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."

Comments

Oh the posibilities....

[eoPh]

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...

Re:Oh the posibilities....

[seann]

I hope they have some form of regulation, eg: if I live at 4742 epcot circle, and somebody leaves a message there saying "Your a bunch of nazi killers.", I wouldn't be too fond. What if I gave my kids one of these devices to play around and they came accross that?
Would I be able to remove notes left on my land? (air?)
GPS is x,y,z right? so if I was 1 foot off the ground (give or take a few meters) this wouldn't be affected by somebody flying a plane, so wouldn't I be in coverage of the "you were on my lawn to set this."
but since theres a 3 meter spill rate, I guess I would have no such luck.

Oh well, cool idea, I'd use it, bad spam posibilitys.

Where do we draw the line?

[svwolfpack]

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!

Just What We Need...

[drb]

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?