Time travel | Concept | Brief | Ideas | Theory | Prototype |

Ideas

Researching and brainstorming ideas I began to funnel down to thinking more on the representation of time, its meaning and alternatives to traditional ways of representing it.

The follwing sketches describe some of my ideas trying to explore the matter.

Space-Time twister

If a given time is represented as a cross-section plane, moving and turning the continuation of time events one access different scales and ranges of time intuitively.

As a physical object the time events bar enables one to understand the continuation and the detail in one "grasp".

The idea for such came from my experiments with mapping video sequences from the form two dimensions in space through time to one dimension and time through another. Two samples of such experiments:

video1 (536kb)

video2 (804lb).

The right side is the original footage, and the left the "rotated" one. It is clearly visible, how only moving objects become visible, as they transverse in time through a vertical section of the image. The whole time period is visible in every frame, describing different slices of the space.

TopoScheduler

Instead of arranging the events in relative temporal scale topoScheduler arranges things according to their connections. Events that have causal links, things that have to be done before others are grouped in one time path, whereas others meander independently on their track of events.
Instead of trying to regulate or control the users time topoScheduler helps to find what is best to to at any given time.

SunDial

Two perpendicular bands of dynamic displays function as the interface to explore different cycles of our understanding of time. The horisontal band displays a level more detailed time than the vertical one, and to change the scale (from weeks and months to days and weeks for example), one has to turn the bands clockwise or counter-clockwise.

To advance to the next item of the current level, say days, one has to turn the horisontal band, and to go to the following same item, (the same day of the next week) one has to turn the vertical dial one step down.

SunDial displays simultaneously time in linear and cyclical fashion and enables easy exploration in the patterns of events in user's life.

Swarm Scheduler

Drawing ideas from the SOM (self-organising maps) -research done at the Helsinki University of Technology, the swarm model for a scheduler is looking at the interrelationships between the events in a scheduler. These may be temporal continuation, reocurring time cycles, similar activities, same people etc.

The organisation is manifested on a two dimensional surface as clusters of events, all being weighted against each other and drawn towards the most similar ones.

Especially in terms of group schedules, this kind if approach might reveal some interesting interrelationships between the events. Relationships that are not visible on a surface level at all.