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Posts about my music, art and photography, with a little Android/Geo/AR stuff on the side. 
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February 15, 2010

Geospatial Technology

As we push into 2010 Location Based Services and Augmented Reality really seem to be coming to the fore at last. Well they certainly are in my corner of the twittersphere and if the applications that are appearing for Android are any indication as well. I've been following these developments avidly for the past couple of months keeping pages of notes [well, mostly links] which I have tried to arrange into something coherent here. It could ramble a bit, bear with me and please add any comments if you have any.

 

At the moment I have Layar, Brightkite, Aloqa, Wikitude, Foursquare, Here I Am and Maverick installed on my G1. Not to mention Google Maps, My Maps and My Tracks. And Google appear to be upping the ante as well with the introduction of Labs for Maps and their own layers option. I currently have a Buzz layer, Latitude and My Maps and there are more, such as Wikipedia and Favorite Places [which is limited to selected "celebs" favourite places at the moment]. In the US they have introduced Near Me Now which may go towards realising something that I will be touching on later. I'm thinking of this with phones in mind but of course there is the netbook and with the introduction of the Dell Mini 5 and the like we have something that falls between the two. I'm going to concentrate on Android apps as that's what I use.

 

Of the apps I have installed I have been using Brightkite the longest. Before I had an Android phone I was using it online and on my mobile, manually adding postcodes to check in. I have actually used it less since having an app and a phone with GPS but that has mostly been due to usability issues. It can be slow to load in busy area, as can most Location Based Services, especially Google Maps, which is something that doesn't seem to get addressed too often when discussing the development of locational tools. And the accuracy, when satellites can be located, can leave a lot to be desired. I tend to only use Brightkite to “check in” to restaurants or bars that I visit as a sort of geo-bookmark these days.

 

I have only recently looked at Foursquare, similar to Brightkite, but as it appears to be pretty US-centric I haven't looked too closely yet.

 

I think Layar must be the first Augmented Reality app that I used and I did use it quite a bit when I first downloaded it. Mainly because the twitter layer is fascinating if you need to kill some time in a busy area as you can amuse yourself reading the tweets of people in the vicinity. But I haven't used it for anything serious, or much at all lately. I think I will take a look at tweetjourney soon though. Really Layar need to be adding the option to create your own layers. Maybe Reality Browser 3.0 does just that. I'm just downloading it to see. I know it supports 3-D but I'm not too concerned about that yet although it is obviously crucial to gaming which I think will be what will push the development of Augmented Reality.

 

Wikitude [another Augmented Reality app] have introduced the option to personalise your experience by adding your own content and already has some interesting “Worlds of Points Of Interest”. Again, not something that I have had the time to investigate fully but definitely heading towards some of the requirements I will be mentioning later on.

 

Aloqa I have to say I have only used to find a cash machine once but it was very quick and accurate but it looks like a glorified listings app to me.

 

Maverick and My Tracks both serve very similar purposes in that they can record journeys and map them retrospectively or you can load journeys up to them and use them as a sat nav. And Here I am does exactly that. Allows you to share your location via e-mail, SMS or pretty much any other Social Media so long as you can do it via your phone. Maverick and Here I am work in tandem and have come to be my most used tools lately as I can keep a record of locations without having to ping it to all and sundry in real time.

 

I expect there is a lot more I haven't seen yet. If so, let me know what you use and why. Whether they are Android, iPhone or Blackberry apps.

I have a few ideas for projects I'd like to get off the ground using locational information. Mostly art based. Some quite basic, using QR Codes, whose simplicity shouldn't be overlooked and which should be part of our Augmented Reality considerations, as indeed they have for over a decade in Japan.

Since I started living on a busy main road it has fascinated me how the local bird life manages to make itself heard over the traffic and sirens. Much of birdsong is of course territorial and one of the options I have considered for my Urban/Avain is the geographic aspect. There are many strands to the project, which at the moment is a growing series of ambient pieces based on birdsong samples but which ultimately I hope to be a full scale installation including human size bird boxes. But more of that another day.

