What would a VET Certificate IV Geo-Locative Unit look like?

With help from Simon Lismann at AFLF we have been researching how we may go about designing a unit of study that would serve as an Intro to Geo-Locative media work.  Our final report will go into sufficient detail but at this stage we are looking at drawing on competencies and skills taken from the following 3 VET study areas: New Media Studies, Surveying and Spatial Imaging all of which have their own established VET course structures etc.  We would then add the research from this project to complete a more fleshed out [possible/potential] curriculum offering in Geo-Locative Media Studies.

Now the thing about making up a media unit from a composite skills checklist drawn from Surveying, Spatial Imaging and New Media curricula is that there is no readily apparent occupational skeleton, as it were, to hang these skills on.

Surveyors do roads, buildings and home improvement schedules. Spatial Imagers, great sounding job description, are linked in one way or another to cartographers, helping enhance the veracity of all sorts of maps.

New Media graduates do, well, web-pages, graphic art and shit hot personal stationary.

So, where does that leave students schooled in the amorphous arts of Geo-Locative Multimedia?  The answer if feel, is hat it  places them firmly astride the Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality stremes.  

As I mentioned in a recent blog post, I feel that AR and VR are, if not non identical twins, then defiantly siblings. They represent the Yin and Yang of digitally altered states of reality, really. And I feel they are both about to take off, big time.

• The 2009 Aug 22 edition of New Scientist ran a great article called 'Welcome to Appland'. The article that has a lot of information about the current and next wave of mobile phones that are different by way of the fact that they are: 
• Location Aware, Sensor Supported and Internet Connected.  
• “What is clear is that Apps are set to become an ever greater part of our lives.  As the technology of handsets improves, the next wave of apps will join up the real and the virtual worlds even more.  Many will be based on ‘Augmented Reality’, which involves overlaying computer graphics on a view of the real world captured through the phones camera. In the Android marketplace, apps such a Wkitude and Layar already use the handsets video camera, directional sensors, location information and internet connection to allow users to look “through” their phones to see a virtually augmented building or landscape.  Once developer tap into the full capabilities of the latest version of the iPhone a flood of similar apps is likely to emerge in Apple’s App store, says Blair McIntyre of Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, an authority on Augmented Reality” New Scientist, 22 Aug 2009 “Welcome to Appland” pps 32 to 36
• One…”cannot deny that the iPhone has changed things for everybody.  Variously described as the Jesus phone, a concierge, a Swiss army knife or, somewhat disturbingly, a fingertip secretary, the iPhone is currently the centre of the App world.  “the truly revolutionary thing that Steve Jobs managed to do with the iPhone was to persuade cellphone network operators to loosen their grip on what phones could do.  One of the consequences of this coup was the birth of the App store, which Apple alone controlled” “Apple made it easy for  anybody with programming know-how to create an App… Lured by the promise of riches , developers from large software houses to bedroom enthusiasts have created a massive market for Apps, virtually overnight” ibid

A VET Geo-Locative unit/s would blend Surveying, Spatial Imaging, New-Media with an introduction to AR and VR.

Surveying, spatial imaging and work with hand-held GPS devices and their laptop/workstation software will help nail down modelling of topographical reality accurately.  

The next bit is attaching information to the real world.  Geo-spatial and socio-spatial metatagging assists/ensures that media assets have the correct digital attributes to be locked onto reality [geo-located].  And at this point one can see how the duality of the AR-VR similarities can come into play.  AR is difficult to 'model' with existing 2D software. [How best do you 'show' someone how AR works in the real world?] We can dump associated content into a web-site, like a layer on Google Earth, or custom build web sites or Flash animations from say Aerial photos to give us a 2D rendered model.  
In our 07/08 AFLF 'Pancultural-e' project we produced a web-based model in order to demonstrate the nature of our Augmented reality Outback trial.  The model that really got people to sit up however, was when we rendered our AR tour into Second Life. In 'pancultural-e' we did a VR tour of the historic overland telegraph Station in Alice Springs.  

Its a smallish reserve and so it wasn't all that difficult to build [render] the 6 or 8 buildings onto an Island in 2L. [deserts are hard to come by in 2L], the buildings went up and it looked really cool.  [Here's a nighttime screen grab from the partially completed Telegraph Station, building not finished were 'parked' in the air]

When all building, landscapes and animals were finished however we hit something of a hurdle.  We had a couple of gig of tagged and massaged relevant multimedia that we'd used for the VR tour and the idea was just to 'place' it in the virtual buildings, along the trails etc and make it 'Interactive'.  At least it sounded simple I guess. Then as your Avatar cruises through, say ,the Telegraph Operations room and sees a flat panel display with a bunch of content menus, to get the media flavour of your choice, you select and savour the 'meme' of your choice.

But according to our guy from NZ whom we had contracted to render the 2L Telegraph Station, attaching the information onto the virtual environment was 'a bit tricky'. We managed to get some interactive media up there but not nearly as much as we would have liked. For the demonstration of how our AR worked though VR was the most , really good looking virtual environment but not much capacity for a user to interact with any of the memes [media].

We need to research if it has gotten easier to place interactive media around structures and landscapes in 2L as I'm sure the demand for this has to be on the up.  And it is precisely here where I see future work happening; mirroring interactive AR media into VR environments, getting your media production buck to bang twice. 

Now just to get the generation of virtual landscapes in a technically real perspective, cop an optic on the following vodcast about Photosynth. As fantastic as this demo is, it is technology from 2007. After you've watched the movie consider how many times, and from how many angles, seasons and weather conditions Ayers Rock has been uploaded to share sites.

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