This Monday, May 11th, I will be presenting a course on “Art, GPS and mobility” as part of the SAT[Transform] educational series. Although the topics may vary according to audience feedback, below is a overview of the topics that may be presented:

> Inspiration for interactive mobile applications:

• intro to mixed & augmented reality
• examples of locative media projects (past & present)

> Geospatial data:

• Existing viewers, rendering engines, and geotagged data
• Location-based content delivery and interaction
• intro to OpenStreetMap, Google Earth, etc.

> Mapping & GIS:

• projections and representations (lat/long - UTM)
• geocaching: waypoints/tracks/routes and exchange formats
• open source software solutions

> User tracking:

• about GPS receivers, technologies, and conversion between formats
• robustness with other inputs: accelerometers, compasses, cameras, fiduciary markers, etc
• alternatives: computer vision, wifi triangulation, LPS, etc

> Development and authoring for mobile devices:

• intro to Mediascape, and how to create locative media artworks
• discussion of other platforms (iPhone, Android, OpenEmbedded, etc)

> Future of mobile technology:

• auditory displays
• gestural interaction
• see-through glasses, mediated reality

The official call for works is available for the Pure Data Convention 2009. You may recall that the previous Pd Convention took place in Montreal in the summer of 2007, and that I gave a talk, workshop, and performed a piece.

The call for NIME (New Interfaces for Musical Expression) has been posted for next year’s conference, which will be held at Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh. More details at www.nime2009.org. The submission deadline for most items is January 24th, 2009.

I went to a meeting on Friday to discuss the development of a standard for describing spatial audio, called SpatDIF. There is now an official website and mailing list, so go check it out at www.spatdif.org.

The idea is quite nice, because it allows one to separate the contents of the 3D scene from the audio renderer. All that is required is to format messages for sound source positions and directivity in this OSC-style format:

/spatdif/source/1/position 1.23 7.98 5.4
/spatdif/source/*/directivity 1 0.7 0 0.7

Then, any SpatDIF-compatible renderer will be able to spatialize the sounds on the particular audio display that it is written for (eg, binaural, 5.1 surround, VBAP, Ambisonics, etc).

From May 13-15, I was at the Mobile Music Workshop in Vienna, which turned out to be a great forum for the exchange of ideas related to sonic design in mobile settings. There is a nice book published, which includes all the proceedings from this workshop since 2004. So rather than telling you about all of the projects, I’ll urge you to go to mobilemusicworkshop.org and buy one of these books

As for the poster that I presented, click the thumbnail below to see the larger version:

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.