Slashdot Mirror
Mid-Air Messaging?
boogahsmalls writes: "HP has been working on a nifty little project by the name of Cooltown that allows users to "paint" the air with comments using GPS and mobile phones. A more extensive write up is available over at New Scientist."
Paint bitmaps
;)
Get it?
I'll probably get a Troll for this
Is that HP's site mentions "will the real Bruce Perens please stand up" - and calls slashdot "www.slashdot.com". Prophetic, maybe?
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
for spammers
think about it. If anyone can link messages to coordinates, don't you think advertisers will be the first to abuse this? hell, they go for everything else that can send messages. though, I wonder if you'll have to pay normal cell charges for these messages...
The kids are going to love this. You walk up to the teacher's desk with a little practical joke in mind. Your mobile phone suddenly bleeps, and you hear a soft whisper in your ear: MAJOR bad mood todaydon't try anything. You think better of the prank and decide to avoid certain detention. All thanks to an invisible message placed in the air above the teacher's desk.
and over the head of your bald teacher, you could write "all you hair are belong to us"
imagine the possibilities! Thanks HP!
It's cool to be sure, but it doesn't sound particularly useful. The article cites the example of a store having a sale, and then leaving a message right outside the door. I personally don't need to be hounded by advertisements anymore than I already am, and it's not like I can't read window signs either. More and more technologies are being invented for communication, more information is being generated, but at some point, it does become overkill, and this is very near that point. It would be hell if whenever I walked anywhere, my phone started buzzing because someone had left a message in the most random of places. And you thought spam was bad now... Granted, some uses such as the traffic alert may be useful, but there are far better, less invasive ways for alerting people in such a mannner. Sorry for this rant, but sometimes, with all the millions of bits of information I deal with everyday, I just want to scream!
Once upon a time...
Perhaps I`ve misread the article but if the phone has to be in contact with some database to receive the message won`t there be occasions when the local base station will run out of lines. For example if a large crowd of people e.g. thousands mass at a particular spot.
Great, now we'll need a 3D overlay interface to look at all those posts in real-time. Now you'll be able to watch spam and trolls fly by you on your drive to work! So now the whole world can be /.-ed! =) LOL, do i get to moderate messages posted on my house?
The biggest trick the devil pulled was letting lawyers become politicians so they can write the laws.
Empire State Building: First Post!
I'll add a sig just as soon as I clean up this room...
Yeah, I hate to bring in the "P" word. But with the GPS-enabled cellphone/PDA/whatever continuously checking with a central site to see if there are any "messages" at the current location, how difficult will it be for someone to track people? (hint: cookies or some such mechansm).
This has more prospects of "Big Brother" than anything else from recent past.....
Besides, there's a lovely lass alone in the corner, with the simple message:
What time? It probably took one of their engineers about two seconds to come up with this idea. Maybe three, depending on which drug he was on at the time of enlightenment.
--- Keep the choice with the user..
"Ok.I'm almost at the top. Just over this ledge"
*grunt, groan*
"Ahh! WOOHOO! I've reached the summit of Everest!"
*beep beep bip bip bip beep beep*
"Oooh. Looks likes someones left a message here. I wonder what it is? I'm sure I's some inspirational message of congratulations. Lets see..."
'Free HOT College sluts waiting for you!!!...'
'FREE! Univerity Diplomas!'
'You can make $30,000 in under 24 hours!!!!'
'First Post'
'Cowboyneal was here!'
'I am l33t hach0r!!!'
The spam possibilities for this are frightening.
Slashdot.com points to the same machine now, I've seen that 'mistake' a lot lately, but really they aren't technically wrong. And slashdot is a commercial organization. Slashdot's 'historic' domain name may be 'slashdot.org' but 'slashdot.com' points to the right place and is really a better fit, these days.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
nontheless, it would take time to develop this, and get it distributed among the phone service providers, and not to mention promotion...
death is eternity
after death is eternity
there is no death there is only eternity.
But this is what Quake is to Windows - the killer app that softens you up to a dangerous technology. Personally, the idea that my cell phone, and therefore my cell phone company, can log my path through life 24 hours a day and sell it to the highest bidder as part of my "Customer Revenue Package" freaks the hell out of me. The idea of 22 year old overpaid consultants from Andersen sitting around a table discussing who would want to buy my whereabouts even more.
