David Vogt's Drift on Mobile Cultural Experience

I founded and continue to lead the MobileMuse.ca Network so it might be worthwhile to know a little about my mobile motivations, and about what inspires the Network's mission for mobile media innovation at the frontiers of culture.

At different times I've been a cancer researcher, astronomer, observatory director, science museum director, and dot.com CEO.  Beyond Muse, I currently champion a set of very exciting applied R&D projects in learning technologies at the University of British Columbia while leading a couple of start-up companies and contributing to a few public and private boards.  The only subjects I'm close to being an expert on are prehistoric stone circles (the Stonehenges of the world) and Native American cosmological creation myths. My most intimate connection with mobile technologies is that I commute by bicycle everywhere, all year.

MobileMuse.ca was conceived a few years ago while I was Chief Research Officer at the now-defunct New Media Innovation Centre in Vancouver.  I was close enough to the innovation engines of large and small media technology companies to realize how difficult it is for them to deal with product development involving the mysteries of human behaviour. Unqualified inspiration and fear rule this innovation game.  Traditional corporate and academic settings can’t synthesize the variety of passions and perspectives necessary to successfully pioneer technology opportunities within emergent areas of human experience.  And ‘mobile media’ is clearly such an area - I happen to believe it will be more significant to the future of humanity than the Internet, television and other media. All of the raw ingredients for mobile media innovation are available in Vancouver, and I figured I knew an original recipe, so the table was set.

Another driver for Muse is 2010.   While network infrastructure on this continent is far from cutting edge, there’s a deeply embedded relationship with media that’s absolutely ready to burst out onto the streets.  And Vancouver was fortunate enough to win the 2010 Winter Olympic Games – the biggest media event on the planet.  It’s extremely rare when an R&D initiative can ride a market development timeline coupled to a destination that is so obvious and provocative.  The Olympics are transforming from a broadcast to an Internet paradigm and 2010 will almost certainly be the tipping point.  We know that millions of people coming to Vancouver, and billions connecting to them across the globe, will all be holding some kind of device in their hand that will enable them to access, capture, share, edit and publish HDTV-quality media interactions within a pervasive, wireless, broadband network.  Yet the critical question is not what those devices will look like or what the networks will do, it is “what will people want to do with these media?”   It isn’t about information, communications or even entertainment – it is about experience, culture and community.  The design and staging of mobile, media-rich, urban, shared experience (Mobile MUSE) became a mission of Olympian proportion.

So the MobileMuse.ca Network was formed to leverage innovation assets against the 2010 opportunity in order to realize the commercial and community potentials of fundamentally new forms of social interaction and cultural engagement within the mobile media space.  My voice in this blog will be describing how we do that, what we're discovering and where we're going next.  Please enjoy, reflect and respond.