 

This got me considering geo-tagged music generally. And given the state of the music industry any alternatives to promoting music have to be an option, why not location based music? If there is a way to make it unique and marketable? Freesound already has a database of geo-tagged sounds, although these are mainly "Field Recordings". Also, Audio-Tagger allows you to upload geo-tagged recordings from a mobile phone but what about location aware MP3 files. How possible would that be? This could be useful for location specific podcasts and/or audiobooks/walks as well as music. I can imagine something like this augmented reality music mixer working on a larger scale as well.

 

I'm sure someone has already implemented geo-information into books somehow, even if it was just the addition of a map! But QR Codes could add links to maps or any other data from books or other printed material. Although with the headway that the e-Book appears to be making now that could all be obsolete in no time and there lies another thread for discussion but, suffice to say, I have a few ideas for a book including geo-data. 


What I really need is some way of geo-tagging places of interest as I find them online such as bars, restaurants, galleries, hotels. maybe a use for Microformats?

 

These bookmarked, geo-tagged, web pages could then be included on a map layer that I would have the option of sharing or not and when I get to an area where I have bookmarked several places of interest my phone would alert me that I was near them. In a similar way that Latitude alerts you when you are near a friend that you share your location details with.

 

For instance, last year I went to Manchester to see Prima Donna, the Rufus Wainwright opera. My "Imaginary Location Tool" could have sensed that my train was pulling into Piccadilly station and alerted me where the hotel I had booked into was, along with directions or local cab numbers. It could also then tell me that the venue for the opera was x miles from there and that the restaurant I had booked lunch in was x miles away too Or that I had bookmarked the local Art Gallery as a potential place to visit once' maybe calling up my Google Calendar to see if I had time to fit a visit in?

 

I can think of several ways to cobble most of that together with existing tools but the alerting part is eluding me. Any ideas? You can get alerts for speed cameras etc so why not other things? Maybe this mapme.ie site is almost there or could be with a bit of adaptation. Or maybe this Yahoo patent is the answer.

 

I'd like to be able to pull up all my geo-tagged information in one place, preferably within a map. Be it all my photo's, bookmarks, tweets even docs, scanned or otherwise wherever it's relevant. This could be a personal, private layer in some sort of Augmented Reality app.

 

What about Augmented Personalities? The Internet Of Things needn't exclude you! What if you could wear a QR Code or an RFID tag, even Bluetooth, with a link to your Google Profile or your blog or something that showed what was currently playing on your iPhone/pod or your latest Spotify playlist, or tweets or Facebook updates?


I fear that the majority of Augmented Reality apps will be advertising based base, especially if Google have anything to do with it, and they will. Ikea have already started to embrace AR and I can see how this will lend itself to retail outlets and marketing. I am guessing that we will get something akin to Second Life based on Google or Yahoo or Bing maps? Possibly Bing as their Photosynthesis tool would lend itself nicely to this. I'm sure we will certainly get a lot of games of varying degrees of interest.


But until we get anywhere near that surely we need more accurate GPS in cities? We need better ways of digesting this information on the move. I for one don't want to be standing outside a station waving my phone around trying to locate somewhere in certain parts of London. There are AR glasses [even contact lenses in development] but they need to come way down in price not to be considered a "muggable peripheral" as well! And we definitely need longer lasting battery life to compensate for the increased GPS use.

 

Unfortunately, I expect we will get a lot more creative uses of location based services for crime and there are a lot of scaremongers who, to a degree, have already raised concerns about security issues with Google. Once Google Goggles is able to recognise faces and present you with data about that person, then you can start worrying. I don't doubt that will happen though in the meantime maybe Google should invest some of its profits into battery development and getting more satellites into space for more accurate location fixes?


Hopefully somebody will start to create the AR apps that I am looking for before I have to get myself too involved with API's and the like. I have read my Yahoo Pipes book and will be starting my KML book soon so should be able to mash something up without the air turning too blue. But I really want to focus on creating things that can make use these developments rather than the developments themselves. 


Unfortunately most of my friends and colleagues have little or no interest in Social Media or Augmented Reality outside of throwing the odd comment up at Facebook. Most of them still use their phones to speak to people! And when you are out with people like this you can't spend too much time checking-in everywhere you go or checking twitter. It gets frowned upon... So I don't know how they are going to cope with me experiencing a tagged world via my phone's screen in the future. They'll all come round to it I suppose. I don't really expect I am in the right demographic for this sort of behaviour anyway, but saying that I don't see teenagers buying into it much either yet. Unless they are geo-tagging their You Tube clips?