Thanks but no thanks.
If guns kill people, then CmdrTaco's keyboard misspells words.
... RTFM!
:)
CoolTown is an HP program out of HP Labs., A cross between R&D/Think Tank, much like Xerox PARC, Its goal is to find way to integrate technology into our every day lives, as shown by this project. To quote HP:
Cooltown is our vision of a technology future where people, places, and things are first class citizens of the connected world, wired and wireless - a place where e-services meet the physical world, where humans are mobile, devices and services are federated and context-aware, and everything has a web presence.
The cooltown vision of a responsive world of mobile services requires clear, creative thinking about technology. For several years, HP Labs has been working at the intersection of nomadicity, appliances, networking, and the web. Our model for this research is one of open collaboration and partnership with others who share similar goals. Creating a cooltown ecosystem requires vision and technology, but above all else it takes a community of like-minded people who believe in open participation, investing in the web, and creating real solutions that add value to people's lives. Our goal is to help bring that community together, to openly share ideas and implementations, and to make a real contribution to the web and to the world.
This is just one of many projects that have come, and will come out of this program. Hopefully HP will do something more useful with them then Xerox did with PARC, but I digress...
So we're talking a virtual graffiti service, which lets people "tag" sites and deface structures without actually defacing them. People don't have to see it unless they deliberately try.
But why should it be limited to ONE set of graffiti? Unless somebody patents it, of course.
If there IS only one service the owners of the REAL site may have a property-rights claim against any posters to coordinates that fall on their property, and perhaps even the service itself (especially if it doesn't let them "paint out" anything on their location and/or if someone posts something derogatory).
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Now people will be standing around waiting to get the message
Or here are some messages to strategicly place.
and these over selective locations.
Not only good for spammers but activists
It's only a matter of time until some business-owner sues to remove a tag that reflects badly on their business, even if it is the truth. Imagine seeing something like "This restraunt failed Health Department inspection in 1998!" on your way in the door of an establishment. Any organization whose image may be tarnished by a tag at a certain location will want a say in what tags are allowed in their "airspace", and will scream bloody murder if people post negative comments. We've already seen it with web pages that users have to put some actual activity into reaching. It's not going to be long after this goes mainstream that somebody tries to criminalize "digital graffiti".
What a wonderful world we live in. *sigh*
--Fesh
Kill -9 'em all, let root@localhost sort 'em out.
I see a few problems that would be hard to overcome... First, say (as stated in the article) someone left a message in mid-air informing people of a car accident on the expressway. Suppose the average speed on that that road is 75 km/h. In addition, the polling frequency, the protocol, and lags in the devices themselves delay the delivery of the message...
This all suggests that messages must be tagged with a radius as well as a location. On the highway at high speeds, one might need a 1-2 km radius to ensure that the message is delivered before one encounters the accident. On the other hand, one only needs a 1m radius to leave graffiti over the crapper at your local McDonalds.
Now what happens if the highway passes through a city (like Boston's 93) with lots of McDonalds... Will I walk into the men's room and get:
"Accident on 93 North - use left lane...."
"Here I sit all broken-hearted...."
If the restaurant falls within the message radius, I will. Now let's go for the low hanging fruit - the obvious fix-all. Let's tag the messages with a location, a radius, and a speed! It's GPS - calculating speed is easy, right? If I'm walking into McDonalds at 4km/h, I won't get the message intended for cars at 75km/h.
Now not only do people know where I am, but how fast I am going. Cross-reference with a map, and they know what road I'm on. Should I expect to see speeding tickets enclosed in my mobile phone bill? Will Mapquest email me:
"You know Dan, there's a much better route to work..."
Will my local health club text my mobile:
"We noticed you go to McDonalds quite frequently and you're not walking too fast these days..."
Privacy? What privacy?
Mercy Buckets, mon amie, may say "uniere post" sur la tour Eiffel.
Even Slashdot wants to hide some things
Yah great, another waste of good ollie space.
