Find web pages of nearby places based on GPS coordinates

Web-Enhanced GPS by Ramaswamy Hariharan , John Krumm and Eric Horvitz, a paper presented at Location- and Context-Awareness: First International Workshop, LoCA 2005.

Location-based services like reminders, electronic graffiti, and tourist guides normally require a custom, location-sensitive database that must be custom-tailored for the application at hand. This deployment cost reduces the initial appeal of such services. However, there is much location-tagged data already available on the Web which can be easily used to create compelling location-aware applications with almost no deployment cost. Such tagged data can be used directly in applications as well as to provide evidence in models of activity. We describe three applications that take advantage of existing Web data combined with location measurements from a GPS receiver. The first application, Pinpoint Search, finds web pages of nearby places based on GPS coordinates, queries from a Web mapping service, and general Web searches. The second application, XRay, uses the mapping service to find businesses in a building by pointing a GPS-equipped electronic compass at the building. The third application is called Travelogue, and it builds a map and clickable points of interest to help automatically annotate a trip based on GPS coordinates. Finally, we discuss the use of Web-based data as rich sources of evidence for probabilistic models of a users activity, including a means for interpreting the explanation for the loss of Web signals as users enter structures.

Why do I blog this? because there seems to be intriguing usage of GPS here and because I'm curious to see the outcomes of the potential application describes at the end.

GPS-based mobile drawing game

Via the locative mailing.list: "N8Spel" a project by Just van den Broecke for the Waag Society. It's actually a GPS-based mobile drawing game for the Amsterdam Museum Night.

Teams would go into the city where they compete on who would (geo)draw the most beautiful “8″ by walking with a GPS and a mobile phone. They could embellish their drawings with photo’s and video’s taken and submitted on the spot. The competitive element was creativity with both the drawing and the media. All submitted media were tagged to the geographic locations where they were taken. The player’s movements, tracks and media could be followed in real-time through a webbrowser

Here is a screenshot of the game

The technical description of the game is described here

Why do I blog this? well with some folks in geneva we were thinking about something like this, using a google map! In this case, I like the idea of "embellish their drawings with photo’s and video’s taken and submitted on the spot" which is an added layer on top of the GPS drawing.

Mikel Maron's Locative Animal Project

Mikel Maron's presentation of his contribution for the Open Plan workshop is very insightful and original. I like his 'locative animal' concept very much:

My [Mikel Maron] angle in my application to the Workshop was Locative Animals. Nothing much happened on this, but I did get to meet a researcher with similar interests, Shaun Lawson. Here's the blurb I submitted on Locative Animals.

My interest in Locative Arts has been somewhat on the fringes of the predominantly urban, socially focused arts projects. The natural world is under ever greater stresses, and these technologies, usually employed to buffer nature, can and have been effectively used to raise awareness of the non-human world and give it a voice. The idea of over saturation of technology has been parodied by projects like "Augmented Animals", though in reality new communication modes are being employed by wildlife researchers to track elephants and reindeer by SMS and GPS. I've been gathering various resources on spatial technology and spatial understanding in animals under the moniker "Locative Animals" [http://del.icio.us/mikel_maron/locativeanimals/]. Nature is not seperate from urban experience, though most city dwellers would not be that aware of the populations living in their midst. Sensing and tracking of wild fuana and flora in urban environments could raise awareness of wildlife in a tangible, positive way. Bird watchers are particularly active and independent; tools to bridge individual bird monitoring into larger situated databases and patterns could be another interesting application of the technology. Another interesting area is Porton Downs, site of much controversial chemical testing, but due to the lack of intensive human activity, also home to many rare species that have disappeared from the rest of the UK. If access is be attained, artistic investigations of nature on this site would be potentially very insightful. This concept grows out of my interest in spatial models of ecosystems, and spatial niches. Birds may not be able to navigate human buildings that competently, but they can migrate to precise locations over 1000s of miles, with senses evolved for the purpose. In other words, a map is only one (and sometimes inferior) way to get around. The Nottingham Jubilee Campus was a pretty successful brownfield restoration, melding natural and urban fabric.

