Calling Sydney

Now that I’m finished with writing papers for the time being, I finally had time this week to focus on my research project at Sydney University. The first and most important next step was to install the displays I’m working with (see my previous blog post on that matter) at a spot, where people would pass them on a daily basis. It was a bit of an effort to bring them upstairs from the workshop, where they had been collecting dust and to do the cable installations and stuff. But after all, everything was done within two days. The main challenge was to bring together all the people, who were in charge of different things (building manager, IT guys, etc). Shortly before going on air the server machine (a new impressive Mac Pro) died and I had to install the server software on my MacBook Pro to drive the displays.

The display is now facing the yard in front of the Architecture building and immediately got attention from students hanging around in the yard, once we turned them on. It’s pretty impressive. I especially like its hexagonal pixelated character.

We also got an eyebox2 with the SmartSlabs, a device for tracking the number of people looking at the display. The downside is that I’ve this great piece of hardware, worth a 1.000 Dollars, at my disposal and can’t use it, since it only runs on Windows. I’ll have to give Parallels a try.

PS: I guess I should start a research blog for this kind of stuff, cause it might not be that interesting for some of you…