You think its bad now when people call asking you to switch phone providers. If this ever catches on, ad companies will be paying big bucks for certain volumes of air. Entire cities could be covered so that as you wak down the street your cell phone and pager are beeping incessantly as you move from ad volume to ad volume. This is the telephone equivalent of spam, and they dont even need to know your phone number to do it.
Wow, just apply this same technology to other areas and you've got a winner. Let's say I've got a wearable computer, monitor inside sunglasses, everything else in a Palm sized thing in my pocket. My eyes are the mouse. Now I walk down the street in New York. I pass a restaurant. When I look at the restaurant I see a blinking light on it, it's really a link to a web page, which then appears on screen. Now get this. I walk into Times Square. I look up at the buildings and see ads. Each ad has a link just like the restaurant. Let's take this a step further.
I take my glasses off. I look at a building with nothing on it's sides. I put glasses on, all of a sudden there's a large ad covering the side of the building.
We've all seen movies where there are very large holographic advertisements all over a city. We can't seem to do that in the physical world yet, so put it in the digital world.
I just had an even better idea. I place one of these things on myself. So when you look at me through your glasses you see someone else. Take them off and see the real me. You can also go to my web page by "clicking" my link.
The real bonus with this is that any time you don't want to see the stuff, just take your wearable pc off. And you no longer have to sit at home in front of a computer to browse the web. You get up and go outside. Geeks will be going outdoors on a more than regular basis.
Here we go. The Killer App. Walk down the street. Spot a hot girl. Check if she's single or not, check to see what you have in common. Search a database for the best pick up line. Get constant advice through IRC on what to say and what to do.
A database of Audio Visual pages and their real world location on GPS. Visualized through wirelessly net connected wearable computers. You would see the net as a holographic overlay on the real world. It's now possible.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
And weren't the -vast- majority of the comments left everywhere, essentially, graffiti? Not spam (ie: trying to be commercial), but the equivalent of the goat-sex and penis-birds of Slashdot?
If they do implement this system, I strongly hope that they use a moderation schema like the ones of Slashdot or Kuro5hin...
Never play leapfrog with a unicorn. Or a juggernaut.
I think the problem would be more with 50-100 speeding motorists reaching for their cell phone at the same moment, than with you picking up the occasional stray message. The privacy thing scares me too, I wonder if the cell phone industry will take a hit from this..
Stop watching the matrix and go get laid, now!
So it'll be like USENET, with all the retarded advertisemnets and the shouting, raging morons? Except in the air? This technology would have to either be moderated or you'd have to buy rights, because this has such a massive potential for abuse:
/. and onto our fields and mountains and monuments. I will never, ever get a reader for this technology.
Washington Monument: h3y! t415 100ks 11K3 a D1C|! hururur!
Some post-office: got anthrax?
The tastless will be brought out of USENET and
Everything is mainstream now.
So far a lot of the posts have been griping that this will just be used to put text message ads all over the city. It probably will. Like a lot of technology, it's yet another cool little toy for the masses that will be perverted by commercial interests. And no matter how much people gripe about it, it won't change the fact that this wouldn't be possible without their active participation.
I've got a cell phone. It doesn't do text messages, it's a phone. It doesn't read email, it's a phone. It doesn't even do any of those annoying shrill little songs that people seem to like, it rings.
So when everybody's complaining about getting spammed on their cell phones while walking down the street, I won't even notice. Why? Because I didn't buy something because it had a load of 'cool' features on it, I bought it because it did what I needed it to do. And I wanted to use my cell phone as a *gasp* phone.
Marketers aren't stupid. Evil yes, but not stupid. Just because a technology wasn't designed for advertising doesn't mean they won't use it that way. The solution is to only use what you need to use, and refuse to pay for the rest.
The worst terrorist attack in recorded history occurred in September, followed by a deadly and bloody WAR against the Islamic faith (against the holiest of Muslim clerics and scholars, the beloved Taliban leaders of the Afghanistan people) and now we're struggling to bring order to Afghanistan with the establishment of an interim government, as well as tightening the noose over the Al Qaeda group (a terrorist cell with possibly the coolest name around) in the mountains of Tora Bora, and you people have the gall to be discussing GPS-based wireless information services???? My *god*, people, GET SOME PRIORITIES!
