Last week I had a chance to check out CityWall – a public, interactive screen at Helsinki's Lasipalatsi. It's a multi-touch installation very much along the lines popularised by the film Minority Report and pioneered by Jeff Han. However, it is not based on FTIR, but "designed from the ground up to work outside in daylight", said John Evans, member of the UIx project group of the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology HIIT.

Their project website explains the principles, so I won't get into that. Another blogpost at Playpen is also good read. What cuts it for me, is the social and public aspect of their work. The content is drawn from Flickr, namely what's labeled under tag "Helsinki", will be fetched onto the CityWall to be accessed by the crowds, on-site in the city centre. This is the approach I love about it – tapping into the "user-generated content", bringing it into a relevant context and having an advanced physical interface to play with

Of course CityWall is a work of such a nature, that it can hardly be without glitches at this point. It's truly enjoyable only in the nighttime, so go now, the summer's white nights take over as we speak.

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Update 29.5.2007

Somehow missed it on the first sweep, but lewism.org has also blogged about CityWall. Check out the comments below. Thanks to him I just found an interesting service Tagzania. O-ou, does it never stop…