pictopia

[to view this online demo, please email us]

Pictopia is a new platform to make everyday life in the cyberspace locatable. It is a digital environment that allows for the creation, organization, and sharing of experience and knowledge, in a location-based framework. Grounded on the an extensive research in urban planning, Pictopia anticipates a near future where location based services and 3g will provide a wave of content and activities that precisely pinpointed to the city. In effect, it is a new medium of communication.

Beyond Operating Systems

Your digital camera probably contains hundreds of images, with names that are non-descriptive, and contents that have no clear value. While most of these images may be insignificant individually, together they could become an archeology of one's experiences and memories in the city they reside.

Pictopia uses this archeology as a framework for the user to organize digital files and applications. Instead of relying on "windows" and "folders" as mere metaphors, Pictopia evokes our ever-evolving memories of the city as an infrastructure of information. This infrastructure attempts to mimic the mental representation of the city in our mind, which is fluid, segmented, and scalable. Pictopia aspires to bridge the virtual with the physical, becoming a place where our life on the street meets life on the screen.

This system could be developed for residents in any metropolis around the globe. Currently, Kowloon Peninsula of Hong Kong is being used as a pilot in this developmental stage. As of April 2004, it is functional offline.

To access the repository of images, files and applications, the user controls a simple graphical interface that glides back and forth along the 3d collage (see image below). This GUI, called 3dPan, was pioneered in the author's previous work, Space to Place 2002.

Pictopia is a proprietary system that is currently pending patent protection. Please contact us if you would like to have more information.