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

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!

Spammers forging coordinates...

[arsaspe]

"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!!!'

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?

This is way cool

[Apreche]

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.

Having worked with wireless location determination

[f00zbll]

The things mentioned in the article aren't new. Back in 99 when WAP was the hot thing, a lot of companies were already throwing out those ideas. Most of the them didn't understand it, nor did the carriers for political reasons.

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.

think filtering

[jonbrewer]

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 /. :-)