Activity Wallpaper , by research assistant at the Viktoria Institute (Sweden) Tobias Skog, explores how a place can get an electronic “memory” of how it is inhabited: how people move around, socialize, make noise or spend time there.

Their activity data are collected using sensors, and an interpretation of the data is then projected in the form of an ambient visualization.

The prototype analyzes audio from a cafe, accounting for various characteristics of the current activity level, such as the number of people speaking or the amount of background noise. The more the color diverts from the background, the noisier the cafe. The number of “dots” in each row represents the crowd, so that the more dots, the bigger the crowd was at that point.

With a look at the projection, patrons can see how the activity level at the caf頨as fluctuated over the week.

Related Loop.ph flocked wallpaper and Not-So-White Walls.