Urban Tapestries is an experimental project for understanding the social and cultural implications of location-based mobile communications. The founders have developed a mechanism by which individuals can virtually annotate the urban landscape with personal stories and commentary.
The technology is now ready for public trial, which will occur in the Bloomsbury neighborhood of London for nine days in December. Registration is already in progress. To demonstrate an advanced prototype of the Urban Tapestries public authoring platform, Proboscis will run a 9 day public trial in the Bloomsbury area of London in December 2003. Participants in the trial will be able to borrow a wireless device running the Urban Tapestries client software to drift around the highlighted area authoring and accessing local content for a session of up to two hours. The aim of the trial is to help introduce and explore the social and cultural possibilities of public authoring. Participants are invited to take part in an experiment to explore what the future for pervasive mobile networking might be like. To give a sense of context for this Proboscis has devised a series of task-based activities for participants - embed your own content (stories, pictures, sounds) in geo-specific locations as part of the Tapestry's threads. Find out more here: www.proboscis.org.uk/urbantapestries/
