servant atrium: The lab that lets you experiment from home

Sunday, July 22, 2012

The lab that lets you experiment from home

Richard Fisher, technology features editor

(Image: David Parry/PA Wire/Press Association Images)

In the basement of the Science Museum in London, there?s an orchestra played by ghosts. Drums, marimbas and cymbals play all day and all night. The music is occasionally pleasant, sometimes discordant, and certainly eerie if you are in the room listening to it.

The ghosts are actually real people, based all over the world, connected to the exhibition via the web. This ?Universal Orchestra? is part of an exhibition in London designed by Google, called Web Lab. The aim is to illuminate the workings of the ephemeral digital world by giving it some tangibility and physical heft.

Visitors to the museum can play with five interactive experiments, from the orchestra to a robot arm that draws their face in sand. But so can anybody, from anywhere in the world. Visit Google?s Web Lab website and you join a queue to control the actual experiments from afar. Cameras and microphones monitor the responses to what you do.

Program a few notes on the website, for example, and the robots of the Universal Orchestra will smash drums and plink cymbals inside the museum. Listen carefully, and you can even hear the fragments of conversations and laughter of people in the exhibit at the time, acting as both audience and fellow musicians.

In another experiment, Sketchbot, you can upload your face via a webcam - or via a camera if you?re inside the museum - and a robot arm will draw a version of your mug on a surface of sand. This one provides a small taste of the coming ?Internet of Things?, where our objects and possessions will be wired up to the internet, enabling us to control them from afar.

A third exhibit arguably works better on the web than it does in the museum. Called Data Tracer, it allows people to search for an image, and see whereabouts on the vast network of cables and servers that image actually resides. On a map of the world, you see the path the image takes to reach your screen, be it from Chicago or Sydney. In the exhibit, that map is mounted on the wall, but web visitors see a dynamic animation.

The experiments combine to bring some welcome physicality to the internet and the idea of the digital cloud, where our photos, music and digital possessions are increasingly stored. It can sometimes be easy to forget or take for granted that the internet is a physical network of cables and servers, connecting actual places and people.

While some of the exhibits in Web Lab can occasionally be buggy and tricky to comprehend, the exhibition will improve over time. Google decided to launch the project in ?beta?, as it does with many of its web products. That means any flaws will be worked out the more people visit - both physically and digitally.

Web Lab runs at the Science Museum in London until 20 June 2013