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Mid-Air Messages To Your Mobile
wilfie writes "Mid-air messages are content for delivery to handheld devices which is relevant to the user's current location. A serious trial of a system for delivering mid-air messages is to be financed by the UK government in the City of Bristol, according to an
article on the BBC website. The article refers to the Annotate Space project doing something similar in New York. The Bristol scheme looks like being a guide for tourists, but what other kinds of content would we welcome, and what would we not? Would we even be willing to pay for it?"
I'm walking in a park when all of a sudden my cell phone catches a distress beacon...
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
no, i didn't read the article, but it conjures up images in my mind something to the effect of "EXIT NOW!!! Some really great thing that will enlarge your penis and automatically file your taxes for you is here for you to purchase!" (which is of course, presented in annoying flash)
track7.org has all kinds of interesting stuff!
Is a bombardment of advertisements as you pass by McDonalds, Walmart, etc. I seem to recall reading about bilboard signs that beam you more advertisement related information such as the contact numbers/address/directions of the place being advertised.
Random is the New Order.
You have 45677987 new messages
Is a bunch of dogooders putting anti-smoking bubbles near stores, anti-meat bubbles near markets, anti-fur near malls, add to infinity.
Neck_of_the_Woods
#/usr/local/surf/glassy/overhead
I, for one, would like to know when I'm close to some place that I can buy an X10 camera.
I can see a system like this turning into location specific Spam.
Just imagine: you're walking down the street, when your handheld beeps to inform you that the local drug store is having a sale on panty liners (or condoms, or whatever). Now, if you're male, you might be a bit irked by this. Or what about the local porn shop having a sale on goatse.cx?
A system like that would make me get rid of any hand held I had, and I definately wouldn't pay for it.
Ed Wedig
Graphic design services
docbrown.net
h2g2.com anyone? Although I assume these "mid-air" messages and the research behind them are motivated by ad revenue (mid-air location specific spam, I shudder at the thought) I would like to think that the location specific messages will actually be helpful ala hitchhikers guide.
Here's to a new promising technology that will hopefully avoid the pitfalls of spam (ha!)
remembering Douglas Adams
I can see where this can be handy for advertising.
Because of TIA and other information hoarding
initiatives, the merchants know what you like
and don't like.
For example, I run an on line fetish wear business.
I contract with bars in the seedier areas of town
to host one of these transmitters on their premises.
I do the same with the adult theatres and porno
shops.
As you walk past, or into, these businesses,
and I know (via TIA or other info hoarding
schemes) that you like fetish clothing, I can
beam messages to your palmtop about sales of
certain items (that I can customize for you).
Since you are in the mood (being in the seedy
area) this might be just enough to tip you
over to making a purchase.
Mark
Cleara
Be at this street corner between 10 and 11pm. Major credit cards accepted.
A big issue to doing something like this, which was pointed out to me by some researchers in a company I interned for, pertained to the amount of information about you that is required for such a system to function but still maintain your privacy.
For example, a mid-air system that delivers messages to you while you're in a certain area can also figure out where you are at what time on what day, simply by aggregating this information in one place. The researchers that I talked to worked around this (they were using GPS) by making the exact co-ordinates fuzzy and increasing the resolution from a few meters to a few miles. Thus you can't exactly tell where a person was at a certain time.
However, in the article, the researchers are using bluetooth, which doesn't leave out much in the way of destroying location information. Which consequently means that the Government, or any company with enough money could come in, aggregate this information and track the devices that are mid-air message enabled. (and if we assume that people aren't going to be swapping cell phones every few minutes, then we can track the people themselves)
"What if we could put information in places? What if we could associate relevant information with a place and perceive the information as if it were really there?"
Cheers,
Joel
I've actually been talking about this sort of thing with friends for years --
some radar detectors claim they can alert you to 'emergency' vehicles (trains crossing, ambulances, some even claim school buses). I have yet to see one work, but I would love if they did, especially with today's cars, if you have your windows up, you can barely hear a siren...and if your stereo's on, there's no chance in hell.
It'd also be great for alerting that there's construction ahead, or an exit's closed, etc.
I would prefer that this band be liscensed for specific services, or that everyone be required to send some sort of a signature that we could block on, or even a 'type' so we could single out restaurants, tourism, etc.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
Of course, the main one is what the article mentioned...reviews of different things. You could be in an unfamiliar city, walking through trying to find a good restaurant. In front of one, you bring up the service, and it tells you different things people posted ("Don't get the clam chowder!!! It's death in a bowl!", "The fries are great!").
Another thing would be interesting sites or things to look for. For example, you're drinking in an old bar, you bring up the service and can view different messages like "This bar caught fire in 1938. See the charred board behind the bar on the right-hand side? They left that as a reminder." or you're at a scenic turn-off in the mountains you might get "If you look to the north-west, you might be able to see the skyline of [insert city]."
Of course there's the whole advertising thing, but depending on how it's setup, it could be a good thing. Walk into a store, get virtual coupons or something.
Something else that could be kinda fun would be a graffiti board of some type...probably have numerous problems, but c'est la vie.
--mh
Post a message in on a busy corner, and see how many people you can get to pull out their phone and see the message... "Made you look :p"
...you'll have to be careful where you walk and when you leave your phone on.
I just know a whole cadre of people out there will mine the world with mid-air goatse.cx pictures.
Imagine this. You're driving down the highway when your palm pilot beeps to alert you of a major accident up ahead, and suggests you take exit 91 to bypass the traffic.
That would be cool. Especially if you are driving in unfamiliar territory and don't know the local radio stations.
There was an excellent article on this same topic in Discover recently. The possibilities are nice... leaving "personal notes" for your friends at a specific spot in the world. I think the best quote from the article was this one: "When you can stand where others have stood and learn how it affected them, and then share your own impressions in return, public space becomes more deeply public than it was before." It reminds me of a nice book on Native American religious tradition by Vine Deloria, Jr. The idea of bringing technology back to the "primitive" notion of public spaces is appealing to the hippie inside me.
Also of note in the Discover article is a brief introduction to geo-caching. Unrelated, but sounds like fun. :)
--madgeorge
i prefer this to a retina scan in "minority report" the bilboard senses your cell phone getting close and pulls up an appropriet add.
also, this may help eliminate men seeing feminine higene adds
I was at Bristol late last year at an undergrad open day and they had a system very like this - they might have something to do with it. The user had a jacket with a GPS system so things like directions to the nearest station could be done with no location input from the user. The had a cool extra though, a sensor in the arm allowed the system to see where a user pointed. With the location info this could be translated to a landmark et cetera, and informtion on that could be sent to the user. I say it was a "demo" but more description than hardware.
they won't need a spray can to tag a wall.
No electrons were harmed creating this post, though some may have been subjected to electrical and/or magnetic fields.
GSM already supports a system called Cell Broadcast. You select a channel on your phone and messages get sent to everyone in the same cell who are "tuned" in.
I worked on this in 1999, so you can assume that it was never a huge success. Most telco's couldn't figure out how to make money from it and so never bought it. There's not enough text space for adverts and people would quickly get sick of SPAM messages.
I realise that it's slightly different to what's being proposed here, but it does sound rather similar.