The projects supported by the Pervasive Media Studio are diverse in both their mode of practice and their projected outcomes. A long terms partnership between HPlabs and the University of Western England was concerned with the development of software allowing for the production, distribution and consumption of ‘mScapes’ or mediascapes – They were also central in the development of an ongoing conference series exploring and demonstrating the potential of mScapes. An m(edia)Scape is essentially a mixedmedia production that uses GPS to both record and playback audio, video, or augmented reality style graphics (mapped images on a smart phones camera/video input – dependent on position) as the basis for a particular ‘text’. Most of these mScape were audio centric allowing for recorded audio to trigger as a user moved through a space. In more recent times the ubiquity of phones with gyroscopes, GPS and compass, has allowed for the real time overlay of graphics on a video image- allowing a user to view an augmented reality through the phones camera. The latter development has seen AntiVJ – one of the Pervasive Media Studio’s residents – working with the HPlabs and the University of Western England on the potential for/feasibility of identifying and tracking a plane in 3 dimensions. The facility for mapping and tracking a plane in 3D space supports the mScape project by allowing the augmented/imposed image to move beyond ‘simple’ two dimensional infomatic style augmentation and toward the potential for ‘architectural’ augmentation in 3 dimensions.

The mScpae project has largely fed into the launch of Calvium – a ‘startup’ aiming at the commercialisation and continuing development of the mScape production and playback tools.

The facility for automatically mapping and tracking a plane in 3 Dimensions also serves the project being developed by Anti-VJ as part of their PM Studio Residency. That project involves the development of a ‘Mapping’ Suite of Applications based on the demonstrated potential for projecting a ‘keyed’ image onto a 3-Dimensional object providing for seamless projected live augmentations of architectural space. At present  AntiVJ projects depend on laborious keying of an image or video to a necessarily static surface or plane. Automated identification and tracking of planes would allow for the mapping of projections to dynamic/mobile surfaces effectively allowing a new form of augmented reality (augmented virtuality??). This potential is further extended by another of AntiVJ’s projects stereoscopic projection – the idea here is that keyed projections on a tracked plane in 3 dimensional space would allow for 3D ‘holographic’ projections.

The PM Studio has also supported research into the use of POV cameras in theatre productions. The ‘Extended Theatre Experience’ has explored the potential for attaching cameras to actors and to objects/props provides for a better or extended experience of recorded theatre although increasingly this has led to the development of new modes of mediated performance.

The SubtleMobs project developed by Duncan Speakman as a residence of the PM Studio is a variation and development of the rather tired/dated concept of Flash Mobs – The SubtleMob projects move away from the simple realisation of a social spectacle that became the standard for flashmobs to explore the more interesting performative affordances of that practice. In the simplest terms this has meant ensuring that the ‘mob’ maintains the form of subtlety that ensures the experience of the ‘mob’ – both between members and for the unsuspecting public – retains its submersion-in and subversion-of the everyday. SubtleMobs participants are told not to bring cameras or other recording devices that might subvert the grounded subtlety of the ‘performance’. The participants of one SubtleMob were instructed to download two sets of recorded instructions to an mp3 player. The recorded instructions were to be played only at the site of the SubtleMob performance and carried out with a partner listening to the alternative/paired recording. The ensuing performance emerges between partners, between couples, between the mob and the public – a kind of purely emergent performative practice.

Their are a number of other  interesting projects and collaborations supported by the PM Studio. The Street Art Dealer project is a collaboration between C6.org and Steal From Work – both groups concerned with public and street art and its marginalisation by market driven art practices and cultures. The project use QR codes (the form of barcoding that allows for embedding and collection of metadata via mobile phone cameras) to allow street artists to sign their work and for ‘consumers’ to then locate work identified by artist (or any other applied taxonomy) – it is suggested that this could lead to a form of commercialisation supporting the work of street artists (perhaps via commissions).

The PM Studio also supports; a CyberTherapy project (collaboration between HMC Interactive, Drake Music, and bibic) looking at the development of simple software that provides synaesthetic feedback (voice to visual feedback) as a form of Therapy for autistic children, a project enabling simple browser based recording and sharing of audio between schools students (Audio Enable), a number of augmented reality and cross media narrative projects, development of the IndieMobile social media campaign engine (Complaint Generator) in collaboration with Indie Mobile (an UX agency).

The PM Studio is supported by The University of Western England and their Digital Cultures Research Centre, Hewlett Packard Labs, and the Southwest Regional Development Agency and is part of Watershed @ Bristol.

Daniel Woo is  also associated with the iCinema project at UNSW a large scale hemispherical ‘cave’ style immersive environment although his work tends to focus of speech and natural languages and interface design and usability research.

Woo was central in establishing a HCI education at UNSW and is considered a leader in the field of HCI education and research. He has published widely on interface design, formal usability testing, speech synthesis and interface, spatial audio interfaces amongst other research interests.

