David Vogt's blog

With the help of Industry Canada, Mobile MUSE has completed a plan (attached) for expanding the impact of its applied innovation model beyond the Arts & Culture sector into other key public-facing industry sectors including Environment, Health and Tourism.  Your comments and ideas are welcome!

In anticipation of public engagement potentials related to the 2010 Winter Olympics, the Mobile MUSE Network is launching its third major development program (MUSE3). 

MUSE3 will focus on community generated media (CGM)” to activate “live space” potentials – building technologies and toolkits to enable communities to use mobile, internet, and large public display media for collective expression and celebration.  Over the next two years MUSE3 will engage with a set of communities to develop and showcase these technologies. 

There's a new beta site in place for HP's "MScape" project, a open environment for creating, sharing and experiencing mobile location-based content.  The MScape world looks at the concept of Mediascapes, which are mobile, location–based experiences that incorporate digital media with the sights, sounds, and textures of the world around you. A mediascape blends digital images, video, audio and interactions with the physical landscape. Games, guided walks and tours, and destinations are among the mediascapes created to date.

For those who survived our longest solstice night and are tuned to seasonal celebrations, here’s a chestnut about mobile context-aware community narratives that hopefully brings some warm inspiration to your fireside reflections.

Christmas is just one child within a large family of cultural traditions that were born from or married into ancient human observances of the winter solstice.  As an astronomer-by-first-vocation living in Vancouver I was intrigued to study the miraculous birth story of the Pacific north coast, sometimes called Raven and the First People or Raven Steals the Daylight.  One dimension of this story is captured brilliantly in Haida artist Bill Reid’s “The Raven and the First Men” sculpture at UBC’s Museum of Anthropology. Raven is a complex trickster and this story is a focal point of the Raven Traveling myth cycle.  The epic poetry of north coast mythology is illuminated in Robert Bringhurst’s fascinating trilogy starting with “A Story as Sharp as a Knife”.

Mobile MUSE has been operating for almost four years and we’d love ideas from our communities about future directions. 

During phase 1 (ending March 2005) we built our collaborative applied research Network, implemented the first version of our unique innovation model, and undertook a set of projects that established technology frameworks, rapid public prototyping techniques and research methodologies for mobile cultural media. It was a great foundation of know-how on a variety of levels.