Discussing lately the issue of augmented playground with some folks, I remembered one of the bets piece from Lyon Art Biennale in 2001: "SYS/*016.JEX*02/1SE6FX/360°" is a project by Mathieu Briand. It is basically a participatory interactive 360° environment made of a big trampoline on which the participant hop around, he/she s then scanned by 75 input points and this data are then displayed on panaramic screens which encircle one at lagging speeds.
The adding together of images with a common viewpoint creates a movement that can confuse our mind. We think that it is a camera that is turning since we have to move in order to look at an object from every angle. In this situation we are everywhere and the object is able to move.
Joseph Nechvatal describes his thoughts about it:
Briand takes participatory principles found in virtual environments (VEs – or that which is better know as VR (virtual reality) and externalises them. For example, his clearly mature participatory interactive 360° environment called "SYS/*016.JEX*02/1SE6FX/360°" manifests the principle of what I have been calling the ‘viractual’ brilliantly. The viractual is the space of connection between the computed virtual and the uncomputed corporeal world which here merge. This space can be further inscribed as the viractual span of liminality, which according to the anthropologist Arnold van Gennep (based on his anthropological studies of social rites of passage) is the condition of being on a threshold between spaces. This term (concept) of the viractual (and viractuality) is the significant connivence/complicity experienced in the show - a connivence/complicity helpful in defining the third fused inter-spatiality in which we increasingly live today as forged from the meeting of the virtual and the actual - a concept close to what the military call "augmented reality".
Why do I blog this? this example of tangible computing at a higher level is curious, especially if we think in terms of how people perceives one's activity on the panoramic display. I was also unaware of this "viractuality" concept.