What about using locative media to give people a background awareness of animal life in urban environments?!

Boring Location Based Services part2.

Last monday, I had a quick discussion with Russell Buckley from Mobhappy about the small amount of LBS that are really interesting and customer/user oriented. I already commented on his previous post about boring LBS (which triggered a good discussion with Roger from Kaywa). Then Russell posted a good note after that I sent him the poor scenarios Intel envisioned for his LBS services (GPS augmented by WiFi): "the technology could be used, for example, to alert you if your dog leaves the yard, to decide which printer on a network is most efficient for a pending print job, or to determine the shortest route to an emergency exit in a building". Russell summarized the two ways of innovating (and lively debate in lots of places :) ): techno-push ("invent something cool and clever and hope there'll be a use for it") and market-pull ("look at user behaviour, identify a problem and then look to invent something that'll solve it"). Currently LBS are exactly at the point where both approaches are used and not-so-many compelling applications came up. Of course there are specific niche market in which LBS has been successful but clearly in terms of mass-market nothing emerged. Maybe non-mobile LBS like google maps (and all the corollary mash-ups) are the most advanced applications. In addition, games and art installation + map hacking/geowanking are great too but what's next? We're all working (struggling?) on it.

Julian Bleecker on dislocation

Californian cool cat Julian Bleecker wrote a very interesting piece about what he calls dislocation: the "ways in which various forms of (mostly electronic) communications/networking social infrastructures make tectonic, geographical alterations on the landscape". This is meant to appear in a book about locative media edited by Jeremy Hight.

... some of the ways that certain spatial practices related to some technologies are changing how we operate in space. Specifically, the way VoIp shifts the practice of telephony from place-specific to place-agnostic (area-code assignment, Skype from plane or Vonage from plane). There's no one way to read this shift, other than to say it is emblematic of practice-in-transition. This was anticipated by cell phones and is tied to the relationship between location and motility. The relationship being that location is "ours" in the case of this practice. We decide from where we telephone and how to represent where we are when we telephone. In the primary case, it was such with the portable handset evolving in degree to the VOIP systems, with cellular telephony in between (as well as more sophisticated DIY call-forwarding schemes, one of which got a colleague at Data General reprimanded for configuring his phone to call-forward to his parents house so he could avoid the toll charges.) This topic also relates to the challenge of anonymity at a time during which resources are committed to surveillance and intelligence gathering. The gangster calling from an "outside phone" is working against the agents who's task it is to trace and record and locate the originators and recipients of telephone calls.

Why do I blog this? I like this concept very much and I think it's a new 'technosocial situation', i.e. a new technologically-mediated social orders (= Erving Goffmans’ theory of social situation : isomorphism between physical space and social situation). This concept comes from Mizuko Ito and Daisuke Okabe's paper Technosocial Situations: Emergent Structurings of Mobile Email Use. Julian's article also connects this dislocation concept with locative media projects.

Intel working on an indoor GPS

According to this yahoo news, Intel is working on an indoor GPS:

The company recently presented its precision-location project as a possible solution to the shortcomings of a global positioning system in an indoor setting. Using wireless networks and fixed access points, a laptop computer can triangulate its own position in relation to other devices in the office.

Yet another GPS augmented with WiFi...

Location-based messages: socialight

socialight is a new location-based service (beta version currently, it actually started out as an academic project at ITP in early 2004):

Socialight is a mobile phone and web based platform that allows users to create and share location-based messages called StickyShadows™. Socialight's mobile and web tools give you access to location-based media on your mobile and on the web.

StickyShadows are virtual multimedia sticky notes that you create using your mobile phone or this web site. A StickyShadow is made up of media, such as text and a picture, and information about who can see it and when and where it's available. The best way to learn about StickyShadows is by creating and using them. Want to to create one now?

