[x] Teleporter

[B. Bogart]

Hi Jim!

Thanks for your response.

Indeed I did not think of our use of the word "tele" in the context of
television which can be clearly "live" or not.

It is certainly an interesting way to discover new places in the
overwhelming number of possible locations held by google.

Your points regarding the even distribution of random locations on the
globe really interesting, and its an important point to make. Of course
there is still a bias in that its unlikely (or impossible) we'll arrive
at locations where smart phones and cameras are a rarity.

Now that is an interesting idea, to use the density of the panoramas to
identify the locations that have not been well captured and generate a
map from that. I would expect it would approximately match a map
plotting wealth by location.

Ben


On 14-03-05 12:29 AM, jim andrews wrote:
> Hi Ben,
> 
> I think of a teleporter as something fictional, for now, ie,
> something that transports you instantly across space. The technology
> does not exist, of course, but everybody knows what a teleporter is
> cuz it exists so prominently in Star Trek.
> 
> What's the closest thing we have to it now? Well, telephone and
> video/television chat allow us at least to communicate more or less
> instantly across great distances.
> 
> So it's true there is some 'false advertising' in calling my piece
> Teleporter. But, still, there is some marvelousness going on in it, I
> think. When you press the 'Teleport' button you are more or less
> instantly shown a panorama of a more or less random location on the
> planet. You can press the Teleport button till the cows come home but
> you won't see the same location twice in the same session. And
> because these are more or less random locations, you see a lot of
> views from islands in the ocean. Cuz so much of the world is covered
> in oceans. You see repeats if you have multiple sessions, but not
> within the same session.
> 
> When you press the Teleport button, the program generates a random
> location. And then requests Google Maps return the closest 'street
> view' or 'panorama' to that location. If we haven't seen the
> resulting panorama, we view it. If we have, then we generate a
> different random location and start again.
> 
> It's interesting to note that this results in something with a
> convincing international flavour. But I expect that more than 50% of
> the available panoramas are of places in the USA. We don't see that
> many USA panoramas. The proportion of USA panoramas we see is about
> the same as the proportion of the USA land mass to the total world
> land mass. Cuz we're selecting a random location, not a random
> panorama.
> 
> I'm finding the results entertaining, myself. I kind of lucked out on
> an approach to that database of panoramas that doesn't simply result
> in a lot of same same  samey same road trip shots. The notion of the
> teleporter had some imaginative energy, to me, and that energy of the
> random location imbues the search results with the world's diversity
> across locations.
> 
> ja
> 
> On 2014-03-04, at 8:37 AM, B. Bogart <bbogart at sfu.ca> wrote:
> 
>> Hi Jim,
>> 
>> Teleporter implies to me the transmission of a live space, not a 
>> prerecorded image.
>> 
>> At first I was thinking you set up a robot camera that is user 
>> controlled somewhere!
>> 
>> One could imagine a pano camera on say the ocean floor, that would 
>> capture an image each second and then allow multiple people to look
>> at different parts of it at the same time.
>> 
>> B.
>> 
>> On 14-03-03 11:38 AM, jim andrews wrote:
>>> I have written a Teleporter at 
>>> http://vispo.com/mad220/maps/teleporter.htm
>>> 
>>> You start out in the machine itself. There are two buttons you
>>> can use to steer the machine. The "Teleport" button transports
>>> your cranium to a pseudo-random location on planet Earth. The
>>> "Map" button lets you see a map of where you are. The "Street"
>>> button takes you back to the representational hyperreal.
>>> 
>>> Suggestions to improve the machine? Comments?
>>> 
>>> ja _______________________________________________ x mailing
>>> list x at vispo.com http://vispo.com/mailman/listinfo/x_vispo.com
>>> 
>> 
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