I don’t imply it it’s really what this title want to express but:
Location-based: because it’s something contextualized and inscribed in a place.
Ringtone: what is represented here is a short melody so, by analogy, it can be thought as a ringtone (although the person who drew it is not that literate in music annotation).
In the end, this can be described as a “physical instantiation of a location-based ringtone”, no device needed!

Just had a meeting with Marc Hottinger about his dataSpaces project. Marc mapped the interactions stored in his mobile phone (communication with antennas, sms, phone calls) on a representation of Lausanne. What is interesting is the notion of “calendar” as represented on the following picture:

Not only the system gives the whole path and the list of events but it also replays day-by-day what happened (well it’s difficult to show this dynamic with a picture):

Why do I blog this? because of my interest in replay tool and of course “geoware” (now that I learnt that word), I find there is an interesting metaphor here, in terms of showing the asynchronous location awareness of people in a different way than Plazes or Jaiku. In my experiments, I have always been amazed by how people can tell interesting things based on this sort of information. Their path of the path of their partners often foster intriguing discussion and it’s quite pertinent to use these “informed opinions” when studying people’s experience of places or certain artifacts,

Yesterday, I attended Geoware 2007, some of my notes (not on every talks but quick highlights of the day).

Ed Parsons gave a good overview of what is meant by “Geoware”, using the term “neogeography”: when geography meets web2.0 and rocket science tech becomes everyday. To him, the most important changes in the last couple of years is the fact that big organizations (Yahoo, Google…) licensed information and made them available for free to the users (through a specific business model). Ed’s point is that “location” could serve as a contextual filter for information stored in databases. A cardinal rule of geographer is “Everything happens somewhere”: that shows the importance of geography. To Ed, the best services won’t be about allowing a person to ask where he/she is but rather to offer a service based on where the person is: location is not an add-on, it’s too difficult to query a map on a cell phone when biking in a city, there is a need to have another model: location should be implicit, less explicit. Porn adopted it already: see the website that propose you people in the vicinity! He also cited an example of a cell phone he’d like to have that would offer him choices depending on the context: for instance if he is stuck in a traffic jam on his way to the airport, he’d like to have a 2 options choice like “delay plane” and “call XX”.

Lukas-Christian Fischer (Plazes) also offered few hints about their strategy. For them, presence is a powerful factor, an answer to establish a contact (prior to communication). It comes down to who did what where, who has done what where and who will be doing stuff where. The 3 functions of Plazes he described are (1) coordination (meeting up with real people), (2) collection (identity from where you’ve been), (3) exploration (finding new corners of the world). Plazes takes location as a social object, this statement has been interestingly thrown out by Sean Treadway and it quite reminds me of Jyri Engestrom’s work (and after a quick chat with them, they referred to jyri…). Besides, they decribed how Plazes is the largest database of hot-spots. What I find good about Plazes (and also about Jaiku) is that the user is in control and that the system convey intentionality (that’s the sort of things I discuss in my talk).

Jeremy Irish presented elements about geocaching (”mark a location and go find it”). From this simple point, things evolve to more complex situations such as: waymarking that allows to attach data to a point, build communities around unique and useful locations in the world, encourages participants to use GPS units to mark locations and take photos, locations are searchable by category.
But, as he said, people want to make puzzle caches more interactive: WHEREiGO: free tools for creating media-rich GPS experiences, instead of marking a point, you create a zone in a region: real-world adventure game, tour guides. His point is to turn a point into an experience. His conclusion: “it’s time to go outside and play”.

Another great talk has been given by Carlo Ratti (MIT Senseable city). Carlo presented different projects they carry out at his lab (RealTime Rome, Mobile Landscape Graz, iSPOTs, iFIND and Wikicity). His lab’s mission is rethinking in a creative way the interface between people, mobile technology and the city. He nicely referred to situationism (homo ludens!) by saying that what they keep from this area is the notion of “environment as flows and less built space”. The project he mentioned are mostly based on how to represent cities using various traces (such as mobile phone calls). In the last one (wikicity), the point if get these data back to citizens (a sort of “feedback control system”),
One of the project that is of interest to me is the AC Milan traces analysis:

“Information about the movement of soccer players on the field during a match can be useful for strategic and physiologic analysis, directed at improving the performance of the players and that of the team. The use of electronic sensing techniques – mostly computer vision – for automatically tracking the players has been an area of active research for many years. An optimum solution, however, has yet to be found. The problem is challenging from a technical point of view because the sensing area is large compared to the moving actors (players), the actors move fast and occlusion and congestion occur frequently.”