An interesting poster about it is available here. The website also provides a good description of what the messages are.

Are location-based services boring?

A very relevant blogpost by Russell Buckley on Mobhappy adresses an important fact in the 'location-based services' world: there is little user-centered application that really worth it. Russell exemplifies this thanks to four services supported by BT:

• Child and elderly people tracking: founded on two basically wrong assumptions (in the distressing case of an abduction, the kidnapper doesn't know that the phone can be tracked. The first thing they do unfortunately, is dump or switch off the phone + the second assumption is that such services track the child. They don't. They track the phone) + Old people tracking? For the life of me, I can't see why the elderly might consent to be tracked or why others might want to track them
• Traffic and directions: can be useful, in extremis. But hardly exciting.
• Find my nearest things like ATM's, supermarkets and Petrol/Gas stations: Find my nearest apps have been around for a while now and frankly, there isn't much a demand for them
• Employee spying (actually they call it "tracking")

I also like his conclusion about BT's services:

So while it's laudable that BT are deploying LBS, they really need to go back to basics and ask why anyone would want to use any of these services, at least on more than an occasional basis. But coming up with answers to this, probably needs a type of creativity that would not typically be found working in a large corporate like BT.

Why do I blog this? I think that Russell raised here a crux issue: location-based services are way too much technology driven and 'feature oriented' as if engineers had struggled to find potential uses for a new feature that could be embedded on a cell phone. An interesting point here is the relation between the activity people and the spatial dimension. Location-based services allow users to get some context-awareness (i.e. take advantage of spatiality to trigger specific events or give contextual information) and to use space as help people in their task (navigation/wayfinding, matchmaking). But who needs that? ok wayfinging support or serendipituous meeting is intriguing but would it be used? I don't want to play the party pooper here but I am not sure it will work like this.

Anyway that does not mean that LBS are overflawed, useless and bound to disappear. I'd rather think that it can be targeted for:

• niche-markets for which space is important and, above all, meaningful: firefighters/emergency crew/army (who may need decentralized control obtained thanks to location-awareness of others), dispatchers/logistics (?)...
• games: a new way to create original challenges and/or interactions
• interactive art
• what else?!

Applications of ontologies in the field of pervasive computing

"Smart Artifacts as a Key Component of Pervasive Games" by Michal Roj (workshop paper for the Workshop on Gaming Applications in Pervasive Computing Environments 2004).

In this paper we present how smart artifacts can become a crucial element in pervasive games. In our vision, ‘magical’ artifacts play two roles: first, they are very attractive game gadgets (such as magic wands), second, they are able to handle the game (implementing the main game logic). We claim that in some cases no infrastructure would be needed to play a game. Artifacts, as we present here, are carried by players (or lying somewhere in the game area) and communicating through a wireless network. The vision has been inspired by a number of ideas and ongoing projects on smart devices and middleware platforms.

Why do I blog this? Michal is interested in by applications of ontologies in the field of pervasive computing, and, in a wider view, applications of ontologies in telecommunications. The topic of his PhD thesis is: “A methodology for ontology-driven programming artifacts in pervasive computing”. Even though his research is more related to architectural concerns

Mologogo: a free application for GPS enabled cell phones

Mologogo is a new and free application meant to track stuff/persons (alpha service):

"Mod a GPS enabled Nextel and fauxjack yourself or your car, or your kid, or a big dog, or an elephant. We really, really want to track an elephant. Mologogo is a free service that will track a "friends" GPS enabled cell phone from another phone(gps not required) or on the web. It currently works on pretty much any Nextel phone with Java and GPS - even a $60 no-contract Boost Mobile phone. Mologogo is totally "alpha" right now, but improving rapidly. It is was built as a Web 2.0 app, so expect integration with sites like Flickr, Upcoming.org, Judy's book, and lots more RubyOnRails/AJAX-y goodness added to our UI. And with our soon to be released API, you'll be able to access your own location data in other sites."

