Remote

"Usman Haque is founding partner of Umbrellium, formerly known as Haque Design + Research, and the founder of Pachube, a data infrastructure and community for the internet of things. Ai Hasegawa uses art and design to present a solution to the challenges encountered in our daily lives. Georg Tremmel, Japan/Austria, studied Media Art in Vienna and Interaction Design at the Royal College of Art in London. 

Remote connects together two spaces, one in Boston the other in Second Life, and treats them as a single contiguous environment, bound together by the Internet so that things that occur in one space affect things that happen in the other and vice versa — remotely controlling each other. Communication between the two halves of this extended environment is a complex choreography coupling the environmental phenomena of humidity, temperature, light, speech, mist, wind, sound and proximity across the two. The object in Boston appears to be a seat; but, experientially, the Second Life space appears to be inside the seat. A similar alteration of scale occurs in the other direction. Visitors to the Boston space and the Second Life space must negotiate to achieve goals: e.g. by sitting down, breathing, touching, knocking, colliding. The environmental data of both spaces is publicly available in realtime via the EnvironmentXML repository enabling others to build devices and spaces that connect directly to both Boston and Second Life. The intention is to explore an architecture that is resolutely 'human' (in the sense of being inhabited, configured and determined by its occupants) yet context-free (because it does not privilege geographical location)." -- from Turbulence