Less related to my work and the stuff I like, there was a talk by Morten Kromann Larsen (TNS-Gallup) in which he explained how billboard companies (JCDecaux and Clearchannel) assess the exposure of people to commercial in the streets. The talk was a comparison between “GIS versus GPS”:
1) GIS: people are contacted and interviewed by the phone and they have (at the same time) to go online to draw their daily path in the city on a map. It’s basically a recollection based on people’s memory.
2) GPS: people are given a GPS device they put in heir pocket while wandering around in the city (they only take 50 persons because the cost is higher). There is hence an automatic collection of the movement in space.
Morten then showed slides depicting the results: when comparing the 2 methods, they found the same pattern of behavior: there is a 82% overlap. So they recommend the GIS method as a favored approach, since it’s easier and less demanding from respondents.
I am less interested by the purpose of the trials, but rather by what they guy was saying: how people are good to remember their path is space (especially when you have a person on the phone helping them with cues, landmarks, reminding them their activities…).

A quite good event and a superb organization. Good chat with lots of people!

Here are the slides (3.32Mb) of my talk at Geoware called “The user experience of location-awareness”, a very thoughtful event I’ve been invited to as a speaker by the Innovation Lab. Thanks Ander Morgensen, Christian Lausten and Peder Burgaard for the gig!

The talk was basically a discussion about how multi-user location-aware applications have troubles reaching a more mature market. Starting from s-curves showing side-by-side the evolution of navigation systems (Garmin, TomTom) and location-aware apps, I described how the former are now well established and used by a large number of persons, whereas the latter still has trouble finding its market. The s-curves depicted different “waves” of locative systems, and stated how we’re in a sorta disillusion phase (as represented on the Gartner Hype Cycle). This led me to show different quotes form trend reports that keeps postponing this ideal proximal future of powerful mososo.

Based on my phd research, talks and side experiences, my point was to show 6 problems that makes these applications developed by academic labs or start-ups failed:
1) Privacy issues
2) Lack of critical mass of users (cluster effect)
3) The belief in robust, seamless and perfect infrastructures
4) Bad user interfaces (on mobile devices, plus the fact that maps are difficult to read anyway)
5) Bad user experience (not conveying intentions, lack of granularity, mismatch between people’s representation)
6) Bad integration in people’s practices and context

Playing the party pooper so far, I tried to not dismiss location-awareness but rather bring 5 relevant avenues that we can take as opportunities (and not direct solutions to the problem cited before):
1) Assist, not automate: in terms of privacy what people do not like is the feeling to be seen without the ability to see (Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon) as Michel Foucault argued. BUT people are OK to disclose things when they can control what they see and when they can see others (the masquerade).
2) Seamful design (Matthew Chalmers): reveal the “seams” (limits, boundaries, uncertainties), provide opportunities to show the imperfections, can be used a trick to lie.
3) Beyond GIS information (Kevin Slavin): “Location is more than GIS information”
4) History matters: the asynchronous character of location-awareness have an added value and can be used to create conversations AFTER the events (comments).
5) Beyond humans: we can think about applications for other beings such as animals (blogging pigeons) or to create new connections between the physical environments AND the digital worlds

The picture shows the conference venue, ARoS, the Arhus Kunstmuseum.

(Via Fab), this Area Code) is full of great insights about urban gaming (”big games”), and the user’s apprehension of location-based technologies. There actually three aspects that I’ve found relevant to my research (excerpts are very basic transcriptions of the podcast).

First, Slavin explained how places where space + story

places need stories to look real.
Big games: to make the most real and most fake stories
they are large scale multiplayer real world games, things that transform the space around space in a game space
basically a layer of fiction added on the spatial environment
games with computers in them rather than the other way around

Second, from the user experience point of view, it’s interesting to see how they evaluate when one their game is successful:

we also measured success because people started to cheat (when people screw things, that proves you’re on the right track). the way we’re going to misuse technologies are perhaps the most valuable way that we use them

And third, Mr. Slavin has a very relevant take on location (in the context of location-aware applications such as most of the big games):

location is not just GIS data, whether we’re indoor/outdoor, whether the phone can hear you’re on busy street or not… and build games that draw on that

it may not have been about location but maybe what’s more valuable is dislocation: the most valuable experiences may have to do with disinformation, it might be more interesting/valuable for people to get lost than to know where they’re going, to forget where where they are
maybe the goal here is not emulate the PSP but rather to know what’ different from a PSP and do that
and instead of doing reportage, let’s make it up, there’s something else there,
it’s much more about misrepresentation and accuracy
we’re working on a often wrong version of “here”

I fully agree with this approach, which kind of resonate with the discourse I am building in my PhD dissertation: location is definitely more than what is implied by a dot on a map or x/y coordinates. Where Slavin advocates for expanding the notion of location (for example: to get lost or to forget where one is), my work is more about how the distinction between automated location-awareness and the explicit disclosure by the users. In both cases, these elements ponder the overemphasis lots of people put in location-based applications (especially buddy-tracking or place-tagging)
Why do I blog this? I am currently in the process of finding the right angle for my talk at Geoware (”The user experience of location-awareness”). This is definitely food for thoughts for next upcoming writings/talks about how to go beyond current location-based applications.

