The Urban Cursor Project at Festival Ingràvid

I have an intense fascination with how places and things look from far above, which may partly explain why I absolutely love this installation created by Danish designer Sebastian Campion.

Visitors to Figueres, Catalunya during the Ingràvid cultural festival were pleasantly surprised by a 3 dimensional oversized computer cursor. It’s called the Urban Cursor  and it’s not just some snazzy design for you to sit your tush down on, it’s integrated with online – in an effort to get the people to explore the link between our physical and digital lives.

With an embedded GPS device, the cursor transmitted geographic coordinates to a website. The cursor had wheels on the bottom and could be moved around by participants. Then on the website the coordinates were mapped in Google Maps, documenting the cursor's travels and making it possible for participants to see how they moved the object around.

Participants could also upload photographs to the website. These were then automatically placed on the map by matching the photograph’s digital time stamp with GPS coordinates. A seriously cool idea indeed!