Wayfarer V1 was a sell-out live event in 2007 at Sydney’s Performance Space – its a live computer game with actors as avatars. ‘Wayfarer v1’ utilised a custom-designed hardware-software system. The players streamed video, audio, bluetooth and RFID from body-mounted Vaio micro computers, to the Wayfarer software which displayed the players’ clock-times, site location, loot and camera point of view.

Urban Agents is the 2nd Wayfarer project – a fortnight long social media event taking place on the streets of Melbourne in late 2009, open to anyone who registers to play. Citizens, agents, advocates and moderators play together to create a smorgasbord of video interventions. Urban Agents tempts you to make sense of your city, to question, report back and to re-invigorate and re-interpret the urban spaces you call home. Wayfarer engages citizens experientially in an event that animates both the real world and online communities.

He is the founder of Transmute, the interdisciplinary collective behind Intimate Transactions, an interactive installation that has been exhibited all over the world, where two people in geographically separate spaces inhabit and interact in a shared virtual space.

The creators state that the objectives of ec(h)o are:

to develop a “next generation” interface that augments an existing physical environment with a virtual audio environment, and enables people to interact with the system without directly using a computer device; to develop an interaction model based on a semantic web approach to networked digital object repositories in order to create adaptive responses; and to demonstrate that enabling end-users access to digital object repositories engenders a participatory model for interaction and communication.

Soundscapes are generated based on the users position in the gallery and audio objects can also be triggered based upon his or her past visits and expressed interests. Customisation is possible as each user generates a “knowledge tree” or “a map of relationships” based on their interaction with the artifacts. Taken together these many maps create a “collective intelligence”. Their design is influenced by the philosophy of Pierre Lévy.

Innovation and its relationship with experimentation and artists are particular interests.

Their website states

Artists are innovators, if a new piece of technology or a new medium, becomes available; artists want to try it, to experiment with it, to push the boundaries. Some artists take on the role of a scientist in almost a performative way and some scientists equally take on the role of artist. Attitudes to science, medicine and art have changed over the last five hundred years, in that whilst Science has become more formalized, Art has become increasingly less so. By stepping outside the testable hypothesis artists are free to go off at tangents, to get bogged down in aesthetics and be mavericks.

The project developed interface techniques and applications to support research into outdoor augmented reality.

Augmented reality (AR) is the registration of projected computer-generated images over a user’s view of the physical world. With this extra information presented to the user, the physical world can be enhanced or augmented beyond the user’s normal experience. The addition of information that is spatially located relative to the user can help to improve their understanding of it. The images and videos on this web site are demonstrations of what a person experiences when they use our equipment.

The project was developed as Piekarski’s PhD thesis, under the supervision of Dr Bruce Thomas, at the Wearable Computer Lab.

The ART Mobile Lab, for instance, is known for its work on locative media in wilderness areas, while the Collaboration and Visualization Lab is known for its hybrid research practice and is dedicated to “the design of new technologies, applications, and experiences for cultural interfacing. That is, interfaces that encourage shifts in the perception of the self and the everyday lived world through collaborative experiences in spaces where we play, work, and learn.”