Spatial Media

Until recently, knowledge-intensive work activities have predominantly taken place in office buildings as a specialized form of economic infrastructure. New digital technologies together with an economic and organizational transition from closed firms to open platforms has changed the pattern of work within the modern metropolis. The office building is no longer the sole workplace typology and work activity has intensified in other urban locations. The questions then are: "How might smart cities reinterpret workplace culture at the urban scale outside the framework of office buildings typology?" and "Which tools and methodologies can be used to make digital workplace culture visible at the urban scale?" In order to answer these questions, workplaces are observed not as private architectural spaces but as compositions of "subjective urban experiences". A Twitter data analysis provides evidence of workplace spatial culture within the innovative global cities of Amsterdam, London and Paris, interpreted as behavior settings. This analysis shows that office pattern locations are generally distributed independently to knowledge intensive business services and workplace demand, as expressed through social media analyses. In addition to office buildings, transit hubs, urban amenities and new digital services play a key role in reframing workplace location. Moving beyond generic visions for digital work in outer spaces, big data therefore provides specific insights and incentives for considering workplace design at the urban scale.

SoundDelta is a mobile audio augmented reality (AR) project to produce an artistic spatial soundscape for public exhibition. The SoundDelta binaural rendering system is distributed between mobile user device(s) and remote server(s), communicating over wireless ethernet. The system uses a novel Ambisonic cell ap- proach for efficient scaling of computation and network band- width with respect to user numbers.
This design divides the physical space into cells, with Ambi- sonic audio rendered on the server for fixed virtual auditor (VA) positions at the center of each cell. Each human listener (real auditor) uses a mobile device to receive Ambisonic streams from their nearest VAs. These streams are then mixed in proportion to proximity, and the mix decoded to binaural. In this manner, computation and bandwidth requirements are made proportional to the number of cells in the physical space, and independent from the number of users. The final binaural rendering may be individualized by selecting or customizing HRTFs for each user.
This paper presents the SoundDelta Ambisonic cell approach, with a review of possible audio AR architectures and prior sys- tems. Computation, network bandwidth, and source position errors are derived and compared to other architectures. The im- plementation itself is described and an analysis of expected technical performance is presented.

Over the past decade a new set of spatial and locative technologies have been rolled out, including online, interactive mapping tools with accompanying application programming interfaces (APIs), interactive virtual globes, user-generated spatial databases and mapping systems, locative media, urban dashboards and citizen reporting geo-systems; and geodesign and architectural and planning tools. In addition, social media produces spatial (meta)data that can be analysed geographically. These technologies, their practices, and the effects they engender have been referred to in a number of ways, including the geoweb, neogeography, volunteered geographic information (VGI), and locative media, which collectively constitute spatial media. This chapter untangles and defines these terms before setting out the transformative effects of spatial media with respect to some fundamental geographic and social concepts: spatial data/information; mapping; space and spatiality; mobility, spatial practices and spatial imaginaries; and knowledge politics. We conclude by setting out some questions for further consideration.

Audio Nomad comprises a series of cross-disciplinary art/science projects working on the concept of GPS-driven location-based audio applications. Project outcomes in the form of artworks enable a user or audience to experience a virtual audio world situated within the real world, as a spatial composition of sounds seeming to originate from real objects. Two-dimensional audio spatialization simulates realistic sound sources, and non-spatialized sounds may also be used as location-based content. Conceptually, sound is used to reveal information or create an aesthetic, often composed of a combination of oral histories, archival audio, site-specific historical information, field recordings, and music. The outcome is a culturally significant public sound artwork utilizing this new location-based audio medium – an application of global positioning, audio technologies, and software engineering.
As GNSS technologies become more ubiquitous, Audio Nomad can take advantage of new platforms such as mobile phones. This unique multidisciplinary collaboration has driven the design of tools with great creative potential to provide new alternative location-based services poised to engage and appeal to the imagination of future GNSS users.

Considering place-based participation a crucial factor for the development of sustainable and resilient cities in the post-digital turn age, this paper addresses the socio-spatial implications of the recent transformation of relationality networks. To understand the drivers of spatial claims emerged in conditions of digitally augmented spectacle and simulation, it focuses on changes occurring in key nodes of central urban public and semi-public spaces of rapidly developing cities. Firstly, it proposes a theoretical framework for the analysis of problems related to socio-spatial fragmentation, polarisation and segregation of urban commons subject to external control. Secondly, it discusses opportunities and criticalities emerging from a representational paradox depending on the ambivalence in the play of desire found in digitally augmented semi-public spaces. The discussion is structured to shed light on specific socio-spatial relational practices that counteract the dissipation of the "common worlds" caused by sustained processes of urban gentrification and homogenisation. The theoretical framework is developed from a comparative critical urbanism approach inspired by the right to the city and the right to difference, and elaborates on the discourse on sustainable development that informs the New Urban Agenda. The analysis focuses on how digitally augmented geographies reintroduce practices of participation and commoning that reassemble fragmented relational infrastructures and recombine translocal social, cultural and material elements. Empirical studies on the production of advanced simulative and transductive spatialities in places of enhanced consumption found in Auckland, New Zealand, ground the discussion. These provide evidence of the extent to which the agency of the augmented territorialisation forces reconstitutes inclusive and participatory systems of relationality. The concluding notes, speculating on the emancipatory potential found in these social laboratories, are a call for a radical redefinition of the approach to the problem of the urban commons. Such a change would improve the capacity of urbanism disciplines to adequately engage with the digital turn and efficaciously contribute to a maximally different spatial production that enhances and strengthens democracy and pluralism in the public sphere.

Audio Nomad is a three-year art/science research collaboration on the creative and technological potentials of location-sensitive, mobile spatial audio. The first Audio Nomad productions were two versions of Syren – a ship-based multi-speaker installation using the ship’s position from a GPS receiver to render a two- dimensional soundscape. New work including Virtual Wall (Berlin) will create a personal location-sensitive spatial soundscape on headphones using a portable computer, GPS receiver and digital compass. The technological intent is to enable the artist to augment real world objects and spaces with sounds perceived to emanate from them. It is important to know the maximum perceivable accuracy of the intended augmented reality effect, given human and technology limitations, even if soundscape design doesn’t always require maximum precision. Ultimately, authoring software features will inform the artist of afforded perceptual quality, enabling better utilisation of the medium’s potential. Few similar projects have been produced to date and fewer have published quantitative perceptual evaluation research. This paper reviews the field and describes present experimental results and future work on the perceptual evaluation of binaural spatial audio for mobile augmented reality, especially Audio Nomad artworks.

SoundDelta is an art/research project that produced several public audio augmented reality art-works.These spatial soundscapes were comprised of virtual sound sources located in a designated terrain such as a town square. Pedestrian users experienced the result as interactive binaural audio by walking through the augmented terrain, using headphones and the SoundDelta mobile device. SoundDelta uses a distributed "Ambisoniccell" architecture that scales efficiently for many users. A server renders Ambisonic audio for fixed user positions, which is streamed wirelessly to mobile users that render a custom, individualized binaural mix for their present position. A spatial cognition mapping experiment was conducted to validate the soundscape perception and compare with an individual rendering system.