Telepod

In one of the older posts, the Telepod was introduced. It is essentially a hemispherical pod on three legs, that allows for the park visitor - or anyone who is within its vicinity when it is placed in any part of the city - to experience media content that is immersive, and shown on the internal surface of its hemispherical top.

While the experience may be likened to being beneath a miniature Imax theatre, the means of information display is different. Conventional Imax theatres can accommodate for custom projectors due to their sheer size; the Telepod, which has limited standing room beneath (good for two or three heads), employs OLED (Organic Light Emitting Diode) technology instead. Using OLEDs removes the need for a projector, and allows for the projection surface to be malleable onto the hemispherical surface.

Projection/screen diagram of an Imax theatre, image courtesy of How Stuff Works.

The original intention of the Telepod were twofold:

1 As temporal shelters on the surface of the LA State Historic Park, where casual visitors can passively engage in media playback, on the park surface.

2 To allow for different parts of the city to experience the media content that is based in the LA State Historic Park. Thus, content that is generated (and stored in the downtown repository) can be played, via cable internet (or wi-fi where applicable), on the screens of these pods.

Their relatively simple structure and ease of portability allows for their distribution across the city, at news-stands, public parks, public libraries, bus stands and other spaces of temporal transit. This creates for multiple dialogues between the central park and points of the city extraneous to the park itself.

The media experience in the park, as such, extends beyond the physical boundaries of the park itself. This, at some level, bolsters the thesis intention of experiencing the city as an entity that goes beyond the bounds of physical infrastructure.

Evolution of the Reading of the City vs. Convergence Technology

The above sketch (click to enlarge) is an illustration of the evolution of the reading of the city with respect to the employment of convergence media. The top part of the sketch shows a timeline, which corresponds to a series of four sketches depicting how a city is read.

1 The first sketch illustrates how the current (generic) city is read, as a system of nodes, junctions, cross-streets (particularly in Los Angeles). The reading of the city obeys its physical infrastructure. Its urban forces - e.g. traffic flows, pedestrian circulation patterns, economic patterns arising from the accessibility of shop-fronts, and so on - can directly be mapped onto their relative positions with respect to these infrastructures.

2 The second sketch depicts the evolution of that urban environment after physical densification, which Los Angeles is employing as a strategy of connecting the "piecemeal" city. Yet, even while densification occurs, the existing infrastructures continue to bound the city, and the city continues to be read as an environment which is defined by existing physical boundaries.

3 With the introduction of GPS, cellphone and ubiquitous computing technologies, and the continued densification of the city, the urban environment continues to become more undefined. The difference is this - the physical city begins to lose its significance once the city is read as a series of nodal points, with GPS systems. The sense of hierarchy in the city becomes diluted, as locations are defined by vectorial relationships, coordinates, relative positions between points.

It is at this juncture that the Remapping LA project becomes highly relevant. The use of convergent technologies, coupled with the provision of the LA State Historic Park as the central media park, is definitive of the urban scenario where experiencing the city through media becomes as significant as navigating/reading the city through its physicality.

And as new media experiences are created, via the architectural employment of media environments, a new layer is added onto the city.

The involvement of the end-user as a contributor to that layer of the city, in effect, empowers the public. As it is human nature to control one's environment, this represents a channel for one to create a change in the mediascape that he experiences.

4 A continued trend of the employment and wide usage of convergence technologies would lead to a city whose hierarchies become dissolved, and whose urban environment is read through layers of media and "metadata".

Note: The sketches of the "evolution of the city" is an adaptation of Chip City, an architectural thesis project done at the Berlage Institute, published in Hunch 5. While the project in does not draw directly from the Chip City project, the parallels in the "spirit of the age" with regards to the role of convergence technology in the experience and interpretation of an urban environment cannot be denied.