http://www.ith-z.ch/check-it/index/home/
team: Anne-Lea Werlen, Brigit Lichtenegger, Fabian Vögeli, Flavia Caviezel, Lenno Verhoog, Nathalie Oestreicher, Susanna Kumschick
 Screenshot of the Navigation Window |
 Screenshot of the Media Window trips palmi - copyright photo courtesy of Chris Freebairn, DPI Queensland, Australien. |
Check It! is a research project by Flavia Caviezel and Susanna Kumschick for the Institute of Theory in Art and Design, in cooperation with Videocompany and V2_Lab. It investigates the latest trends in the way people, baggage and goods are checked. It places particular emphasis on the type of checking system, the logic of the checking procedure, and the role of visualisation technology.
The hybrid documentary material gathered during research, including video, photographs and text, is being evaluated and presented in the form of an interactive installation, that serves as the central tool for ordering the material. I worked on the idea for the installation with Flavia, Susanna and Lenno, and developed the interface.
The interface consists of a media window and a navigation window. The media window displays the actual media and can be opened on a second screen, and the navigation window is made up of 3 resizable panels: a panel containing the map of the airport, a panel holding the keywords, and a panel that displays the media objects represented by thumbnails. The layout of the keywords and media objects is selforganizing, so that strongly related objects are displayed close together and selected objects appear in the middle. The relatedness of keywords is determined by how often they are used together to annotate a media object. The relatedness of media objects is determined by the similarity of their keywords and location. Selecting an item in any of the panels, will focus and highlight the related items in the other panels. Clicking on a thumbnail will also display the media and a description.
 Terminals at the Swiss National Museum - copyright photo courtesy of Susanne Stauss  Two screen setup at the Swiss National Museum - copyright photo courtesy of Susanne Stauss |
The interface was built in Java, using the jgoodies forms library for doing the layout and QuickTime for Java to handle the media. To enable MPEG-2 content the MPEG_2 Playback Component for QuickTime has to be purchased. Because the application depends on Quicktime Player it only runs on Windows and Mac. (quicktime for java is automatially installed by the quicktime player installation as of version 7). The application is multilingual and suited to run on single or dual monitor (or videobeam etc) machines. Quicktime text subtitle files are supported via SMIL. Unfortunately the sound is lost when using mpeg2 media as a video source in SMIL. A way to work around this is using quicktime reference movies. For the text to display right on both Mac and Windows they have to be encoded with the Unicode character set. To convert subtitles with Mac Roman or Windows 1252 character encoding to Unicode I wrote the Quicktime Subtitle Converter. The interface borrows heavily from previous projects I worked on like Amicitia and playList, but especially from DataCloud 2 and DataCloud 2.5 for the Self Organizing Principle. |
In 2006 the project was exhibited at the Swiss National Museum in Zürich. To me it was a succes because the visitors were discussing the material and theme of borders and globalization, and not the application itself :-)
In the beginning of 2007 a web demonstrator of the work was released. Acces to the research material however is limited because of it's sensitive nature, and for now only available in German.