The bodies of the thousands of innocent civilians who died (and will die) in these unprecedented events could give a good god damn about an incredible abuse of IPv4 (unless these people have done the right thing and are using IPv6 in these devices), your childish Lego models, your nerf toy guns and whining about the lack of a "fun" workplace, your Everquest/Diablo/D&D fixation, the latest Cowboy Bebop rerun, or any of the other ways you are "getting on with your life" (here's a hint: watching Cowboy Bebop in your jammies and eating a bowl of Shreddies is *not* "getting on with your life"). The souls of the victims are watching in horror as you people squander your finite, precious time on this earth playing video games!
You people disgust me!
Like I have read in some of the posts here, this is a cute technology, but honestly, what does this do for us? How is this really useful?
I get that it could work on some level as augmented reality - you walk into your bosses office and when you do, the adjenda for the meeting you are about to hear is spoken to you via your phone. But this seems to be more of a toy than anything. I don't see this being part of everyday life.
IMHO, HP would be better served in making the next great calculator. They really changed the calculator market with their 48 series calculators, why not keep that up?
RonB
It is human nature to take shortcuts in thinking.
Incoming message: Hey dude, you're standing in shit.
A corporation that owns most of the malls in America has already considered deploying Mobile switching centers (MSC) in malls to get highly accurate location determination. They already have a shopping service during the holidays where a person can make a list of the items and give it to a mall staff. The staff person then goes to all the stores, stands in line, buys the item, wraps it and then bags it.
An extension to that service would be to use your cell phone. When you enter the mall, it sends you a WAP or SMS message asking you if you want to turn on shopping service. You go to the stores, and use your phone to scan the barcode. When you're done, you download the list to service and a starving college student stands in line for you. Of course there are a lot more ideas for commerce applications, but that is just one of them.
Wireless data by itself is worthless and a nitch service. Once you have accurate GPS with transparent data exchange, the service becomes a necessity.
On the fun side of things, there are tremendous opportunity to use GPS and wireless data for gaming purposes. Let your imagination run wild and you will see that things like RPG, Real-Time Strategy and Turn-Based Strategy games can move into a whole new world. Nokia already has a division for wireless games and there are several companies in Europe developing wireless games. Some people have even suggested using wireless data and GPS for dating services.
Any information can be filtered. If we have such a system, we certainly wouldn't have to receive everything all the time.
/. :-)
Just look at Slashdot. I browse at +2, unless I have time and desire to read more. Slashdot certainly has a lot of crap, but I choose to filter is. It would be trivial to implement such a system for HP's Cooltown.
Taking that further, I can see location-based annotation as a pay service. If I were Zagat I could charge people for the service of displaying ratings when they walked in front of a Restaurant. I know I would pay for such a service. I like walking around and finding nice places (As opposed to planning in advance), and I would pay to know beforehand from a reliable source what I should expect from the food.
I can think of many other examples, but I think I'll rush to patent them instead of posting them on
This could be a great way to give geocaching hints. When you get close, you could get a message "look in the roots of the tree with the broken top". Since it would have a GPS and phone, the geocaching easly could be combined. For info on geocaching, visit www.geocaching.com. How close are you to a hidden cache?
The truth shall set you free!
I don't need to know your velocity to know what road you're on! Think about it... you're on Highway X and you fire off a message. Well, guess what, you can only be traveling North/South or East/West. I don't know to many highways that give you more options than that. Cross reference your location with a map an I know what road you're on. Fire more than one message while traveling the same highway and I know exactly which direction you are headed.
Besides, once I know your location it's all a rather accedemic. I could simply follow you in a helicopter if I want to. To extreme? A couple of friends in cars with FRS radios should do nicely. Not to mention you can be tracked quite effectively with just your cellphone being turned on - never mind this GPS stuff. It's called triangulation.
"They do not preach that their god will rouse them, a little before the Nuts work loose." Kipling, 'The Sons of Martha'
The same as justice and health. That we will be able to pay a service to screen for us has all ready been mentioned in the article. And with the way the laws are changing we will HAVE TO HAVE our GPS cell phones going 24 hours a day, after all - we have nothing to hide. If we can't pay we will be fodder. If I had my way I would turn this upside down. The less power a person had the more anonymous they would be, the more power they had the less anonymous they would be. But the powerfull make the rules - so you can bet your ass that they will be able to afford and legislate their own privacy. What, the people making the laws are supposed to represent you? Make them, or bleet like happy livestock.
