Drifting Whispers: Let the wind bring you to me

Drifting Whispers is an interactive AR art experience to connect nomadic souls, where embodied AI selves drifting over digital winds driven by real climate data; forming an spatial-social network.

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Overview

What's the most important thing in nomadism? It's not the nomading, but the places where we choose to pause. Communities give us these moments of pause. In our project, Drifting Whispers, each individual becomes a soul drifting on digital winds driven by real-world weather conditions, scattering across the globe.

Memories made in these locations are as transient as the wind, but collective memories need a place to be engraved. In a word, we need a communal temple, a physical manifestation of our community that lasts beyond the virtual.

In Drifting Whispers, each city gives rise to a virtual community, a "city within a city." This virtual community is based on the actual geographical locations where the community has resided. Using AR technology, each community member can upload their whispers (intentions) to this city. Everyone can see this city and its happenings, as well as revisit the location of stories through their smartphones.

Even as everyone continues to drift away, this virtual city of community remains. It permanently engraves our collective memories.

Inspiration

As digital nomads of this era, we've established numerous pop-up cities around the world. In 2023, from Zuzalu in Montenegro, to Chiang Mai, and Istanbul, hundreds of people migrate like migratory birds, miraculously gathering in another part of the world.

  • Zuzalu: A pop-up city in Montenegro where two hundred people came together for two months to advance humanity, creating playgrounds at the intersection of technology, science, health, and social innovation, and fostering a global network of communities.
  • MuChiangmai: A developer-focused pop-up city in Chiang Mai, emphasizing healthy living, co-working, and co-building using blockchain and cryptographic solutions for real-life problems.
  • Zuconnect: A two-week popup village in Istanbul, where leading innovators in crypto, AI, governance, decentralized science, and culture unite to co-work, break down silos, and have fun.

Functionality

Drifting Whispers uses AR technology to create a mirage unique to each community. Everyone can participate in the construction of this virtual community through the upload of voice, text, video, and other multimedia. The virtual community aggregates all these materials into a sentient entity that remains imprinted above the corresponding city.

Whispers from non-community members drift according to real-world weather conditions.

Thermal Equilibrium: The virtual community needs interaction to persist. Each interaction within the community is written into the blockchain, and the gas fee from each interaction maintains the community's "heat". If there's no interaction for a certain period, the community will reach "thermal equilibrium" and eventually disappear from space.

Creation Process

Our team members are seasoned digital nomads who have participated in several coliving communities and have extensive experience serving pop-up geospatial communities. We've created mixed reality products at Zuzalu in Montenegro (Amber, https://twitter.com/reality_xyz), and a geographic treasure hunt game for our community in Istanbul (Jiang & Eggy, Istanbul Go).

In our discussions in Istanbul, we found that precious memories from all communities only exist in fragmented recollections and a few articles. As people migrate, ties to the land weaken, and the community's stories risk vanishing. So, we've combined our past community service experiences, collected feedback, and created a product that immortalizes the community in mixed reality.

Achievements

  • Permanently preserving a replica of our beloved communities.
  • Encouraging community members to interact based on geographic location, creating a visualized community spirit plaza.
  • Enhancing community cohesion and emotional connections among members.
  • Converting real-time voice into AR visual effects.

The Future of Drifting Whispers

  • Garner support among nomadic groups to form an interactive, temporal, and spatial nomadic network.
  • Improve the aesthetic experience of interaction.
  • Develop a personalized community database to enable seamless communication between the community and its members as an AI entity.
  • Based on established co-living communities, create permanent visualized mirages for them.

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