Technorati Tags: mologogo

Placecasting

Via fredhouse, another neologism: placecasting:

'placecasting': networked publishing of digital media (esp. audio) that is logically associated with a physical location, to be experienced by suitably equipped people in that location.

fredhouse gives the example of the work did at Mobile Bristol (for instance this paper). Previously we refered to this concept by location-based annotations (be it a written postit/message or an audio note).

Of course, this lead me to type 'placecasting' in google, then I stumbled across this placecasting.com website which is just an appetizer:

Placecasting: Broadcast anywhere. Experience anytime.

Let's talk about • Podcasts • Vidcasts • Webcasts • Gamecasts? Making them, getting them, living with them.

Stay tuned for more info.

Ok we'll stay tuned ;)

Beta version of platial

Finally, there is now a beta version of the platial platform I mentioned few weeks ago.

Platial enables anyone to find, create and use meaningful maps of Places that matter to them. We hope it can connect people, neighborhoods, cities and countries through a citizen-driven common context that goes beyond geopolitical boundaries.

What is interesting is they way the designer came up with this idea of collaborative atlas:

The specific concept for building an online, shared mapping tool came after Di-Ann and I had moved to Amsterdam in 2004. We encouraged a lot of people to come visit. (...) We made them maps, like everyone does, of the basic neighborhood amenities. (...) We ended up with a kitchen drawer stuffed full of these notes. It was our collection of Places, plus menus for take out, magazine articles listing kid friendly museums, schedules of parades, and a few brochures and tour books for attractions that seemed interesting enough. A few maps got lost, loaned out or recombined, others got photocopied or emailed or taped to front doors as invitations. Then we moved back to the United States, and that drawer of Places lost its context, it became useless in Portland. We wanted a way to preserve all that knowledge in a powerful, useful, contextual way. We started asking my friend Jake about the technology side of building something to address this, and discovered he'd been working on, and thinking through some of the same issues

Why do I blog this? I like this idea and their tagline is quite straightforward: "Find the Places you always hoped existed - Your Collaborative Atlas - Create the maps you always wanted to share". It's actually a new step in the 'annotation of space' kinds of applications which will grow up thanks to the users' contributions.

Best estimation of a node position taking into consideration the economic viability of a wireless sensor

(via), An interesting idea for building effective LBS/positioning services is developed by Jagoba Arias Pérezfrom University of the Basque Country in Bilabo. As described on his webpage:

each node has to have very low costs, both in its design and in its production. The most important advantage of this type of network is that of duplication: with so many sensors participating in the operation of the network, if one fails, another will fulfil the function until the failed item can be replaced.(...) a new algorithm for finding the position of the nodes is put forward and developed. To this end, the distances separating the nodes are utilised. However, given that each sensor has to be very economic, the quality of measurement of these distances is not expected to be high and, consequently, location errors appear. Thus, the algorithm proposed here attempts to calculate the best estimate of the node position, in the knowledge that the distances involved have errors.

This will hence enable each node to automatically compute its own location and then aid in fixing a position.

Location- and Context-Awareness (LoCA) 2006

LoCA 2006in cooperation with Pervasive 2006, 10-11 May 2006, IBM Dublin:

Building on the success of LoCA 2005, we seek technical papers describing original, previously unpublished research results. Areas of interest include, but are not limited to:

* Sensing of user location and context * Inferencing schemes for context awareness * Location and context representation, management, and distribution * Analysis of user mobility and context * Privacy and sharing of location and context information * User and case studies of location- and context-aware systems

Submission deadline: 5 December 2005

Why do I blog this? maybe a bit technical but...

Locative Media event (2006)

An Open Plan event is scheduled for July 2006 in Manchester:

The final exhibition and conference of PLAN - The Pervasive and Locative Arts Network will take place in Manchester during July 2006 as a part of the Futuresonic 2006 festival. PLAN is currently developing the scope and format of the exhibition, and the PLAN Technology Workshop in October will feed into this planning.

