What Would Make A Project Like This Work Better?
There’s no denying it: during the production of these mediascape projects there were a number of technological shortcomings that were nothing short of mildly perturbing. Aside from the obvious (technology and software that actually works), I’ve been thinking about features that would be really nice to have had.
I thought that Mscape had a fairly decent user interface that was easy enough for a beginner to get into, but there was also a lack of features (possibly because it was a beta version). I would have really liked Mscape to have uni-directional polygons or some sort of similar feature that would allow a sound to be triggered when the person walks across a marker in one direction, but not when going in the opposite direction. Or possibly a hole that could sit in the middle of a polygon and nullify existing sounds. This could probably be done with scripting tricks but I wasn’t successful in my attempts to do it.
And, oh, the eternal crisis of GPS drift… We need Local Positioning Devices that could just sit fixed in local locations and then send us relative local position information. It would work like map aligner, but give us our GPS coordinates based on it’s calculations. As the Local Positioning Devices record their GPS information, they would average their positions and give us much more stable information based on their data.
I think there was more, but this is all I remember…
I think i mentioned this in my post, but one of the major issues for me was that we all had to share a single PC. I do not fault the department for a lack of funds to provide us with this, as a mac lab is most likely more expensive and over all prefered. but mscape needs to develop a mac version. iPhones need to PDAs with GPS inside, and the project would’ve been more seamless in the production state. having to struggle with software and hardware i guess comes with the territory of this new media…i get that. but it doesn’t change the fact that it takes away from the creativity of a project given the limited knowledge of the tools, limited access to computers, and limited time. I feel like I rushed through the process instead of getting to test, make changes, retest, change again, and so on and so forth until i was satisfied with the end result.
That being said, this does not change the fact that i will be trying to use my knowledge of this process to better develop my final project and incorporate some elements of mediascape into something larger.
Comment by phyllis — April 9, 2008 @ 6:11 am
I have to agree that the project was limited by the lack of decent equipment and the hinderance of the create-a-scape website, but I want to put a positive note that everybody was able to acomplish what they were intending to do. It turned out to be a fun and innovative project that I would do again if there were not any time constraints.
Comment by dpena — April 15, 2008 @ 8:57 pm