MSET: Multimedia Services & Enabling Technology
Client: Philips Research Laboratories, Redhill.
Our interest was social and aesthetic -- what can visual imagery, on a personal mobile device, bring to everyday situations that cannot be experienced through existing media channels? And why might you want to participate?

We came up with three possible motivations:

1. The User as Protagonist. People like to see things that somehow reflect themselves, their everyday experiences, and imaginary experiences and situations that parallel everyday life.

• Making Babies. Using the crossing paths of people on their way to work to generate virtual babies that continue to thrive and grow, sending messages about heir lives over time. Proud 'parents' can display pictures of their strange offspring on their phones.

• A garden in my pocket, planted from virtual seeds, the garden develops depending on the locations the person spends time in. Different parts of the city have different climates, pests, soil conditions etc.

• Should you wish to accept it. Emergency situations include performing a triple organ transplant in Elephant and Castle, guiding a jumbo jet with 300 passengers safely to land in Regents Park, containing an outbreak of a  mutant disease in Liverpool street at rush hour.

2. Social Exchange: Finding Things to Show and Share. How do you create, distribute and find snippets. Finding can be part of the story you share.

• My Lazy Crow is a virtual pet crow that knows where it lives. Released in another part of the city or country it will find its way home sending messages and snippets of things seen on the way.

3. Things to do together. Creating things or participating socially in groups.

• Orchestral Hits / Park Life. A full size virtual orchestra laid out in a park. Individual instruments can be isolated or a whole orchestra can be created if enough people are around.

• Sticks & Stones. The art of fiddling. Little collections of tiny, insignificant things that people fiddle with -- silver foil, loose staples, sugar granules, bits of polystyrene cups -- can be combined to make creatures that move in unpredictable ways. The city becomes the storeroom: different 'bits' are found in different parts of the city.

Project Team: Fiona Raby, Ben Hooker, David Bell, David Yule, Steffen Reymann, Duncan MacPherson.

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