The PLAN Exhibition will showcase new concepts in pervasive and locative media, with a focus on large scale public experiences that communicate the possibilities and research challenges to a broad audience. The exhibition will form part of an art festival, but is anticipated to include social, political and scientific projects as well as projects where the aims are primarily aesthetic or about audience participation. Further details on the scope and focus of the exhibition will be available after the PLAN Technology Workshop during October.

Knowing where you walk to

From the Ubicomp 2005 demos, there is this extremely cool feature:

GETA SANDALS: KNOWING WHERE YOU WALK TO by Shun-yuan Yeh, Keng-hao Chang, Chon-in Wu, Okuda Kenji, Hao-hua Chu (National Taiwan University)

The GETA sandals are Japanese wooden sandals embedded with location tracking devices. By wearing them, the GETA sandals can track anywhere a user walks to. The GETA sandals work both in the indoor and outdoor environments. The motivation for the GETA sandals is to create a location system that needs minimum infrastructural setup and support in the environment, making it easy for deployment in everyday environments. In our system, a user simply has to wear the GETA sandals to enable his/her location tracking. This is in contrast to most of the current indoor location systems based on WiFi or ultrasound, which need to setup access points, fixed transmitters and receivers in the environment. The GETA sandals track a user’s location using a footprint-based method. The footprint-based method uses location sensors installed underneath the GETA sandals to continuously measure the displacement vectors formed between the left and right sandals along a trail of advancing footprints. By progressively adding up these displacement vectors, the GETA sandals can calculate the user's current location anytime anywhere. Although the footprint-based method has the advantage of being a mobile and wearable location tracker, it has a drawback of accumulative error over distance traveled. To address this problem, the footprint based method is combined with a light RFID infrastructure to correct its positioning error over some fixed distance.

There is just this picture which is not quite informative:

Capture the Flag game using cell phones

Sunday evening's paper: Capture the Flag: A Multiplayer Online Game for Phone Users by Adrian David Cheok, Sze Lee Teo, Lei Cao, Le Nam Thang (for the ISWC05 conference):

This paper explores the concept of using smart phones to facilitate pervasive mixed reality, location-based, physical and social gaming. The interaction and communication between the virtual and physical worlds are explored and studied using a mixed reality version of the capture-the-flag game. In this game, players from two different paradigms, virtual and real, compete and collaborate in a social gaming environment using mobile devices and network system. (...) Unlike Human Pacman and ARQuake where players are equipped with head-mounted displays and complicated wearable equipment, players can move freely over wide outdoor area with true mobility and minimal hardware.

The basic goal of our smart phone-based CTF is to capture the opponents’ flag by acquiring it from their base and bringing it to the home base. (...) There are two player roles; smart phone players play as Knights while online players play as Guides through desktop PCs and they are connected via the Internet. The Knights whose positions are tracked via Global Positioning Unit (GPS) have to set her team’s “castle” in the beginning of the game by placing their own physical flag (a Bluetooth embedded device) on the ground. Once done, a virtual castle and a flag appear at the corresponding location in the Guides’ 3D map and in Knights’ smart phone interface. (...) Communication between various players using text messaging is an ongoing process throughout the game.

Why do I blog this? this is a good example of a low-tech approach of pervasive gaming using text messenging + GPS and bluetooth (unlike augmented reality tech). I'd be happy to know more about the tests/usage.

LATimes about cell phones services

Put a cellphone to work — to locate friends, avoid traffic, find a cafe, check show times — and you mobilize your options.by Susan Carpenter:

Cellphone users tend to fall in two camps — those who use their phones to make calls and those who use them for everything else, such as listening to music, getting restaurant recommendations, receiving instant traffic updates and otherwise planning their weekends. (...) Largely unknown to the masses but enthusiastically embraced by die-hard cellphone fanatics and techno geeks, a bevy of mobile content options have come to market in the last year or so. And the release rate of these on-the-go offerings continues to race along at breakneck speed. It's just their adoption by your average, everyday cellphone user that is slow. (...)"Oh my God, Logan's here!" she announced, reading the message delivered via Dodgeball. A sort of Friendster for mobile phones, Dodgeball is a social-networking program that lets subscribers announce their location to a preselected group of friends and friends of friends that has been established online. "The big thing in L.A. is you just need an ice-breaker in order to start talking to someone," said Elizabeth, who moved to L.A. from New York a year ago.