This stuff makes me so angry I could just rant. Maybe next time I will.
Sounds like you are looking at a far wider picture to which a Communist / Anarchist approach would be the solution.
This sounds like an idea that will get mixed responses, lets wait and see how well this "floating message" will do.
Imagine this technology combined with a car computer - as you are driving, the dashboard could tell you the speed limit without a big ugly sign being at the side of the road. You car could tell you where is ok to park, and when it's illegal without painting the curb all sorts of ugly colors.
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
I sincerely hope there will be a way to turn OFF the portion of the program that transmits your coordinates at any given time. Standard GPS receivers don't transmit anything, so you get the useful information without having to give up your location. But the day when my cell phone becomes a stool pigeon to my every activity is the day I go back to two cans and a string. Beyond just government things (which are bad enough) could you imagine, say, some criminals learning your code and finding out how close you are to your car or house so they can rob you? How about the stalker guy/girl being able to track your daily movements? How about your boss finding out that you go hang out at strip clubs on your lunch break? Any of these things COULD happen if you have the GPS receiver connected to a transmitter like they describe.
"Just because I'm paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get me."
I wish there was a choice that said "Factually Wrong -1" when I mod.
What if you linked this tech to somesort of rpg game, perhaps you could place virtual items at certain locations. And people would be slaying virtual monsters at the park. You could pickup cool items, which are comfortably located in an attraction park (of course they'd have pay a whole lot of money to the game company in order to get those items there)
Something like this was suggested back when VRML was popular. The idea was to mirror the physical world in VRML, but with more advertising. Didn't sell.
Tell that to the woman that was in the basement of the WTC who called for help, and was subsequently rescued. She would have died otherwise.
I guess you're over-simplified logic has a flaw in it.
"Derp de derp."
That's nothing. You should see my onboard handheld snow-writing device.
------
Let me give you the lowdown
The article cites the example of a store having a sale, and then leaving a message right outside the door. I personally don't need to be hounded by advertisements anymore than I already am, and it's not like I can't read window signs either
Well, if they used slashcode to paint the comments, you could mod such comments down as redundant.
Search a database for the best pick up line. Get constant advice through IRC on what to say and what to do.
Yeah and if the network goes down at an inopportune moment, you'll be saying things to her like, "Your breasts are like pillows. Can I fluff your pillows?"
Hi.
"you're" is "you are", not "your".
Tell that to the woman that was in the basement of the WTC who called for help, and was subsequently rescued. She would have died otherwise.
What megacorp do you work for? One example of a benefit (to someone else) and you're allowed to justify anything which benefits you. Conversely, one bit of harm (to you) from anything and you get to condemn its use by anyone else. What if she'd been saved by a serial rapist. Should they all be welcomed into your home?
"Kilroy was here" [3dair.com]
From the article:
An outhouse was built for the exclusive use of Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill for the Potsdam Conference.
Only one? No wonder it was called Potsdam.
Frankly, I never saw the point of cell phones. If I need to call somebody, I'll damned well pull into a gas station and use a pay phone. If somebody needs to reach me, they can damned well use email.
No problem -- keep it for when _you_ need it and leave it turned off otherwise. Of course the day will come when you'll be DMCAed over the head by the advertisers for "circumventing" if you turn it off.
Now, instead of having to deal with obscene graffiti on the walls of public bathroom stalls, the graffiti will automatically page people when they use the commode, to make obscene remarks. What makes it even worse is that shop owners won't be able to get rid of such messages as easily; it would be very strange if an entire bathroom would need to be declared because people with pagers would get demeaning comments about their adequacy when they used the urinals.
From a more serious perspective, webmasters strongly disapproved of Third Voice, who provided software that allowed users to associate comments with web pages. I imagine shopkeepers who are slandered (or have their bathrooms rendered "interactive") will strongly oppose this technology.
ByteMyCode.com: A Web 2.0 code sharing community.
