I’m just back from a trip to Japan. Two weeks I was gone away. I plan to write up a review of all the tech I used when over there. But one of the most fascinating parts of my trip was seeing that in the two weeks I was gone, Dublin City Council managed to launch and close the Portal between Dublin and New York. Today, I overheard a tourist wondering if they were near it (they weren’t), and I broke the bad news to them. Little did I know that around the time I was talking to them, the Portal actually reopened.
In an effort to overcome what I described to the tourists as “us taking the piss”, the Portal will operate between 11am and 9pm here in Ireland. That’s 6am and 4pm in New York.
Blurring has also been implemented to overcome the piss-taking. If people get too close to the Portal, i.e. close enough to show stuff on their phones, the Portal gets blurred both here and over in New York.
My personal opinion is that shutting it down was largely an overreaction. Once the novelty wears off and the news stops talking about people grinding on the Portal, it’ll settle into what the creator, Benediktas Gylys, wants it to be: “As humans we are creating the Portals experience together. I invite local communities not only to enjoy but to care about their Portals and how other community members are approaching the sculptures”.