Why LBS Applications Fail by David H. Williams is a good overview of issues regarding the problems of location-based applications. The author describes them at the 7 deadly sins…

The Seven Deadly Sins of Location-Based Services. Source: E911-LBS Consulting 2006.

Regarding my own interests (the user experience of location-awareness), here are some excerpts that I found interesting:

Sin #5- Flawed Technical and User Design
This is the failure to design toward the specific value proposition that is important to the target markets. Root causes include:

1. Inattention to use cases of the service, the associated user interface, and the degree of personalization of the service
2. Lack of creativity and innovation
3. Not recognizing all the complexities involved in an LBS deployment: application setup, network and operational processes and systems, business operations and customer service
4. Failure to adapt to realities of wireless device information presentation limitations

Sin #7 - Deficient Marketing
This refers to the inability to get visibility in the marketplace. Root causes include:

1. Taking a mass market approach versus niche product marketing
2. A tendency to adopt a “Build It and They Will Come” mentality, while losing focus on the key value proposition(s)
3. Not recognizing that customer education and giving the customer a sense of personalization is essential

Why do I blog this? I am gathering some thoughts for a talk about the user experience of LBS, the situation is not that different form 2 years ago. The article offer some relevant insights but here are some weird points (like “An example of a company that does a good job of identifying and targeting opportunities is Virgin Wireless, one of Richard Branson’s companies. The company’s vibrant marketing strategy, using billboards and the company’s website, clearly targets teenagers with its “cool” slogans, brightly colored phones and simple plans.”). If that’s a good way to “identity and target opportunities”…

In “Visionary in Residence: Stories” (Bruce Sterling), there are different short stories. In one of them, there is this email discussion about the design of a new category of product based on location-based technology:

If Al has the location and condition of all his possessions cybernetically tracked and tagged in real time, maybe Al is freed from worrying about all his stuff. Why should Al fret about his possessions any more? We’ve made them permanently safe. Why shouldn’t Al loan the lawnmower to his neighbor? The neighbor can’t lose the lawnmower, he can’t sell it, because Al’s embedded MEMS monitors just won’t allow that behavior. (continued)

So now Al can be far more generous to his neighbor. Instead of being miserly and geeky “labeling everything he possesses,” obsessed with privacy–Al turns out to be an open-handed, open-hearted, very popular guy. He doesn’t even need locks on his doors! Everything Al has is automatically theft-proof–thanks to us. He has big house parties, fearlessly showing off his home and his possessions. Everything that was once a personal burden to Al becomes a benefit to the neighborhood community. What was once Al’s weakness and anxiety is now a source of emotional strength and community esteem

Why do I blog this? because the excerpt describes a relevant possible consequences of location-based services that has not been explored so far in what I’ve read concerning their usage.

I’m slightly underwater lately and I missed this news about location-tracker in Second Life:

SLStats comes in the form of a wristwatch, available in Hill Valley Square [in SL] in the Huin sim. Once you register with the service in-world, the watch “watches” where you go, tracking your location as you move around the world, as well as which other avatars you come into contact with. The information is used on the SLStats site to rank most popular regions (among SLStats users, of course), and to track how much time you’ve spent in-world, which you can view at a link like this one, which tracks Glitchy: http://slstats.com/users/view/Glitchy+Gumshoe.

Why do I blog tis? yet another location-awareness tool that I should quote in my dissertation about this topic.

Spotted this morning in Geneva:

It’s written “salot” with two arrows pointing at the windows (with means in fact “salaud”, there is a bad typo, an english transaltion would be “asswipe”).

What’s the equivalent of this with a mobile social software for location tagging?

For geowanking kids: NORANDSANTA is a website that broadcast information about “santa tracking”:

Detecting Santa all starts with the NORAD radar system called the North Warning System. This powerful radar system has 47 installations strung across the northern border of North America. NORAD makes a point of checking the radar closely for indications of Santa Claus leaving the North Pole on Christmas Eve.

It seems that they also use satellites, NORAD jet fighter and “santa cams” (”ultra-cool high-tech high-speed digital cameras that are pre-positioned at many places around the world“). See Paris below:

Why do I blog this? even though this leaves me sorta speechless, it’s yet another XXX-tracking platform.

