|
The Internet Wanderer is a handheld device for navigating through the web by wandering through the woods. It combines the act of exploring the web with that of exploring the outdoors. It is an ironic comment on the poor bodily experience we are enduring while working with computers. Compare the intense sensory-motor experience of a cross-country hike to its poor counterpart when you are surfing the web.
This product is meant to raise awareness of what we are sacrificing in our attempt to make our lives more comfortable by the use of technology.
How it works
The product is actually a software that can run on any pocket computer with a GPS extension. The Global Positioninig System is a satellite service that lets special receivers sense their worldwide location with an accuracy of a few meters. The service also allows to infer one’s altitude. The Internet Wanderer uses this information to translate the user’s movement around the outdoors to his movement on a chosen website. The user’s position becomes the position of a camera hovering over a website - location determines xy-positioning and altitude determines the zoom of the camera, i.e., the size of the clipping which is visible at the same time.
Daily Use
When put to daily use, it will be interesting to observe completely new ways in which users will relate to both their outdoors and to the information provide through websites. They will attribute new meanings to their surroundings and a usual tree might become a new landmark where there is a link to an interesting subsection of the website. Similarly, the website will be interpreted as parts that are easier to reach and parts that make it strenuous, so that new trade-offs have to be made.
-
New jogging routes for reading the politics section every morning
-
Climb up trees to get an overview
-
Obstacles make it dangerous or even impossible to read some parts
-
Special work-out spots where you do exercises to read an article line by line
-
Interventions in the forest: People putting up ladders and swings to read better, mark spots to find information more easily
-
Landscapes are chosen based on how they fit the landscape of a website
Development of the Idea - a self-experiment in semiotics
The idea for the Internet Wanderer resulted from a semiotic exploration into what role our body plays in identifying and interpreting signs. I conducted a comparative experiment in which I opposed the experience of navigating bare-footed through a forest and that of navigating a website in the comfort of the office desk. In both environments I set myself three analogous navigational tasks - finding a comfortable path; getting from A to B; finding something interesting. By self-introspection, I then tried to decipher which signs I take into account for my decision and how I interpret them.
The result was very revealing and contrary to commonly held beliefs about the density of information in modern media. In the forest, the density of signs was much higher and affected the whole body. Prepared like that, the experience at the computer was quite disillusioning. My body was ready to help in interpreting the situation, but only the eyes were useful now, and even they had nothing to “interpret” since almost all of the information was pre-interpreted and served as pure information (in texts and prepared images). Disturbingly, even though there was no effort necessary to interpret the information, the feeling was rather unsettling and I felt overwhelmed by the amount of information. On the contrary, the experience in the forest was of a calm and more focused nature.
This experience led me to comment on the abstracted and poor experience that we face when “exploring (information) landscapes” today.
Contrasting the experiences of real-world vs. virtual-world navigation
 
Experience of starting out
 
Trying to make sense of information abundance
 
Getting to a point of overview
 
Discovering interesting areas
Status
A working prototype was developed, running on an HP iPaq hw6915, a handheld computer with integrated GPS. As this machine's Java environment is very limited, the software was developed in a Java derivative for mobile platforms named SuperWaba. In principle, it should not be a problem to make this work on any mobile device supporting a browser application and a connection to an external GPS receiver.
|
