The system

Two teams of specialists prepare the terrain :

1. A production team survey a delimited territory and gather audiovisual fragments which reveal the specific characteristics of this space : details, portraits, fictional elements… Emphasis is placed on the uniqueness of the viewpoint and on the intensity of the relation with the reality.
See how we did it in Geneva.

2. The collected images and sounds are indexed and assigned to a geographical location on a digital map by the team of editors. Each audiovisual fragment constitutes an asset which will be indexed according to objective and subjective attributes. Our editing engine and web services will then make the “magic” to create a meaningful and surprising movie.

It is at this point that the public enters the scene and can use the system :

Equipped with an iPhone (personal or borrowed) and the WE app', visitors wander through the urban space. They hear in real time the soundtrack of the film which they are walking and watch the editing process taking place on the smartphone interface. Their trajectory will “awaken” the existing images and link them together…

Once the walk is complete, the visitors, now become viewers, can watch “their trajectories translated into films” on the internet site and can share them. Each generated film makes it possible to (re)immerse oneself into the “digital memory” of the urban space.

The tools

Where the iPhone becomes a wePhone
Where the shoot is replaced by the walk
Where the film is the fruit of chance and determination
Where the publication of successive walks traces the lines of an invisible city.

To make the project work, we have developed the following tools :

1. A Digital Asset Management system to manage and leverage the data and metadata for mobile use: a web application called Memoways. This is the principal work interface through which any content producer can control both the geolocalisation and the logic for the possible interconnections between the assets.
For more information see the Key Concepts of the Memoways application.

2. The editing engine. It is an algorithm developed to perform automatically an edit based on a set of variables (localisation, speed, thematic and user scenario coherence…). The editing engine lives “in” the WE app on the iPhone and performs “live” to filter in a meaningful way the pre-existing content to the user / walker.
For more information see the Editing Engine page.

3. Software for smartphone. For the moment we are working only on a iOS based software, but are looking forward to develop also for Android smartphones. Our iPhone app' is coming, try it out !

4. Web services and API’s. To get data and metadata from the server to the smartphone, to deliver the final movie on a web page or a mobile device, we build up a range of API’s and web services that are the “glue” and the “bridges” between the data / metadata and the user.