WiNotFi

Exhibition Opening

2004-09-16T04:18:00.000-07:00

We had our exhibition opening last night and it all went very well. Everything worked, Carnivore and the Flash client handled the large number of people and the live display looked really interesting. We got lots of positive feedback. Will be adding some pictures of the exhibition soon.

The card works

2004-09-09T08:07:00.000-07:00

After much searching we got an internal wireless card and it works. It's a MRI-WL009. We are testing the signal and Flash in the Project. Also trying to figure out the logistics of setting up an instillation with 2 digital projectors, a DV camera, a computer and a Disco Ball. It also looks as if we will have to take down our piece every evening and put it up again every morning. At this stage though everything is working technically, so hopefully its just a matter of fine tuning.

Monitor / Promiscous Mode

2004-09-08T13:22:00.000-07:00

We have finally tracked down an internal PC card which we are hoping to install and test tomorrow. Here is another blog with some information on this.Benjamin Schweizer

Final Week

2004-09-07T10:09:00.000-07:00

Click here for our progress visually. This is our last full week, and we have discovered the difference between our cards and why some laptops can sniff/snort networks and some can't and now know that the pc we want to use cannot run in monitor mode rather than promiscous mode, which is the more common one. This is not a massive problem as if worst comes to worst we can use Audrey's PC. In the meantime we have been calling all the shops here looking for one...but again lack of knowledge and the relative novelty of wireless means the choice is very limited. We are going to test an Orinocco card tomorrow and also try to get our hands on a Broadcom internal PC card. We got a list on a forum of cards that do and dont work, as this is an American site most of the cards aren't available here and those that are dont seem to be available in the shops here.

We have been testing the sounds and are pleased with the results, many packets mean a nice overlay of the sounds.

We are going to the project tomorrow with crossed cable, dv and discoball to get a better idea of what can/will/may go wrong. We are also going to finalise the exact layout of our space.

A lot done, a lot more to do!

2004-09-02T10:06:00.000-07:00

From the last list we managed to get the pc in college using carnivore, wireless and with flash installed.

This means that we can use a bigger pc to run the whole thing from the project.

Our second main achievement this week was to get digital video running into flash, which we think at this stage was an oversight on behalf of flash as it works on the latest version of flash player. The reason we want to use dv is to give us more freedom with a filter, so that the video feed compliments the bubbles, as in reality is too much of a contrast.

We also met with Linda, our supervisor and she was very happy with our progress and emphasised the need to show the traffic gridlock and speed of the network and to have another defining characteristic that would make people understand what was happening. Sublety is not a choice here, this needs to be big and bold for all to grasp.

Now

2004-08-24T10:54:00.000-07:00

To do:
1. Get usb for pc in room
2. Install flash on pc
3. Go to project with two fixed aps and check los around building and how much cable needed
4. Audio
5. Exclude more html

Update on 'Run up to installation plan'

2004-08-24T08:40:00.000-07:00

9 August*Access Point up and running in Project - au*The installation of the AP is still causing problems, and this is mostly due to lack of expertise in the area and conflicting advice from people we ask...this week it HAS to be up and running and that is that...

*Idea for music and how to make it happen - a* I (Anya) investigated using Max Msp for the music and having learned quite a bit I realised that if we only want each bubble's creation to cause a note with reverb, flash could do this...I would like to use a vibraphone/echoing high note to denote each type of packet/each colour bubble. However this adds to our worries about Flash having too much to cope with.

*Flash improved - j* Johanna has flash picking up more understandable words. We need to attack html code now.

16
*Contact Linda re equipment - au* We are getting two projectors from Trinity and they will be projected on the top wall of the Project, so we don't need a back projector from Linda.
Filter/fx on straight video to make it more abstract - j
Work on music- have something ready by then - a
Motion detection sensors - au
23
other ideas - go through blog - 3
projections
perfect visuals

Into the projects

2004-08-19T05:53:00.000-07:00

Two major things have happened since -
1 - Indeed we do have the upstairs - to ourselves, which is great as our bubbles will remain free!
2 - We have been on a total rollercoaster concerning the ap and what we do and dont need...major confusion abounds about this new techology.

