curated and moderated by the project organisers as opposed to displaying unfiltered content directly from users. Pictures (and video, apparently) are sent to the screen as email or MMS messages, and certain items are selected to be displayed based on their relevance to current events in the city. I wonder how the system would be different if it allowed instant and unfiltered display of user content? That users can attach captions to photos draws some parallels with digital story projects, such as Story Bank. Currently there appears to be no way to retrieve content from CityWall to take away with you, it has to be experienced in-situ.

On a different note, we discovered a rather cool cafe just around the corner (everything seems to be 'just around the corner' in this town, I love it!). It's a vegetarian place that serves fair trade coffee (the first time I've seen that logo so far), has free WiFi access, a shelf full of books, board games and the like, and, best of all, a stand of Ubuntu Linux CDs! The CDs appear to be placed there by either Linux-tuki or Ubuntu Suomi, which makes sense as this place is the home town of the project we all know and love. There were only a couple of CDs left, so I guess there are some happy Ubuntu converts out there. On the other hand, they deperately need updating, as the CDs were version 5.10 (the "Breezy Badger" version, which was released in October 2005). Better still, they had a laptop sitting on a table which was running Ubuntu and free for all and sundry to use to check their email, surf the web, etc. Although the cafe was nice, I got the impression that it was very 'local', as I didn't see a single word that wasn't Finnish. We felt very welcome, however (although we got there 15 minutes before closing time, so didn't want to hang around too long).

Random observation: Since arriving, my mobile phone signal hasn't (that I've noticed) dropped below 100%. Apparently landlines are few and far between in Helsinki, so it makes sense that mobile coverage is above what Swansea has led me to accept as 'normal'.

date: Mon May 21 20:57:39 2007 | permalink | tags: linux phd iphone finland hci

Related Posts