user experience of location based services

Timo Arnall (Oslo School of Architecture & Design) gave the 
following talk at this years XTech conference as part of the UbiWeb 
track

    http://2007.xtech.org/public/schedule/detail/191

Timo talked about different ways to define physical hyperlinks, e.g. 
www.semapedia.org which makes it easy to create barcodes that you 
can scan with your phone, and which take you to a mobile friendly 
version of the wikipedia entry for the tagged object. Timo made the 
observation that in public places accessing information on the small 
screen is often intensely anti-social, removing us from people and 
places.

HP Labs's work on mediascapes (http://www.mscapers.com/) allows 
people to create games based around GPS locations. Players listen 
to/watch media clips that are activated when the move into 
predefined areas. HP's software is currently limited to GPS enabled 
Windows Mobile devices.

New mobile phones are likely to support JSR 179 which defines a Java 
API for midlet-based applications to access the device location. 
Perhaps this could be adapted to define an interface for exposing 
location as part of the DCCI?  One thing to look at is how trust and 
privacy are handled, as this is likely to be a key issue.

I can easily imagine a location based game built around SVG Tiny 1.2 
for a rich user interface, and making use of Ajax to update the UI 
as the user walks from one location to another. SVGT1.2 is expected 
to be widely deployed on mobile devices, and there is a great 
potential for integrating with the DCCI for accessing device 
capabilities.

Further information on location will shortly be available on the UWA 
wiki, which is currently in preparation.

  Dave Raggett <dsr@w3.org> http://www.w3.org/People/Raggett

Received on Thursday, 27 September 2007 10:52:07 UTC