The concept of You Over There is to embed a person in another cultural environment using live video and audio streams.
The idea I have in mind makes use of projectors , 2 X 2way mirrors ( 1.5’ x 4 – 5’) , speakers, etc. For this project I would make use of 2 live video streams per mirror ( 1 of the user for the web and another is of the environment to stream to the other video).

The live video will be projected onto a 2 way mirror which is backed with a screen of vellum, so that the video can be seen and wont pass through the mirror. The two mirrors will ideally be set up in two different locations with very different cultures but in similar environments such as parks or schools or bars etc.

I would also like to make a website for this project with all 4 live streams so other people can look and compare cultures.

Ideally to make this work I would have used 4 cameras and 4 computers for streaming but since that is not possible I will attempt to use 4 cameras and two computers ( 2 cameras per computer). I did some testing on what is possible and found the following:

- quick time broadcaster allows only one stream at a time
- made a copy of QT broadcaster and tried streaming 2 videos using the 2 qt broadcaster but all it did was hang my computer
- I installed wirecast and streamed one video using that and one video using qt broadcaster which worked pretty fine
- Only problem with the above is that wirecast is not free it costs $449 for a license .
- Shawn suggested using FMS to broadcast the videos which I will look into.

1) create an installation which shows live video streams from one part of the world to another and people can interact with other people some how.

- maybe have the live stream projected on a mirror so the person looking into it will be embedded in the stream.Also have a mirror at the other end? Some how i want to combine cultures using live web so people can experience different cultures.

So last week in class we were supposed to work on something using text marks.

Textmarks is a free sms service which allows you to text something to it and it ables you to pull it using php and do stuff with it. When you register with textmarks they give u an id and when you text something after the id to 41411 you can pull the message.

So Alberto came up with a cool idea where a user inputs the address where they are and where they want to go and an sms is sent to them with the exact time the train is coming to the closes station you have to go to. Kind of like the transit feature in google maps. After some research we found that it is not possible to scrape the google transit information and the New York MTA has not made the information public like other cities yet.

Therefore our idea was kind of put on hold till we find a better way to scrape the information we need. So i decided to give textmarks a try. I was trying the example from the class example.

Unfortunately i was not able to get it to work. I uploaded 4 files to the server:

- textmarks_phone.php ( which was to store in the text file the hex value for changing the color from the sms)

- textmarks_ex.php(the script used t pull the hex value from the text file and change the color, done using Ajax)

- textmarks.txt ( the text file to store the hex value)

- ajax.js

But the problem i kept getting was a URL error in ajax.js. I checked all the URLs and still same error. So im still working on it.