Parsing tons of papers, articles, documents and pdf that I accumulated in the last few months, I ran across this article in Vodafone’s Receiver: Big Games and the porous border between the real and the mediated by Frank Lantz. In this short piece, the author describes what he means by “big games”, i.e. “Big Games are human-powered software for cities, life-size collaborative hallucinations, and serious fun“. Some excerpts I find pertinent regarding my research:

(picture from a project called “N8Spel” a project by Just van den Broecke, not cited in this paper but I quite like it)

Imaginary places, constructed from code, are now being represented not just as pixel grid windows into synthetic 3D environments, but mapped onto the actual 3D environments in which we live. Called “Big Games”, these large-scale, real-world games occupy urban streets and other public spaces and combine the richness, complexity, and procedural depth of digital media with physical activity and face-to-face social interaction.

He then describes games such as ConqWest, Mogi Mogi, PacManhattan, Superstar, Can You See Me Now, Uncle Roy, Botfighters… And describes how the urge to use spatial environment as a playful space did not come out from the blue: children’s neighborhood games (like Red Rover, hide and go seek, and kickball or Capture the Flag), Assassin/Killer game, skateboarding and Parkour, location-based art activities of the late 20th century, Live action role-playing. And those activities share some common purposes:

a desire to push game experiences beyond traditional boundaries of time and space. But there is another, complementary desire within conventional computer and videogames themselves. Over the last 10 or 15 years, these games have developed a profound obsession with play dynamics of 3D spaces, architecture, and environments. (…) In some ways, Big Games are a natural extension of this obsession with environmental exploration and social dynamics as gameplay subjects.

The author hence describes how mobile and ubiquitous computing technologies are a catalyst for big games creation. And finally, his thought about spatial practices are very interesting:

There is no longer a clear, well-defined boundary between the virtual spaces and interactive systems of our digital experience and the concrete, tangible aspects of our physical experience. Even as high-resolution computer graphics make the simulated worlds inside our computers more realistic, the actual world outside our computers is behaving more and more like data.
(…)
Regardless of the technology with which they are implemented, Big Games reflect a change in perspective brought about by mobile, pervasive, and ubiquitous technologies. Even Big Games that use chalk on sidewalks to make a citywide puzzle, or appropriate the archaic technology of payphones to make a game of urban tactics, are made possible by a shift in how we perceive our environment brought about by the new relationship between space and computing. (…) Whatever else they are, these games are primarily about connecting people – a way to reclaim public space as a site for a new kind of shared experience.

Why do blog this? because it gives a very good summary of “big games”, which I am partly interested in my research (I use big games to study how people collaborate and use location-awareness features). On a different note, it seems that in the location-based/geowankin scene, the term “big” now receives more and more interest. See the “big here challenge” or how Fabien describes it (or even Matt Jone’s video!).
Finally, what the author stress in his conclusion (big games to reclaim public space), is exactly something Mauro and I wrote about three years ago in the following paper:
To Live or To Master the city: the citizen dilemma or in this short pdf report I dropped on the web: Augmenting Guy Debord’s Dérive: Sustaining the Urban Change with Information Technology. The report only focuses on the use of LBS to foster new public space practices.

A good read in the IHT today: Wireless: Can mobile phones give you ‘presence?’ by Thomas Crampton is an article about mobile presence and location awareness.

Though this topic received a fair amount of work in HCI research (my PhD diss is about that very topic), it is now more and more common to see it installed in the paysage (landscape). There are more and more systems that provides those features (both on desktop and mobile devices), and Jaiku (one of the system described in this article) is a relevant example for that matter. The article describe Jaiku, Plazes, Whereify… Some excerpts I found interesting about the design choices:

“Mobile phones have already become the hub for communicating by voice, pictures, video and Internet,” said Mikko Pilkama, the director of multimedia services at Nokia. “Making phones aware of the context for all these activities is the next logical step.”
(…)
Engestrom said that in setting up Jaiku, it became clear that the sharing of such data also raised privacy concerns. “We make sure that you as the user decide whom you share information with,” Engestrom said, adding that individual users own all information stored on Jaiku’s servers and can have it deleted at any time. Users also have the option of shutting off the system for privacy.
(…)
In addition to location-based advertisements, there could be charges for premium features like storing information over longer periods of time, or for sending SMS alerts.

But, of course, things are not simple (as reader of this blog might know):

“I worry that people attribute too deep a meaning to raw information,” said Danah Boyd who researches social media at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. (…) An added risk for the location-announcing services is that people might find themselves unable to break away from following friends or old lovers, Boyd added.

