Seven Mile Boots - Implications of an Everyday Interface Martin Pichlmair Vienna Technical University Favoritenstrasse 9-11/187 1040 Vienna ++43 1 5880 187-33 pi@igw.tuwien.ac.at ABSTRACT With seven-league boots through the Internet - when you take a stroll through the physical world in this wireless LAN footwear, you might meet people who happen to be spending some time in a chat-room. Their virtual conversations are made audible as spoken text coming out of the boots. The piece Seven Mile Boots augments reality by introducing a new layer of communication to an everyday task: spoken chat. Virtual crowds are met equipped with an intentionally basic interface. Categories and Subject Descriptors J.5 [Arts and Humanities]: Fine arts, Performing arts; H5.5. [Information interfaces and presentation (e.g., HCI)]: Sound and Music Computing; General Terms Design, Human Factors KEYWORDS Wireless Art, Interactive Art, Presence, Augmented Reality, Flanêur, Space. 1. INTRODUCTION The internet of today is a space of realtime communication. Internet Relay Chat (IRC), AOL Instant Messaging, ICQ, and Web based chat systems show that. Numerous other resources for exchange of personal communication exist. Weblogs are the latest hype for publishing personal information. The assumption of the internet as a collaborative tool for thinking seems as wrong as the view of the internet as a network of corporate marketing. Together with instant messaging applications, IRC transforms the internet to what it always was intended to be: a network of social interaction. Realtime communication often works on a physical layer: sound waves and light waves. It incorporates traditional codes of communication. We all learn how to interpret spoken language. Most of us learn how to interpret written texts. The act of interpretation of arbitrary signs is a very basic, everyday habit. We collaborate and understand on base of the signs we read around us, on base of interaction with our environment. Our notion of being constitutes itself along the lines of experiencing the world. A text - like any content - can be transcribed from one medium to the other: poems, plays and fairy tales lend themselves best to be read aloud. This transformation between media highlights certain aspects of a text and shadows others. Qualitative features of such a transformation also affect the content just like the act of reading does. Still, the heart of a story stays the same over different media. It is possible to tell the story of little red riding hood in written, spoken as well as e.g. drawn form. This central content is often referred to as the narrative [10]. The Seven Mile Boots are an interactive art piece that allows its wearer to walk through the internet. Once the boots are put on they instantly go online via a wireless network. Taking some strides the wearer walks simultaneously in the real, physical world and in virtual reality. Every few steps she crosses the border between two chat rooms, encountering new people online. If they happen to chat while she is in the same room, she will hear their chatter through speakers built into the boots. Thus, the wearer is turned into a flanêur, a data-dandy walking the net. 1.1. Spatiality and Presence as experience of our hybrid reality Our experience of space has changed seriously during history. While earlier means of transport like trains lead to a "panoramic" view of space, today's individual transport and communication systems emphasise the notion of presence. Space is what gathers around us as individuals. Space is not only what is physically there but also the invisible, the technically conveyed. We manifest ourselves on several different layers of reality: we are in a certain spot as individuals in the world while we are a node in the global GSM network at the same time. We are not only local but also localizable. We leave a footprint in the memory of communication networks. The whole concept of space can be read in terms of the presence of networks consisting of nodes and their relations. Seven League Boots are a footwear that appears in several fairy tales. The boots allow the wearer to take great strides - seven leagues each step. The installation Seven Mile Boots opens the door to parallel existence. While the user wears the boot, she exists in several networks at the same time - in several social spaces. She experiences an augmented reality as different layers Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. MM05, November 6-11, 2005, Singapore. Copyright 2005 ACM 1-59593-044-2/05/0011$5.00.