Here is a beautiful video made by ItoWorld that shows the progress of the OpenStreetMap (OSM) project during 2008. Those who don’t know OSM, should take notice of the exponential growth of this data source. Contrary to NAVTEQ (which provides geospatial data to almost all online services, including Google Maps, Yahoo, MapQuest, and Microsoft Virtual Earth), the content of OSM is free, open source, and largely user-generated.

I think that in the near future, bottom-up projects like this will replace the top-down commercial data sets, similarly to the way that Wikipedia has replaced online reference material. The paradigm has the advantage of numbers, making it more possible to keep up-to-date with the changing global landscape.

OSM 2008: A Year of Edits from ItoWorld on Vimeo

My main activity is the development and programming for the Audioscape Project, which involves anything to do with spatial organization of audio content and sound processing. Generally speaking, we provide the ability to create virtual worlds that function as musical interfaces or installation.

Most recently, however, we have started to add the ability to include mobile and location-based environments, in the outdoors. By using tiny mobile computing devices, GPS, and ad-hoc wireless audio streaming, we have managed to create shared mixed-reality audio environments that multiple users can experience while roaming around outdoors.

The bulk of this development occurred during the Almost Perfect locative media residency at the Banff Centre New Media Institute in November of 2007.

More information about this project can be found on the Mobile Audioscape page, and below is a video that was filmed during the residency in Banff:

On March 11th, 2008, I presented our mobile audio work at Interface[s] Montreal, which is a conference series held each year at the SAT. The theme for this night’s presentations was “Mobility”, and so I talked about the future use of audio in augmented- and mixed-reality applications.

You can watch my presentation below, or watch it on the Interface[s] Montreal website for the full experience.