Run up to installation plan

2004-08-09T10:23:00.000-07:00

9 August
Access Point up and running in Project - au
Idea for music and how to make it happen - a
Flash improved - j
16
Contact Linda re equipment - au
Filter/fx on straight video to make it more abstract - j
Work on music- have something ready by then - a
Motion detection sensors - au
23
other ideas - go through blog - 3
projections
perfect visuals

30

tbc
testing
6 September
tbc
testing

D DAY!

getting the network up and running

2004-08-09T03:15:00.000-07:00

This week we have to have the WAN functioning in Project, there has been too much time wasted on issues with APs and if we can even a basic functionality going there, at least we can test and begin to imagine what way the final show will look. we are still toying with the idea of putting passwords on the network and offering free internet use to people, who will in turn be creating more data for us to use, a sort on internet cafe.

We are to meet the curator and the technical guy there on wednesday and it is looking like our piece will suit the upstairs part of the project, which is a bar area so fingers crossed that this works out, and the next post will be the results of our first test there!

Also, it seems that wireless-related articles, especially in business sections, are becoming common here in Ireland (a bit behind on that front), which means that our timing is fairly perfect with this...

two busy meetings

2004-07-31T04:46:00.000-07:00

Thursday was a very busy and beneficial day for us, with two people giving us so many ideas and so much encouragement. We talked a lot about what our project means, and what wireless is doing to our social actions - mainly about bringing the private out into the public arena and making the invisible visible

Firstly, we met Stephen McCormack from Bitbuzz, with a view to getting help from him on setting up an Access Point in the project, because we were under the impression that the Point we had would not work. (Johanna to expand on this!)

I took some notes, and seeing as this is a bank holiday weekend and I want to break away from computers I am transcribing them literally, to be made sense of next week.
Steve suggested installing the final work in some other places -
MIT - because they use their wi-fi system alot
- He talked about many themes running through our project, which we haven't yet expanded on here...Audrey has some thoughts to put up to add to these:
o Doing one's own thing in public space
o Bringing what was private before out - office work, communications
o He also brought up the value of realtime blogging, which I really agree with - the emotional reaction is so much fresher when you blog realtime - just look at my entry below..whereas when I take notes and blog the next day the message is different, it is more of a chore to recall events. Wireless makes realtime blogging.
- Steve told me about this girl called Susan who works on projections and was working here on a part of the Rejoyce festival that involved wireless.
Steve also talked about us having different coloured bubbles for different packets.

Next we met Linda Doyle in Trinity.
We explained to her that much of the work related to wireless, obviously with the likes of carnivore, focuses on surveillance, monitoring people and the more sinister elements. We wanted to higlight a more magical and beautiful element of a greatly positve advance. She suggested that the blog reference our ideas a bit more, which is no problem, as we have plenty of them, and philosophy, but we had been concentrating on the nuts and bolts and need to blog more now!
She also spoke about -
personal space
Daniel Rosen's Easel
Eavesdropping
Rebecca Allen and audio spotlights
RCA - tape-floor-text
Engaging with the space
Who owns the bubbles? (free nature of bubble why we chose them)
That we should collect anecdotal evidence of what people think of wifi - moral panic
Fiona Rabbi - Anthology Dunne?
Wasted Unused Soace
Structural Window
Back Projector
Floor - piece of cardboard - walking on it starts the show - a la Billie Jean
Projecting on to the ground
Natalies Dangling String
Audio Mirror
Floor - Elevated - Back Projector

So, after all of that, the real need next week is to research the above, get the AP working in Project, and get an idea of where our space is, which is the REAL problem now as it seems it will be a few weeks before we know where we are going to be in the project - and all the usual issues that come with it.

Mixing two flash movies

2004-07-29T03:56:00.000-07:00

Okay, so we have one flash movie where our 'waves' circles are born in the middle of the stage and then move out. The other one takes the packet content from the network, and throws up static circles with no words inside. Now we need to mix the two.(these links are very big apologies will shrink them later)
Yesterday we got 40% of the way there with this and this
We just need to get the code right to move them and take particular words out, test, test, test and then we can decide what extras we can do!
Stuff that came up while working yesterday...
- We need to get these cirlces to die rather than staying out of the stage...
- get average of packes at any time
- wht is fcolor and icolor
- radio stream?
- email someone who got words out of carnivore and ask them for tips on packets...
Today we are to meet Steve from Bitbuzz, who will hopefully give us an Access Point for Project, and Linda Doyle from Trinity, who is/will hopefully be our supervisor..

