Mixing the Material & Immaterial

So far we have come to an agreement, Devonport needs to be rediscovered. Not only by the residents, but by outsiders too; including me. I have only been to Devonport once or twice, both times for the purposes of this project. Usually I am really good navigating myself around an unknown foreign space, but I really struggled to find my bearings this time. Looking at maps has no uses, pathways which were once there have disappeared since or are cordoned off by construction sites; something needs to be done.

Our concept is essentially a re-imagining of the “Marauders Map” from “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban”. This map entailed drawing footprints of people that were inside a building in real time. We want to take this idea and amalgamate it into a visualisation of the community. The issue with this is, we don’t have a satellite in space handy and capable of tracking users in a particular area.

This is where the second part of the concept falls into place. Our idea was to get the residents of Devonport and others alike to rediscover the area, and visualise this journey process. This is where things get fun. We are planning on mixing up an old-school compass with your usual north bearing, and giving it a more modern & digital twist. Compasses were originally used as navigation tools, and the user was forced to used its readings to find headway. Not everybody is a navigator these days, but people have come to the terms of acknowledging technology as a guide; aka SatNav for cars. Imagine a compass, but its bearing was your final destination, not a north bearing.

But what is this final bearing? It doesn’t need to be complicated. Our trending theme for this project is discovery, so why not allow the users of the compass to rediscover locations around Devonport? No names, only a direction and a distance to keep things sane!

GPS is an exciting set of data, which is manipulated solely by movement around a space. Why not log these journeys of discovery through GPS, and re-imagine the data through visualisation. Mixing the thoughts of the “Marauders Map” and concepts from RTS games such as “Command & Conquer” we can de-shroud visited areas of a given space.

In the image here of Command and Conquer: Tiberian Dawn, the cursor tooltip denotes the shroud as “Unrevealed Terrain”. When units on the game are told to explore the area, the shroud disappears and the map underneath is uncovered.

There are other variants of this fog, one in which is called “Fog of War”. This is an extra layer which reveals to the user the mapped out space from when it was last visited, but not any form of live information is relayed across unless the player is present in that location.

#bdat