Helyer’s work is what his website describes as ‘actively interdisciplinary’- linking creative expression, scientific research and technical development. More specifically Helyer’s work is characterised by an interest in the potential for technical architectures to reveal otherwise unseen or marginalised dynamics that span and interweave the development of culture, environment, history and technology .

Installation is the most common vehicle for Helyer’s work which tends to employ elements of computer and mechanical interaction as the basis for an establishing and exploring the visceral relation between body and ecology that it potentialises.

Helyer’s most recent work has developed out of a collaboration with the Satellite Navigation and Positioning Group and Human Computer Interaction Lab of the University of New South Wales (Most notably with Daniel Woo and  Michael Lake of UNSW). That work is based on the Audio Nomad system that provides for the mapping of geo-tagged media and geospatial information in a interactive system that immerses the user in a sonified representation of the environment. That representation juxtaposes sonified meteorological and environmental data with recorded histories, cultural fragments, field recordings (both visual and sonic) making the relations between these ‘readings’ visceral. The user traverses this sonic topology  produced via an immersive multiscreen and surround sound system and the unique Audio Nomad interface  to explore the transitions and relations between the human, biological, and environmental systems.

The Audio Nomad system is the result of a project Helyer began in 1999 and which continued until 2001 called Sonic Landscapes and which employed the spatial audio systems developed by Lake Technology and the GPS systems developed by the SNAP lab of the University of New South Wales (and in collaboration with both Lake and UNSW). That project allowed for a fictive but nonetheless visceral 3D immersive soundscape to be accurately positioned and explored on/in a physical terrain. The subject and site for that work was the St Stephen’s Graveyard in Newtown, Sydney – a site rich with the kind of lost/invisible histories, that along with the invisible or marginalised dynamics of our ecology, constitute the other principle interest in Helyer’s work.

Two other interwoven streams are apparent in traversing Helyer’s catalogue. The first is an interest in oral and sonic histories that is expressed in the Wireless House (2009) and  GhosTrain (2008) projects both of which work on resounding the forgotten histories that are expressed in the sonic markers of a superceded or evicted heavy industry that once constituted Sydney’s inner city life or the oral histories that recount the human cultures to which it gave rise.

The other stream of Helyer’s catalogue is the design of mechanical and dynamic sculptures that harness wind or other environmental (or differential forces-electromagnetic force for example) forces as a means of modal ‘transduction’ – of converting wind to dynamic form (Zephyr 2010), or electromagnetic potential into sound (Swarm 2005), audio to tactile vibration (Adrift-2009, Transformer 2005), kinaesthetic potential into sound and form (Spinner 2005).

Helyer’s work is extensively and generously documented on the Artist’s web site (http://www.sonicobjects.com/) and farexceeds this rather cursory account of his contribution to media art both nationally in Australia and and internationally – The rise of ubiquitous computing and cheap portable, and embeddable, systems of playback has seen sound art move to the forefront of media and interactive art – Helyer has become a central protagonist in this ongoing exploration.

Run Silent, Run Deep is the 2008 Singapore Iteration of the series and involved a mapping of the Marine environment of Singapore harbour onto an immersive and interactive sonic topology that the user can explore via a projected visual interface.

The Audio Nomad project involves the representation of geo-tagged, recorded, media including images, video, sound, juxtaposed with the sonification of geo-spatial information. This reconstitution of this collected data in a sonic topology allows a user to navigate a soundscape in which recorded histories, unseen ecological dynamics, and visceral field recordings are evocatively juxtaposed to reveal otherwise forgotten, marginalised, or assumed networks of relation.

Eco Located began with a  maiden collaborative residency aboard the MARIN (Media Art Research Interdiciplinary Network) catamaran.

The project took water quality and meteorological readings, geotagged information, made field recordings, and recorded interviews with scientists and the community in and around Belfast Port and during their voyage across the North Sea- concentrating on the ‘Littoral cultures’ – the cultures that develop at the transition or boundaries of (in this case) land and sea.

The information gathered becomes the basis for an immersive surround sound installation that uses the Audio Nomad system to allow a user to enter and navigate an abstract soundscape – a kind of sonic topology constituted of and juxtaposing (sonifying) the information and media recorded during the vessel’s progress across the North Sea.

The Eco-Located project continues a common theme in Helyer’s work that explores the potential for audio to make audible that which be forgotten or unseen – this extends beyond the post modern desire to reveal an underlying or marginalised structure and  to explore the way we might use audio in both new and old technology to realise new networks of relation and remembering between individuals, the communities of which they are part,their ecology, and their histories.

He is currently working with the Game Studio @ SICS and is the principal developer of the commercialised pervasive gaming platform ‘The Creator’. He was also involved with the Integrated Project on Pervasive Gaming.The ‘game creator’ project developed as part of that project is the original  implementation of ‘the Creator’.