Augmented Reality App Shows Recovery.gov Funding Near You
Want to see who got part of the hundreds of billions of dollars in Recovery.gov funds near you? Now you can point your iPhone 3Gs or Android phone in any direction and see the closest recipients, thanks to the publication of the official data set onto the Layar Augmented Reality platform. Sunlight Labs published the marked-up information and the results are fascinating.
This may be the most accessible way to view this information yet. I must confess, I am surprised to see that an auto shop and a Bible college in my neighborhood received a lot more money than the technical college, eco-car company and Native American youth program down the road. Fire up Layar on your phone, search for "Sunlight" and you can see the effects of the funding program on your own neighborhood. This is the kind of thing that standardized data makes possible.
As Sunlight explains: "Layar is an application that overlays your view of the real world with waypoints representing your favorite coffee place, the movie theatre you're trying to find, or in this case, where some of that $787 billion from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act is going."
Fortunately, the Recovery funding information was published by the Federal government in KML format - making it easy for 3rd parties like Sunlight to mash it up with services like Layar. I wish there was an option in the interface to Google the name of the recipient, not just look up its location. Right now there's no information made immediately available beyond name, sum and address.
Sunlight was deeply critical of the initial release of data by the federal government this Summer. This is a great example of what kinds of things they and other groups can do when they get their hands on data.
So how does funding in your neighborhood look?
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> This may be the most accessible way
> to view this information yet
Really? I mean, I'm sure it's fun to look at the circles and everything, but IMO the only sensible and meaningful way to consider this information is in a database, or at least in a spreadsheet, with associated analytic tools. The most obvious mash-up is the tired old display to Google maps.
I don't see why you'd want to know if there happen to be aid recipients in your local area. Are you going to visit them or something? Is it really useful to know that some bank or industry that got aid has an office nearby? Who really cares if they are nearby or not?
Unfortunately recovery.gov didn't make it possible to link back to detailed information on recipients, but I liked your "Google This Recipient" suggestion and have now added it.
Thanks for the writeup/feedback.
James, that's great.
Anonymous, knowing these recipients are physically nearby me puts them in a meaningful context. I stood outside my house and it meant something to me to know which groups where in which direction. A database or a Google Map are certainly useful - but do you know how few people would care about that? Hardly anyone cares about things related to the functioning of government anyway. This post has had 250 pageviews in 3 hours, thank goodness it's ok for me to occasionally write about important things that aren't popular - or else writing about recovery.gov data at all would be a failure for me to do my job. Finding a cool-factor for this data? Sounds worthwhile to me.
> Hardly anyone cares about things related to the
> functioning of government anyway.
Very true, and very sad.
I agree with Sunlight that the data provided on recovery.gov are quite weak. But I just don't see how displaying local aid recipients through Layar will improve government transparency or present any useful information at all, either to citizens at large or to analysts, since any given view through Layar will be of such an insignificant percentage as to be meaningless.
The only value I can imagine for the app is bringing home the reality that there are in fact aid recipients nearby, but that is to me a rather insignificant value add, and also one that very few users are likely to explore.
The whole concept was evolved on its own.
Once augmented reality become success, many other ventures will be focusing it and will be developing many applications for it.
This is the whole new concept and people needs to do lot of research on it.