Netniet.org wanted to explore what happens with rating people in a physical space. Inspired by reading, “Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom”, they reused the whuffie, a social currency in Cory Doctorow’s book which people use to rate each other and pass each other value which they use to live off.

“Are we heading towards a future in which social networks will also dominate real life? At the Impakt Festival, this future became reality. With your mobile phone you could judge the performances and especially the people around you, for instance, on whether they are drug free or dangerous. The way in which you are judged by people might also determines your experience of the festival: your popularity becomes tangible. Do you get an extra cookie to go with your tea?”

The installation was spread across 4 different spaces and two separate buildings. Each space had a screen that visualized ratings and zone presence of people participating. 5 days, 5 questions or ways to rate each other. People wore badges with unique ids and a mobile application was used to rate people. Ratings also showed correlations between people as they rated each other.
Example: “Is this person drug free?” Correlation: both have a low rating, means people think they use a lot of drugs. We would then present a random meaning inside the rating-triggered visualization, for instance, ” person 1 is likely to meet person 2 in a cloud of smoke somewhere”.

Check out a video fragment of the Gifted project up and running.

For the Roomware Project, the big benefit is that any of you can now build applications that can take advantage of our new zoning ability. It’s easy to download and there’s documentation too. It was certainly the most complex installation so far. A mobile client handled the ratings using mobile internet. RW Server handled the bluetooth device tracking. That the mobile client handled the rating was a blessing in disguise. We were trying to handle all rating via bluetooth. Fortunately this failed (java does not support writing bluetooth friendly name). If it had, it would have meant a long wait for the plodding speed of bluetooth readers to pass the detection of a rating along. Mobile internet did it within 4 seconds. From a user experience perspective this was just fine;)

See further post on Barcinsky + Jean Jean’s blog

Project Team

Alchemyst – zoning, bluetooth detection

Barcinsky and Jean Jean - data visualization

Nietniet.org – concept, voting application

Lava – graphic design

Nulaz – mobile client for voting

Impakt festival – Festival organization