MUSE project tests corporate acceptance of community-rooted initiatives

The Mobile MUSE project is well underway testing various wireless technologies for possible use during the 2010 Vancouver Olympic Games, including its most recently announced initiative, the Digital Dragon Boat Race. The project looks forward to the mid-term when visitors to the city will almost all be carrying mobile digital devices capable of handling and sharing rich media files, and the potential opportunities to bring Vancouver’s communities together with private sector sponsors to create entertaining and educational applications. The boat race web site was launched April 29 at http://www.ddbr.ca. The Digital Dragon Boat Race, being spearheaded by Mobile MUSE, will provide visitors and residents this summer with the chance to collect clues by text message from various location in the community – in similar fashion to the well-recognized murmur project – and then use points they’ve collected to participate in a virtual dragon boat race during the annual Alcan Dragon Boat Festival. While the project bears more than a passing resemblance to the arts-driven murmur project – a curated archive of text-message accessible vignettes about a community’s history and culture, Mobile MUSE director David Vogt tells Canadian NEW MEDIA that the project is not so much high-culture-minded than as a way to bring large corporate sponsors together with community groups to create a new form of branded experience. While the initiative is a first step into the possibilities of using high-speed wireless bandwidth and converged devices, Vogt and his team already have an idea of how culture and commerce are likely to meet by the time 2010 rolls around. "The issue is, what do people really want to do with that? It’s not going to be watching The Simpsons on this device. Or, it’s not going to be getting Starbucks coupons. It’s going to be whole new forms of social engagement, social interaction, embedded into an urban environment in a particularly new way. It’s going to be aided by context awareness, which is we know where you are, we know who you’re with. We know what you’re trying to do, and your experience is going to be staged in a theatrical way according to those kinds of parameters," he says. Community partnerships to drive content, Vogt says, are going to be particularly important, and have played a role in all of the Mobile MUSE projects. In this case, researchers sought out content from groups in Vancouver’s Chinatown to populate the game, and connecting the initiative with the dragon boat festival should attract attention. The festival is the second largest in Vancouver’s large Chinese community after New Year’s. The project is also being assisted in by five industry associations, a consortium of researches and about a dozen small new media companies. "If we leave it to the Disneys of the world and the Starbucks of the world and the large telecom carriers, well, we know what we’ll expect. But, if we can find ways of getting community arts groups, individual streets, museums, cities themselves to start playing, then we can build this around concepts of community, and gathering. That’s where we’re coming from, and what we’re leveraging is that there are all kinds of major multinationals hunting in this environment already looking for new forms of presence. You can buy naming rights and branding rights on things and you can buy sponsorships, but in the long run, we’re moving into the experience economy." That work, short-lived as it has been to date, is already paying off, Vogt says. Mobile MUSE has launched four prototype projects involving wireless technologies including SMS, WAP, Wi-Fi and interaction with large public displays. "There isn’t a single one of our prototypes that hasn’t attracted strong business interest from it. In other words, each one of them is going to be sustainable, but also expandable, even though that wasn’t a requirement of the initial experiment. All I’m saying is, it’s clearly ready."

MUSE project tests corporate acceptance of community-rooted initiatives

Broadcast | May 13, 2005

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