Will put in more details later of these two brilliant people!

2004-07-22T10:10:00.000-07:00

1 - There has been a problem with the wifi cards. We discovered today that it is becase they force data encryption, meaning we can't sniff the network here.
2 - She just installed a cisco card - and hey presto - it works and she can see me using my laptop for searches!
3 - So we opened the client and put the webcam into flash and got OUR FIRST CRUDE BLAST!! - it works!
4 - J has keywords in the client like cow, tiger, etc and I put cow into google and got this....isn't it fab - that is the lab in the background....
5 - BREAKTHROUGH NO 2!! We got our circles working with ONE packet - but skipped away from it before we got a screen grab and can't seem to get it to work again - no problem - happy with today's progress...all is left to do today is to work out whther dv works or not and if we even want it...
6 - EPIPHANY NO 3!!!! - We now have it all working to a good extent - webcam, overlay of dots, words inside, but these only echo that the client senses a packet, not the exact word - but that's progress.
And I even managed to look like I am looking the wifi waves in the eye!!!
7 - Tomorrow we are taking it back to the public houses, as they are the most reliable source of signal that we have come across and if things work out, Project will be even more reliable (trinity not 100%)...so it's the globe/market bar to:
...try all this again (with a webcam or the i-toy, which has not yet been brought into action and is a good compromise between dv and webcam)
...draw up a plan for the next few weeks
...come up with our ideas for final presentation
8 - Next week: get Steve - the wonderful Bitbuzz man, to set up and AP for us in Project - Trinity AP not suitable....fingers crossed!

Current Situation

2004-07-15T01:51:00.000-07:00

We met with Nina and Nicky (overseeing all class project and final exhibition)on Tuesday. They really like the idea of a blog documenting our progress, as they felt that the progress made is a big part of our project.

To further our research, we need to have some sort of resource where we can ask people about the problems that we run into, as we don't yet have a supervisor and some of our questions are hard to find answers to.

So, I have accordingly subscribed us to some mailing lists on yahoogroups, some newsgroups in college and a few lists/forums that I found through google.
A good page to start is here.

Johanna has already got some good advice from a guy called Tom Green on communitymx, as well as a great tutorial on how to import from a webcam into flash.

So, to sum up on the meeting on Tuesday, we first threw our ideas up about final presentation. These are(all alternatives or to be used together):
-splitting the one screen/projection into four to show different webcam feeds
-using feeds from different areas around project or using feeds from around town
-having just one feed on the screen at a time but randomising and rotating the feeds so the same image isnt on the screen for too long
-projecting our representation around the crowd (animation, no feed)
-using mirrors/mirrorball to take projection of feed or do the above
-we are also considering making the space of the experience small and self contained through some sort of material, maybe aluminium sheets

We still aren't decided on words or images but are heading towards an amalgamation of both, and dots are still the central form of communication. I will post up some inspiration/source ideas of this in next few posts, in the meantime the backrground for our blog says it all!

A central problem for this project is and always has been how to make any overlay/mask seem like it is interacting with the people/room in the feed. We are very conscious of making it look like the 'waves' are moving the way they would normally, and appealing/attractive/awe-inspiring!

Currently, however, the main problem that we are encountering is how to import dv into flash. We know that there is a definite glitch with importing sound AND audio to flash but wwe have yet to find good advice on just video, as flash just won't see the hardware and is being windows-centric. We have all tried separately but flash only recognises a windows dv drive and not the sony dv drive. Finding a driver is not proving easy, so it is either a driver problem or a space problem - ie the firewire feed is too much for flash to cope with.

We are going to feed something as big in another way and see what happens today.

Finally, DATA. Audrey wants us to present at DATA but we are not really ready but she feels it would be a good 'halfway' mark for us, and we could just stand up, explain the project and get some feedbak. Conveniently, Johanna will be in Galway. It is on next Tuesday so I will have lost about a stone by then.

