The Mercury Project

The Mercury Project,
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The Mercury Project
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Mercury Project combined robotics and archaeology in an interactive art installation. To our knowledge, the Mercury Project was the first system that allowed WWW users to remotely view and alter the real world via tele-robotics. Users excavated artifacts buried in a sand-filled terrarium in our laboratory in Los Angeles. All buried artifacts were derived from an unnamed 19th Century text which provided a meta-commentary on science and the Internet. Users were challenged to collectively identify this text by describing their findings and hypotheses in an ongoing Operator's Log.