Location aware
From ETS
Contents |
Possible projects
Overheard at PSU
Users could select their PSU location and share small messages. Messages may be responses to a "Question of the Day". Submitted messages could be viewable by the public, sorted by location. This would probably be easy to implement with a drupal, using locations as taxonomy.
Scenario for 'Topic of the Week'
Sarah had an hour break in between her two Monday morning classes. She sat down in the HUB and pulled out her iPhone to check the Collegian’s new topic of the week. Sarah enjoyed participating in the discussion of each topic, and liked the challenge of keeping her comments brief (only 140 characters were allowed). She pulled up her “Topic of the Week” application with a couple finger taps. This week’s topic appeared on her screen: “What is your favorite book, and why?” Sarah didn’t even have to ponder the first part of the answer: she had loved George Orwell’s 1984 since high school. But, the question of why exactly she did, and how she could fit that into 140 characters, was a challenge. She tapped the “Respond to this Topic!” button, and pulled up the virtual keypad on her iPhone screen. She began typing: “My favorite book is 1984 because…” she tried several explanations, and found them all to be too long. Eventually she found one succinct enough to work: “My favorite book is 1984 because it challenges our ideas about truth and control. Who could forget the notion of ‘doublethink’?” Counting spaces, it was 127 characters, just 13 characters short of the maximum. Perfect. She posted her answer.
Sarah then browsed through some of the other responses that this week’s query had already generated. She saw one person, identified as “Steve R.” had written about Animal Farm, another famous Orwellian work about political revolution. She tapped the “Map” function and found that this other Orwell fan had enabled his location sensor, and he was also in the HUB, in another seating area. Feeling adventurous, Sarah decided to find him so they could discuss their favorite books.
Links
- Location Aware hot team whitepaper - http://ets.tlt.psu.edu/wp-content/uploads/psuets_locationawaretech.pdf
- Location Aware hot team links - http://del.icio.us/tag/locationhotteam
- MIT's ifind - http://ifind.mit.edu/
- Really cool browser-based software. Does much of what we discussed. - http://metosphere.com/blog/2008/04/10/iphone-location-browser/
