Mediated Spaces, Inc. creates new ways to learn, play, discover, and remember. We link the real and virtual worlds, using imagination and pervasive computing. We do this without creating Skinner-esque rewards: rather, by using the power of networks to make interactions relevant and valuable, users collectively answer challenging questions or solve difficult problems.

Mediated Spaces was founded in 2008, focusing on location-aware mobile application development. Before every project, we define our questions. At the start, the questions are simple. After a walk in Prospect Park, the first question was: what bird is that? And now that I've seen it, how to I log it? The resulting WildLab application won first runner-up in the NAVTEQ Global Challenge in 2008.

In 2009, the company received a MacArthur Foundation Digital Media and Learning grant to create an educational version of the application. Since launching in late October, over 230 students in New York City classrooms have logged well over one thousand bird sightings.

Another question we started with: what are the stars above my head? The Skymap was launched in 2008, and won the grand prize in uLocate's WHERE developer challenge in 2008. It rapidly grew to hundreds of thousands of pageviews. Since then, Google has launched their own Skymap, which we highly recommend!

Our work has been exhibited at Chelsea Art Museum, the Sony Wonder Tech Lab, Eyebeam, the Museum of Contemporary Art (Genova, Italy), the Los Angeles Center for Digital Art, Rockefeller Center, the University of British Columbia, and others.

One question we are discussing now is: how do we scale our WildLab project in schools without sacrificing some of the rigor of the inquiry-based program? Also, how do we incorporate sensor data about the environment, and what databases should we talk to so that the questions, and scientific analysis, remain well-informed and robust? We are currently re-building some of our services with a more scalable architecture, and prototyping sensor applications. For more information, see the project Web sites, or see us at a conference!