Early last year, I posted here about Graffiti Research Lab and their work in creating a methodology for virtually tagging buildings using a green laser, a powerful projector, and some really cool software that they developed and then released as open source. That methodology is equally applicable to smaller scale rear projection systems that can be used indoors. Although in such cases IR is probably more appropriate than lasers.
It’s seems that at least two different groups are attempting to commercialize such an approach. I just happened to stumble across both of them within the span of a couple of days. The one I heard about first (probably because they are making a bit of a PR push) is YrWall, out of the UK. I’m not sure if this is an offshoot of another organization, but from their site YrWall seems to be a one-trick pony exclusively devoted to pushing this one product. I’d say they are the more commercial of the two, which I suppose could be either good or bad depending on your needs.
The other, Tangible Interaction out of Vancouver, is more of a general purpose experience designer (not all that different from Operand) that lists a digital Graffiti Wall amongst its specialties. They also mention a Graffiti Can that seems a lot closer to the original GRL LASER Tag project I mentioned at the top. It seems like both companies have adopted a rental model to make this fairly hardware-intensive technology viable for events, which makes a lot of sense. It’s impossible for me to tell which system would be better since I haven’t been hands-on with either one, but take a look at the videos.
Interestingly, if perhaps irrelevantly, the term “virtual graffiti” has already been claimed for another, earlier, technology wherein people created tags that could be viewed online or via mobile devices but used geolocation to tie them to specific places in the real world. And even more irrelevantly, the URL is owned by a Network Security company of the same name. Perhaps “digital graffiti” will stick.
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2 Responses to "Virtual Graffiti Walls"
This post about graffiti seems like as good a place as any to mention Muto – a video animation created by painting actual walls outdoors. It’s not exactly interactive, but it’s genius nonetheless…
And since I mentioned Muto, I should also reference Mine. It’s less like graffiti, but has a similar animation quality because it was done by repeatedly changing a single sketch board to make each frame.