OK, 8 more days left and I’m still living more or less at uni to finish everything before my last weekend in Sydney.

One of the projects finished yesterday and was exhibited at an exhibition at the School of IT, which is just a 5 minutes walk from the Faculty of Architecture. The picture above shows the final test run that I did the night before around 3am in the morning. Of course it didn’t work, meaning I didn’t really get to sleep that night, trying to fix it. I finished the whole thing like 5 minutes before the official start of the exhibition. Is that good or bad timing?

More information about the exhibition should be online somewhere soon. Meanwhile, you can see a short video from the exhibition here:

I also just had my final presentation at the weekly research seminar, but have still more work to do: there’s another interactive screen installation I’m setting up, which is not finished yet and should be running by Friday. Going back to work now…

I’m also blogging here now, as a guest author:
http://www.mediaarchitecture.org/

It’s about work-related stuff and my contributions will probably be quite limited due to the amount of time I’m already spending on other things.

Last week I visited the architecture labs for the first time. They’re located in the same building where I currently work, just one level up. It’s the place where architecture students build their models. Apparently the cleaning stuff gave up vacuuming the place and now it’s only being cleaned at the end of every semester, leaving tangible traces of studying activities over time.

I am a tidy person, usually. But somehow – I don’t know why – my work desk always ends up in chaos.

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…

Too much work currently, again with a paper submission for this conference, and no time for blogging. The semester also started with the beginning of march, which keeps me busy as well, since I’ve to tutor. Tutoring is much more demanding here then it is at the TU Vienna. It’s also only done by PhD students and involves teaching, writing assignments, marking etc. At least the paycheck is better too. But still: it’s 4 hours per week according to the official contract, but in fact it’s more than 10 hours of work each week…

Here are two pics from this week’s tutorials:

The course is all about information visualization and their first task was to visualize their path from home to university, using different techniques to encode various parameters, such as noise level, smells, colors, travel speed, steps etc. See here for last year’s website and student projects. This year we’re using a customized social online network to make it more interactive and web 2.0-ish.

It’s almost 1am (ie in the night) and I’m still at the lab (workshop paper deadline on Friday…) Surprisingly I’m not alone, there are still other people working as well. The fact that I can’t see any windows from my desk probably makes it easier to work late, since you’re losing all sense of time. Anyway, I’ll be heading home now to get some sleep…

Here are two pictures, one showing the office space (I call it lab, but it’s commonly known as mezzanine) and the other showing my desk (I know, it’s messy).

For those, who are interested in my research work at the KCDC lab at the uni here in Sydney, I’ll talk a bit about the project in detail today. It’s still in its conceptual design phase, but I’ll post more here as the project evolves.

My colleagues at the lab work on aesthetic and ambient visualizations, often with the focus on making information better visible for users, in an aesthetically pleasing and sometimes persuading way. Since the focus of my dissertation is (broadly) on the integration of large-scale visualizations into architectural environments and the KCDC lab just recently acquired a large-scale SmartSlab display, it was apparent for me to work with these displays.

This is really cool, since it allows me to explore cutting-edge technology first hand! During my PhD work I was only able to use standard projectors for large-scale visualizations (though I’m currently working on a low-resolution LED display together with my brother), which has some obvious disadvantages. (such as shadows, limited projection area, works only well in dark rooms, etc)

The only disadvantage of the SmartSlab display is that it has a very low resolution. You can watch movies on that display if you’re about 5-10 meters away from it, but once you’re up really close, you will more or less only see pixels (or hexals, as they call it). However, this feature can also be exploited in exciting ways, which I’m actually trying to do. (ie you can see a picture/movie from far away and interact with pixels once you’re close)

We’ll probably use some eye tracking hardware or other sensors (attached to an arduino board) to allow some basic user interactions.

Concerning the data, I hope that we’ll get access to the building’s electricity and water usage data. If we will, the idea would be to create a public persuasive ambient display that makes the stuff and students working in the building aware about their use of energy.

Energy awareness is actually an important matter in Australia. The government and public institutions are really trying hard to convince people to use less energy wherever it’s possible. The following pictures also show the public awareness about this issue. I took the first picture at the toilets in my uni building and the second one is from Bondi beach.

Like I said in the beginning, this is still very early work in progress and I’ll keep you posted on that matter. Any comments are very welcome!

The University of Sydney is Australia’s oldest university. It is located between Newtown and the Central Business District (i.e. 10 minutes walk from my current home) and hosts about 45.000 students every year. They’re currently rebuilding the entire campus renovating many buildings at the campus and building a new library, since they’ll celebrate the University’s 160th anniversary in 2010.

The lab, where I’m currently working, is part of the Key Centre of Design Computing and Cognition, which is located at the Faculty of Architecture. I share a large office space with about 20 other PhD and master students. I might post a picture of my working place sometime, but it’s not that interesting anyway, just a lot of cubicles with busy design and engineering students working on computers. Until then you can have a look on the floorplan – I’m sitting at James’s desk, since he just finished his master thesis and left the lab last week.