After a substantial hiatus, I returned to the Last Miles installations a few months ago, trying to figure out what the next steps might be. The experience with the installation in last spring demonstrated what a challenge issues of internet connectivity can pose. Most available open-source software that coordinates live video, audio, and ssh feeds just doesn't work well without extremely good internet connections -- and flaky internet connections is all that's available when putting things in public spaces in Durham and Duke.
Yet the idea of having the installation "connect" the user with another place that she or he may or may not be familiar with -- but that is geographically close -- remains compelling. And working with live audio and video created plenty of space for the unexpected to sneak in. Last Miles Refactored, as I'll call this second version, is going to try to preserve as much of the initial vision for the project while making sure that the installation's technological supports are more reliable.
For now my ideas include:
- Interfacing with Flickr or similar service to pull down photos from Durham of public spaces (this latter may need to be flagged by users themselves)
- Better user interface with support for arbitrary display types -- I'm considering PyGTK or pygame. I'd really like to find something that lets me create nice looking transparent widgets out of the box. I used gtk last time but spent way too much time styling the interface.
0 Responses to “Last Miles Refactored”