“The problem is that people really, really love stalking,” Boyd said. “When you have just ended a relationship, it is not necessarily healthy to follow the exact location of your ex- lover minute-by-minute on your phone.”

Why do I blog this? nothing really new under the sun here but it seems that Le Web3 (a conference held in Paris last week about technology usage) gave an opportunity to gather relevant people such as Jyri Engestrom and Danah Boyd to discuss their thoughts about LBS with an IHT journalist.

iFind is… “MIT’s new location-based application for friendspotting”, as they describe it (a project coordinated by François Proulx):

iFIND, a project developed at the MIT SENSEable City Lab, aims to improve social networking through some kind of digitally augmented serendipity. Using iFIND, you and your buddies can instantaneously exchange your locations on campus, talk to users nearby, and microcoordinate more effectively. If you are a geek, you will even be able to arrange meetings in real time using the group’s center of gravity!

iFIND aims to give full control of location to the users. It is you who can choose, on a peer to peer basis, when to disclose your individual data and to whom.

Technically speaking, it’s based on PlaceLab:

Your location is derived from the signals that your laptop’s (for example) wireless card detects in its vicinity. Thanks to the high density of WiFi access points on the MIT campus, the software can compute your location accurately (we’d say within a few meters).

It’s kind of weird but after blogging about the “urban radar” I now ran across this Urban Juice project by Mine Danisman Tasar done at the Umea Institute of design (and Philips), which expands the notion of travelogue:

Prior to a trip, the modern nomad can not afford time to get acquainted with a new location. Besides that, it is challenging to be fully prepared for a new place. Urban Juice turns your travel experience into a fun activity by letting you get on-the-spot information and keep a log of your trip. By incorporating a social network of travelers, it provides you with the accumulated information.

There is a lot more to draw from the project report (beware! 23Mb pdf!). It explains the 3 modes of the projects: map (get location information, tag places, document your trip…), menu (travel planning), camera/augmented reality (take picture and document your trip in the camera mode OR get on-the-spot information in the augmented reality mode).

Why do I blog this? it’s yet another system that aim at gathering traces of people’s activity (like location tagging) to share them and create a filtering system about cities and travels.

Via Fabien: Mobile LBS Market by C. Desiniotis, J. G. Markoulidakis from Vodafone, and J-Fr Gaillet from NAVTEQ. The paper describes the mobile market of location-based applications (as opposed to web-based LBS for instance). Overall, it interestingly describes a more down-to-earth vision of the present situation:

mobile LBS were widely predicted to be the most promising “killer applications” in wireless communications. Today, most of these expectations are still not met and a significant delay in the market forecast has incurred. (…) Some of the most important reasons responsible for this turn are summarized as follows:
Poor tracking performance. Current deployed techniques only allow a few hundred meters to a few kilometers accuracy. For the time of writing, very few handsets with advanced location capabilities (e.g. A-GPS) are available in the market while they are offered at high prices.
Inherent customer perception issues. Privacy concerns arise as users are uncomfortable of feeling being watched. Security and location-aware phobia (both consumer and operator) prevent the users from adopting LBS as their usual habits.
Low throughput mobile networks. The unavailability of high capacity networks (that would enable the transfer of multimedia content) is also considered a preventive factor for the wide adoption of LBS. The 3G networks launch and commercial availability was delayed. Further to this, only recently WLAN have started to take up and provide Internet services to crowded hot spots.
Significant investment required. The initial investment and the high deployment costs (in terms of network equipment and marketing campaigns) imposed to MNOs and service providers did not justify the LBS development and market launch (at most markets).
User adoption requires time. Taking as example other successful services, the market should be well educated in order to adopt a new service concept. Therefore, the initial low take-up phase of LBS was unavoidable.
Not well defined business models. Taking into account that the emerging LBS introduced new service concepts, the business rules that would govern the value chain were not clearly defined among the business entities. This caused confusion in the involved players discouraging thus new initiatives.
Unfriendly User Interfaces. Inherent difficulties of mobile devices e.g. for entering queries and displaying results (images, 3D maps, etc.).

Why do I blog this? because it lists very pertinent factors regarding problems about the mobile LBS adoption. I am mostly interested in the “Unfriendly User Interfaces” and I think the authors are maybe a bit too usability-centered and forget that LBS suffer from more holistic “user experience” problems: the failure to be deployed in correspondence with people’s context and practices. And I surely believe that 3D maps won’t help in the short run.

The forecast described are also intriguing expectations (based on a survey: “LBS 2006 Temperature Meter”, LBS Insight Industry Survey, Berg Insight, April 2006):