Minority Rapport

Sitting in a bar in Edinburgh, I just purely by chance happened to catch a technology article on BBC News talking regarding using eye tracking as a method of computing input. The demonstrations talked about replacing the mouse with simply looking, but for some reason (possibly alcohol related), put me in the mind of the film Minority Report, and the scene with adverts jumping into Tom Cruise’s eye line trying to distract him from going about his business.

I found a few old articles relating to research done at Imperial College London, looking at practical applications, but I started thinking, what if this technology could work without users necessarily being aware of it? Architects are normally pretty bad at actually studying how people use their buildings, so what if we could map what people actually look at when they enter a space? The role that sound plays could be studied, do people look for a specific noise’s source? Do tactile surfaces draw their attention? In short could we learn to better exploit all of our building users senses to orient them within a space?

Continuing on, its a nice idea that buildings could react to an individual, making the user experience personal. A sort of truly interactive building that doesn’t need a user to necessarily understand what’s going on in order to exploit the advantages of the interaction.

Vermillion Sands

Over Christmas I have been reading “The Complete Short Stories of J. G. Ballard”. It’s a huge book and so far I’m about a third of the way in. I’m reading it, ostensibly to switch off but inevitably I couldn't help mark a margin or two with little sticky notes in reference to interesting material. I’ve discovered at least 4 or 5 possible projects so far including the Sonovac - a device which vacuums up the unwanted echoes of past events. Among the stories are a set written in the fictional suburb of Vermillion Sands which is like Sunset Boulevard seen through the eyes of Salvador Dali. One story, The Thousand Dreams of Stellavista stood out. The opening paragraphs describe the experience of a lawyer and his wife as they visit possible houses in Vermillion Sands. The challenge is that the houses in Vermillion sands are:

“…composed of early, or primitive-fantastic psychotropic, when the possibilities offered by the new bio-plastic medium rather went to architects’ heads. It was some years before a compromise was reached between the one hundred percent responsive structure and the rigid non-responsive houses of the past. The first PT houses had so many senso-cells distributed over them, echoing every shift of mood and position of the occupants, that living on one was like inhabiting someone else’s brain.” (p. 30)

The challenge for the story's protagonists is to find a house which has not undergone a serious mental breakdown or, in one case, has become seriously psychopathic. Many of the descriptions of the architectural experiences of being within environments which shift and mould themselves reacting emotionally, to their inhabitants are reminiscent of Holger Schnädelbach et als. Exo Building:

as well as older project such as dECOi’s Hyposurface:

HYPOSURFACE Installation - by dECOi, with Paul STEENHUISEN from Art Music Promotion on Vimeo.

Clark experiences Hyposurface from Clark Goolsby on Vimeo.

The interesting thing about this story is that it was written in 1962. Read in the context of today’s technological possibilities it feels like a dystopia which has now turned into an aspiration. It also taps into our emotional relationship with our environment – something that has not really been addressed by any of these technology projects yet.