Today, Basheer Tome and I won the first Public Space Invitational, hosted by the City of Boston’s mayors office. We proposed a project called Rhodes and are excited to get started on it.

Rhodes is an outdoor life-size videoconference between public spaces in two otherwise disparate locations. Utilizing short throw projectors and webcams positioned at eye-level behind semi-transparent projection screens, we propose creating a lifesize video chat that is both low cost and realistic. Accessible to all who pass, Rhodes will simultaneously blend in with and stand out from the surroundings. Rhodes was borne out of two trends in real-time video transmission. First, realistic (i.e. life-sized, camera at eye level, etc) video conferencing remains prohibitively expensive and therefore out of the reach of most people. High-end tools such as Cisco’s Telepresence and Polycom’s RealPresence both retail for up to $100,000, rendering the technology inaccessible to all but those in corporate board rooms, where the technology often sits unused.

Second, there have been a flurry of recent interventions (artistic and commercial) that seek to link disparate communities through real time video. However, these are often either unidirectional, voyeuristic, and/or not accessible to the general public. A few recent examples include the “Hole to China” (2001), Stanford/MIT’s “Wormhole” (2011), and SNCF/TBWA Paris’ “Stick Your Head into Brussels” (2012). Closer to home, both Hollister (5th Avenue) and Forever 21 (Times Square) incorporated a live video element onto the facade of their flagship stores that opened in 2010.

Rhodes subverts both of these trends by providing a low-cost framework for interaction that is realistic, life-sized, and, importantly, equally accessible to parties on both sides of the screen. Rather that drawing attention to itself like John Ewing’s “Virtual Street Corners” (2010), Rhodes seeks to blend into its surroundings as much as possible. Our hypothesis is that over time individuals will become intrinsically drawn to the screen (possibly by recognizing the same commuters on the other side day after day) and this will result in a far more profound experience than if there was a sign telling all who passed to interact with the other side from the outset.

We seek to promote Rhodes as a connection to people at-large rather than a connection to a particular place. In doing so, we hope that New Yorkers don’t leave the experience thinking “wow, people in X city really aren’t that different” or “city Y is a place I’d like to visit”. Rather, we hope they think that “this random place that I am interacting with could literally be anywhere. How does that change the way I act in this world?” While we emphasize the banal and peripheral ambiguity of the space, there is no doubt that Rhodes can also serve as a rallying point for friends and family, as well as a site for meeting during major events, such as when the Red Sox win the World Series, on New Year’s eve, or even in the wake of tragedy. Through the creation of a shared space between two communities free of advertising gimmicks and media commentary that often influence our opinions of other places, Rhodes does not set out to “fix” anything. Rather, it is a framework for the public to discover for themselves, unleash their creativity in a new type of space, and draw their own conclusions.

Read the press release here.