Not all information can be filtered. Just think DMCA and UCITA. Try and filter out the lame scenes in Episode I or mix your favourtie scenes from the Matrix. Scenario's like this will soon be an order of magnitude more common when WSPs start sending copyrighted material via phones through 2.5 and 3G. Your WSP can simply make deals with partners to send you the occassional spam along with the service that you require for your everyday needs, e.g. email, SMS/MMS messages. This stream of service can be protected by copyright (if they choose) and thus be given DMCA protection. The phone is a closed box that you cannot alter (too much), and any attempt to circumvent the Telco's controls on the phone is a felony charge punishable by up to 5 years in a federal penetentiary and up to a $100,000 charge. Scenarios like this will get more and more common as Telco's try to make money of their customer base, and customers try to control the media they recieve.
-Shieldwolf
just = (My)Opinion.toCents();
An extension to that service would be to use your cell phone. When you enter the mall, it sends you a WAP or SMS message asking you if you want to turn on shopping service. You go to the stores, and use your phone to scan the barcode. When you're done, you download the list to service and a starving college student stands in line for you. Of course there are a lot more ideas for commerce applications, but that is just one of them.
Or, we could take it even further, and have the act of scanning the barcode automatically charge your credit card, thus avoiding the cash register all together. (some sort of anti-theft device would have to be concieved, of course!)
Logically. It will evolve to have different services and protocols, just like the net does now. There could be public messages, private messages (kinda like e-mail or something) etc. Different companies could set-up message services for different uses etc. Some people might even make a system like usernet, they could have a 'good places to eat at' group that you could use/subscribe to. I'm sure there are 1000's of other ideas that this could be used for.
You really need to try and think more lateraly.
I was under the impression that a mobile phones location can be calculated to within a few metres without any GPS system.
At any time your phone can poll base stations in the local area and determine which station provides the strongest link. By knowing the location of three base stations, and knowing the relative signal strengths, the location of the mobile phone can be triangulated very accurately.
I remember reading about this quite some time ago, but I haven't heard anything about it recently. The technology can apprently be used in criminal investigations, such as kidnappings and such. I am pretty sure all networks have the technical ability to do it, but don't do it because of privacy concerns and the like.
Wow, talk about over-reactive. I give an example of somebody getting their life saved, and then you twist it with an improbable worst case scenario. (like a rapist is going to use cell phone tracing technology to find a victim)
As far as 'justifying' something that benefits me, I don't see why you feel I need to justify it. I don't need to justify it to you. I made a decision to own a cell phone, and that's final. I didn't ask for your approval.
I just felt that somebody saying "I won't get a cell phone because I can get to a pay phone..." was over-simplified. So I pointed out a scenario where you wouldn't be able to get to a pay phone. Obviously I'm not the only one who feels this way because lots, and I do mean LOTS of people have cell phones. Not to mention that market is growing.
Obviously cell phones add something to people's lives, despite being able to reach phones easily.
Getting back on topic, what HP is hoping to do with their CoolTown technology sounds kind of interesting. I like the idea of paramedics being notified if I have a heart attack. You would too if you're at risk. If you have the attitude that you don't like a new technology because [insert silly over-reactive reason here], then I hope you enjoy your time in the stone age.
"Derp de derp."
How long would it be before some ticked off merchant sued to stop posting of messages in front of his property? If he could prove a competitor had flamed/slandered him (although that would take a Scientology style witchhunt to break through any anonymity setups), he'd have serious grounds.
As far as critiques of companies or services go, you'd really need some kind of moderation. Not only could they filter insightful comments from the flames, but they could also handle admin chores, such as moving a company's coordinates when it moves, killing old records when a place goes under and a new one moves in, or aliasing/hyperlinking coordinates when a place opens a second location.
Naturally, it would take a freaking mint of money to do if you had dedicated staff. But if you used, say, slashdot's or some other user driven moderation scheme, it just might be workable.
"Prepare for the worst - hope for the best."
This reminds me of the Greg Bear series (Eon, Eternity)-- "picting", displaying complex characters and symbols above your shoulder-- is an important method of communication. If this could be build into glasses (or contact lenses) or mini-holographic displays, the richness of human communication could be vastly increased!
Imagine being able to project emoticons instead of actually smiling, frowning etc!
*meep*