Berkeley team produces trashcan that projects its contents

2005-02-22 18:51:34
And now the latest from the trash-tech beat: The Urban Atmospheres team at Berkeley, which studies the interaction of people and their environment in urban areas, is running a project called “Jetsam” that “explores urban public trash, its meaning, patterns, and usage.” While we wouldn’t mind learning more, it sounds like it would be kind of hard to participate in the research without, well, getting kinda dirty. So, we were pleased to learn that the Jetsam team has come up with a prototype for an “augmented trashcan,” which can project images of its innards onto the sidewalk. The can captures a picture of each piece of trash as it enters, and adds it to a collage of its contents, creating a constantly changing array that spreads out over the ground in front of it. We’d like to see more of these; somehow, we suspect that people might think twice about some of the things they toss if they knew that they would become part of an instant public art display.