SIAT Project WeBlimp to be shown at Surrey Olympic Celebration Site

posted: january 4. 2010

A project by a group of senior undergraduate students at SIAT will be featured as part of the Surrey Celebration Site for the 2010 Winter Olympic Games.

weBlimp
weBlimp is a social, crowd controlled flying airship. It conceptually miniaturizes participants and places them inside the gondola of a remote controlled blimp.

The purpose of this project is to explore the concept of crowd collaboration, and how it can occur in the context of navigational controls in an embodied manner. The project attempts to bridge the gap caused by the disembodied relationship between the remote control and the device. The weBLIMP is intended to play with participant's sense of scale. weBLIMP is a blimp, controlled by participants in a room (located away from view of the blimp). The navigators play in a room with a projector showing, at wall size, what the blimp is seeing, and the blimp embodies what the participants do. The participants react to what they see on screen, and the blimp reacts to what the participants do. This project is an example of embodied interaction, which plays with scale and social interaction.

Publications:
Quan, B., Thong, A., Waddington, N., Wu, A. "weBlimp", ACM Creativity and Cognition 2009 Conference, October 27-30, 2009, Berkeley, CA. Poster session.

Team:
+ Brian Quan
+ Andrew Thong
+ Nathan Waddington
+ Anna Wu