The Gambit

I designed the software for this portable, interactive, site-specific animation sited in the lobby of John Portman’s Westin-Bonaventure Hotel in downtown Los Angeles. The viewer wears a digital compass attached to a PDA color screen and headphones. Walking through the hotel lobby causes the equipment to display images and play spoken-word sound and music in response to the constantly changing compass coordinates. These images are of spaces normally inaccessible to the viewer’s vision from within the Westin’s lobby, as if seeing through walls with a kind of periscope. The playback of the voice-over measures the speed of viewer’s displacement across the compass coordinates, while the images measure real-time physical location. In the context of the hotel lobby, the off-the-shelf PDA becomes a narrative-bearing device. Custom software controls communication with the compass and playback of the images and sound, and is specifically tuned to track movement through this particular hotel lobby, a space with unique geometry, obstacles, ambient sound and scale. In this way the software becomes site-specific.

Tags: context-aware computing