Pigeon and urban computing

A long time before Beatriz Da Costa's blogging pigeon, Dr. Julius Neubronner patented, in 1903 a miniature pigeon camera activated by a timing mechanism. Equipped with the cameras, the pigeons photographed a castle in Kronberg, Germany, around 1908.

(Photographs courtesy of Deutsches Museum, Munich)

More recently, Terraswarm Brooklyn Pigeon Project also deployed that trick as "an effort to confront the limits of this grid by creating an equally rich disclosure of the city from the vantage point of a flock of pigeons." Benjamin Aranda, one of the author of this project gives more details in that interview. Why do I blog this? documenting the intersection between two fields I'm interested in: urban computing on one side and "new interaction partners" (or the participation of animals in social computing) on the other. Plus, it's always fun to trace back the beginning of s-curves (new interaction partners in that case).