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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!
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
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
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
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"
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