Pigeon-guided tours
We really can't decide if the Urban Eyes project is really innovative or really lame. It won third prize in the Fused Space competition and uses CCTV cameras, pigeons and RFID
tags in birdseed to provide a different view of the city. It works like this: you go buy a bag of birdseed with some RFID tags mixed in (don't worry, the pigeons are unharmed by this addition) and feed it to some birds. These birds then fly around the city and activate whatever CCTV cameras they get close to via RFID, with all the video being uploaded to a URL printed on the seed bag. On the one hand, this is a new way to view and personalize the city. You're tracking your very own adopted pigeon and watching it wherever it goes (for the 12 hours or so it takes for the seed to pass through the birds system), getting a pigeon-guided tour of the city. On the other hand, the same effect could be had by flipping through a bunch of CCTV camera feeds, without the limitations of only seeing the places one particular pigeon has gone. It'd be pretty lame if you fed the thing on 59th
street and it never went anywhere other than 59th street wouldn't it?