I started writing this post based mostly on links I came across in tweets, I read a lot of useful pages, some of which are linked to in the text above but others that didn't fit the bill but are still of interest are listed below.

 

 

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Filed under  //   augmented reality   geo   location based services   QR Codes  

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November 29, 2009

Some Geo-Pondering

I want to be able to aggregate all of my geo-locational stuff to one Google Map. If I geo tag photos in Flickr, bookmarks in Delicious, add a calendar entry in Google Calendar or tweets from my phone I should be able to see them all on one map. I might even have Google Docs tagged with geo-locational information that might be pertinent to somewhere.

I guess I am going to have to try Yahoo Pipes to acheive this... Or will Google Wave be up to the task?

Rob sent me an invite for Wave and I have duly started looking at the features it has to offer. Unfortunately not all of those features mentioned in the videos that accompany it are available to try yet. For instance the robots that can draw your tweets into Wave or send your completed Waves to Blogger. Hopefully a Posterous equivalent of that will appear too? I'm hoping/assuming Wave will tuen out to be some sort of hybrid of Twitter, Office Communicator/Windows Messenger and GMail but with the addition of features that have been available in iGoogle, such as widgets for RSS Feeds, embedding Maps, Calendars and Google Docs. What we get depends whether they're aiming it to a more Corporate tool or have more Creative uses? It certainly looks to be a Collaborative tool alright but it all depends on what you can eventually feed into it. Given the amount of information it is now possible to keep up to date with via Twitter the poor old RSS feed needs a new sense of purpose and feeding into various mashed-up apps has to be it.

I think I need to wait until more options are available within Wave before judging it but I'll keep tinkering with it. In the meantime I need to take the plunge and start looking at the API's to these things. But first I need to get a few other things sorted.

Firstly, I'm not over convinced that the GPS feature within Twidroid on my G1 is actually adding any geo-information to my tweets yet any way! But the fact that it takes ages to get a location in Brightkite and Latitude as well suggest that that maybe living in a city for you! The G1 camera is too poor for any practical use as well so I don't use that for geo-tagged photos and therefore still need to add geo-locational info manually to any shots I take with my 400D or Cybershot. I haven't even looked at adding geo-location details to Delicious bookmarks although I know it's possible. It's obviously possible to feed Google Calendar entries into Google Maps too as this GoogleSystem Blog demonstrates.

I like geo-locational stuff. I like it as a way of merging our analogue and digital lives, as a step towards an Augmented Reality. I like Layar. But I have issues with waving my phone around, to lock onto locational information, inviting any unscrupulous passer-by to swipe it off of me. I don't necessarily want to advertise my position in real-time as Google Latitude or Brightkite does but they could have their uses if fed the right information.

For instance If I tag restaurants, places of interest or shops that I find online, in a particular area that I think I might be visiting in the future, in Delicious; and events that are going to take me to that area are in my Google Calendar then when the GPS on my phone detects that I am in that area my Google Map [or Latitude] should be able to remind me to check these places out. I can then Tweet comments on these places and see them appear beside the original entries. And tweets mentioning the shop/restaurant/etc concerned can be fed into a Twitter List that I can see fed in situ on the Map. This is the sort of thing that I believe Brightkite was created for but it has limited users and seems to me to be more of a photoblogging site now. It certainly appears to have become more people rather than place orientated and there are more than enough Social Networking sites for that sort of behaviour!

Still maybe the fabled GPhone will appear one day and answer all these wishes? Or is the Google Chrome OS going to end up on a netbook instead? In the meantime I better make sure I have some API/Mash-Up books on my Amazon Wishlist. Before long I hope to be able to produce music/artwork with locational properties, but more about that in a later post.

Zemanta refuses to work in GMail today so there may not be the amount of links here that I'd hoped as I had to add them all manually.

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Filed under  //   API   augmented reality   blogging   geo   geo-tags   Google   Latitude   locational   maps   mash-ups   mobile   photography   Wave   Yahoo Pipes  

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