"[Dodgeball] sends you a photo, and if you find them, it's like, 'Hey, you're on the website,' and it's not as awkward as randomly approaching someone for no reason," added Elizabeth, who met her friend Daniel Hengeveld because she saw his picture on Dodgeball.

Yes it's the same situations as explained in the article about Mogi Mogi I blogged about yesterday: physical proximity is a trigger for social encounters, 'ice-breaking' as stated in this LA Times article.

The article also interestingly tackles the limits of cell phone services:

As exciting as these new developments are, using them can be frustratingly slow. For many cellphone users, they are also too expensive and/or too complicated. (...) The barriers, Zutaut says, are the phones themselves and the technological limitations of the mobile service networks. On the phone side, it's a matter of processing power, screen size and keypad functionality. As for carriers, it's how quickly they can deliver data, and the price they charge to deliver it.

Moreover, I like the final statement:

"People oftentimes don't fully understand what the technology or the service offerings could provide and oftentimes can't visualize how it would impact their lives.

"In a couple years, when their teenage kids are using it, they think, 'That would be really cool.' " [says Allyn Hall, director of wireless research for In-Stat]

Mobile Entertainment 2004 proceedings

I just found the proceedings of Mobile Entertainments: User-Centered Perspective, a conference which happened in 2004 in Manchester. I already blogged about some paper about it but now it seems that the whole proceedings are online which is good. Some papers are business oriented (consumers' insights...), other are more HCI-related with a strong focus on users understandings and sociology of mobile gaming.Here are the ones abotu location-based games:

• On the Streets with Blast Theory and the MRL: ‘Can You See Me Now?’ and ‘Uncle Roy – All Around You’ by Duncan Rowland, Martin Flintham, Steve Benford, Nick Tandavanitj, Adam Drozd & Rob Anastasi page 115
• ‘Gangs of Bremen’: The First Prototype of a Mobile Game by Jochen Hahn & Katja Fahrenholz page 125
• On the Development of a Mobile Play Mechanic by Barbara Grüter & Anna Mielke page 133
• The Design History of a Geolocalized Mobile Game: From the Engineering of Displacements to the Engineering of Encounters - A case study of the development of a mobile game based on the geolocation of terminals by Christian Licoppe & Guillot Romain page 149

"The Drop": real world 'capture the flag'

The Drop: Pragmatic Problems in the Design of a Compelling, Pervasive Game by I. Smith, S. Consolvo and A. Lamarca (2005)

We are developing a new multiplayer pervasive game, called The Drop, designed to be compelling to play and yet practical to deploy in real-world settings. In The Drop, two teams use mobile phones to play a version of “capture the flag,” where one team hides a virtual “briefcase” in a public place and the other team attempts to find it within a specified amount of time. If the team that is searching for the briefcase finds it within the game’s time limit, they win; otherwise, the team that hid the briefcase wins. In this article we explain how the game is played, then discuss the technical, social, and business challenges we have faced while creating and implementing it.

Why do I blog this? what is interesting in this paper is that the authors not only describes the pervasive game they develop but they also provide the readers with different reflections about how game designers can face some issues when working on this project. The game design process is well explained. It reminds me what I blogged about Mogi Mogi's development. It's something also developed in this paper: The Design History of a Geolocalized Mobile Game: From the Engineering of Displacements to the Engineering of Encounters - A case study of the development of a mobile game based on the geolocation of terminals(whole proceeding as a pdf!) by Christian Licoppe & Guillot Romain