Live video

2004-07-09T05:12:00.000-07:00

Managed to import a live video feed from a webcam into flash today. Now we can start work on overlaying our output from carnivore. Heres a sample, be very afraid!!!!

wall of Audrey

carnivore meeting

2004-06-28T07:31:00.000-07:00

After our meeting today, we have decided to give each other the following tasks to do:

Anya to contact carnivore people and see if they have any thoughts on live video mixing. Anya is now officially master blogger.

Audrey and Johanna to start investigating programming our own carnivore client.

We joined netsoc today as the signal here is not as good as theirs, which travels across the road and surprised them to hear that can get it.

2nd Outing

2004-06-25T04:07:00.000-07:00

Yesterday we went to the airport. The signal there is quite good but there seems to be a lot of users and so we couldnt maintain a connection for very long. We ran fuel (carnivore client) which looked great, with about 20 lights glowing. The coffee is crap in the Italian coffee bar by the way - even Bewleys would be better.
Then we came into town and went around IFSC and found a few open networks, which was interesting.
So, the main thing we realised that if the network is too busy, any video won't run fast enough, and if it is not being used by people, we wont get enough source for our content.
Now that we have a better idea of how it works and who is using it, we now need to pinpoint what we want to do...
1st picture is of fuel in action
airport1
2nd picture is of etherwatch after i keyed in an image search for...can you guess?
airport2
it is a kinda dirty word...

1st Outing

2004-06-22T07:36:00.000-07:00

today we have been in the market bar and are now in the globe. thankfully we have got carnivore and etherwatch up and running on one laptop and hope to get the others going tomorrow...
questions are coming up all the time so we are posting these and will try to have them answered by next week -
- why do they not work in college? how do switched networks stop it from even working when you do your own google search?
- what are we going to use for our own client?
- what kind of activity is in these bars - will monitoring churn up enough?
- why are the cards trinity gave us not working?
- how and are we legally reponsible for images that come up?

more questions to follow....

Proposal for winotfi

2004-06-21T07:05:00.000-07:00

Over the next 2 months we shall use this blog as the centre for communicating our progress for our final project in the MSc in Multimedia Systems in Trinity College Dublin.

Any ideas or suggestions are more than welcome - staffoa@cs.tcd.ie

Project – Working Title – ‘WiNotFi?’

Members
Johanna Bolton
Audrey Hanley
Anya Stafford

Summary
The availability of wireless communications is increasing daily but we feel that there is a lack of awareness of this facility and its potential. We want to help people to understand the waves which surround them by representing them in a physical form, through video and other media.

Wireless technologies currently operate in the 2.4 gHz range, which is also occupied by a number of other waveforms such as microwaves and cordless phones. It is a crowded range, and one that should give us plenty of material to play around with.

After initial research, we have decided that it would be necessary to complete some mini-projects in order to explore the social impact and uses of wi-fi in Dublin. Part of this will involve locating hotspots, monitoring traffic by grapping packets, creating our own hub and making an aerial using a Pringles tin to extend the signal’s range. We aspire to presenting some of our findings at the July meeting of DATA. We will also collect all of these ideas and chart our progress in an online weblog.

At this early stage we envisage our final presentation as a live video mix from several different hotspot locations in Dublin, Project, Temple Bar included. We want an attractive visualization, to encourage people to feel comfortable with the concepts. A screen split into four is possible, and we may use common visual elements from each feed to link these screens, e.g. similar colours to connect them on another level. Through software such as Carnivore and Etherwatch we will capture the information being sent through the network and then mix it into a visual representation. We are also looking at using text to speech software to provide a soundtrack to the video, and have not yet given up on the idea of being able to take MP3s and other sound files from networks.

Seeing as Trinity’s server may be able to cope with the high volume of traffic created by the live feeds, we would consider running it through there, rather then Project. Another advantage of this would be that we could stream our work live on the internet.

This project should yield some interesting results and commentary on different areas and their communities.

Roles
Johanna brings her technical and electrical expertise.
Audrey brings her aesthetic and critical analysis.
Anya brings her experimental and organisational sensibilities.
At the moment we work broadly as a group and set roles as we encounter them. We will all be interested in playing some part in everything from video mixing to streaming. We are all starting on much the same level.

Equipment
2 Digital video projectors plus screen (wall?)
Five webcams.
2 sets of headphones.
One wireless enabled PC.
Wireless Hub