Dissertation defense: Oct. 19, 2011

Big day coming up! I'll be defending my dissertation: "The Fort Vancouver Mobile Project: Action Research in Net Locality" on Oct. 19 in Lubbock, Texas.

Public art at Texas Tech University

Texas Tech University's Spanish Renaissance-themed campus was described by James Michener as "the most beautiful west of the Mississippi, until you get to Stanford," and part of that appeal today is its public art collection. That artwork was deemed one of the Top 10 university collections in the U.S. by Public Art Review magazine in 2006.

For the past three years, during my annual residencies in Lubbock, I have been trying to find all of the pieces throughout the campus, which is Texas-huge, the second largest contiguous campus in the nation. This past May, I finally was able to locate all of them. Here are a few photos from my HTC Thunderbolt of several of them, plus other sights from my time on the campus:

Self portrait, showing the sun color and terrain type

This sculpture is in the courtyard of the English building, where I spent most of my time.

The Masked Rider is one of the two TTU mascots (the other one looks like Yosemite Sam).

Book person in front of the union building

A detail from the Tornado of Ideas sculpture

The Tornado of Ideas

Prometheus Bound

Driftwood horse

Bell tower

One of the large portal sculptures around

Another portal

Will Rogers

People, frozen in time ...

More people

More shapes

More patterns and shapes

Former TTU president

This is probably the most interesting piece on campus

Masked Rider again

Details from a building

The big neon Double-T on the side of the football stadium

Another wild horse sculpture

This is a mosaic inside the football stadium; really cool in person, but hard to photograph; the size of a stadium wall

These only can be seen as symbols from above, looking out the football stadium windows

The view from the president's skybox

I'm in the reflection of this one

This old barn is in the middle of campus, a reminder of the ag days

One of the hardest ones to find; these are gigantic, too

The seal at the entrance to campus

Sir Ken Robinson: Do schools kill creativity?

Changing Education Paradigms by Ken Robinson

Divergent thinking in education systems:

Find the Future game at the New York Public Library

This looks like it will be an alternate reality game of some sort, connecting physical objects with an interactive expression of ideas, related to those objects. The trailer sure does make it look exciting:

MIT-sponsored Start-Up Demo pitch session

This just came out on the Mobile Portland list, from Rob Wilcox, could be helpful to some:

"Northwest Demo is sponsored by the MIT Enterprise Forum and you will be demoing to the Alliance of Angels, Keiretsu Forum, Puget Sound Venture Club, Seraph Capital Forum, TacomaAngel Network, the ZINO Society, media and individual investors.
From the announcement You have two weeks left to submit your entry. Deadline is Friday, April 8th. Click here for more details. While this event can certainly help your chances for financing, it is primarily a DEMO event, not a financing pitch. Therefore, we ask that you adjust your summary accordingly by telling us WHY it will be a great DEMO. Based on your submissions, 10 to 12 companies will be selected to present to our screening committee. From there, the committee will select the companies that will demo their product or service at the Northwest Startup DEMO – Spring 2011 event to be held on May 12th. Here's the click here, sorry for breaking your analytics: http://www.mitwa.org/apply-northwest-startup-demo-spring-2011?

Reacting to the Past games

The next step for the Fort Vancouver Mobile project and its descendants is to go beyond even interactive and immersive storytelling, at least as envisioned, and push users into this kind of broader experience, Reacting to the Past games, in which users can play different roles and respond in uniquely personal ways to a historic moment. That will take a lot more work, and much more grant money. But that is the vision I'm following.

TED talk by Layar co-founder

Found this short demo by Claire Boonstra, co-founder of Layar, just before its launch. Hard to believe that was such a short time ago (Layar seems like the old guard at this point), but the video is a good primer for those just starting to look at augmented reality interfaces.

TEDxAmsterdam: Layar from TEDxAmsterdam on Vimeo.

An early look at mobile interpretation in museums

Museums & Mobile 2011, Survey Results.

View more presentations from Loic Tallon.