The Coming World of Mobile Sensors
At Supernova 2008 this week we got a glimpse of what’s next for mobile; and it has little to do with hardware like the iPhone, software like Google’s open-source operating system Android, mobile platforms put forth by Apple, Google, Nokia, Research in Motion, and the carriers.
What’s coming is life profound. Put billions of sensors in cell phones - regardless of hardware, operating system, or carrier - and affect the way we understand traffic or the weather.
Syndicated from last100, our digital lifestyle blog
With continued advances in chipsets, accelerometers, compasses, we can change the way we interact virtually with the physical world around us. We can turn monthly cell phone bills, which are difficult to use beyond paying, into living information integrated into our working and personal lives and social networks.
“We’re just getting started,” said Bob iannucci, Nokia’s chief technology officer.
Iannucci, a computer industry veteran, feels like “I am kind of watching the same movie” as the mobile industry transforms itself from early hardware and software into technology deeply ingrained into our lives and the world around us.
In one example Iannucci discussed adding mobile sensors in cell phones that can detect any number of things — location and movement, barometric pressure and the weather around us, even our own personal health. What we will have in the near future are near-field communication, indoor positioning, and environmental analysis.
Iannucci mentioned a recent project involving Nokia, the world’s leading handset maker, and students from UC Berkeley. Nokia planted 100 N95 smartphones into 100 cars used by 150 students. These cell phone “probes” were able to measure real-time traffic.
Imagine if tens of thousands of data points from motorists in an area were collected, anonymized, uploaded to servers for aggregation and analysis, then pushed back to individual users. The phone, which already knows your route to work and your daily schedule, will be able to tell you that a traffic snarl is forming on the 405 and that you’ll never make your 9:30 meeting with a client in time — so here’s an alternate route.
In another example Iannucci noted that barometric sensors could be placed in cell phones — you can already buy sports watches from Suunto with weather sensors — that will monitor the environment around you. Include your data point with billions across the U.S. and the science of weather prediction undergoes a profound change.
“The ability to move information changes societies and livelihoods,” Iannucci said.
Cell phones can also impact the world around us in ways we cannot see, at least physically. Dean Terry, the director of the Mobile Lab at the University of Texas at Dallas, demonstrated the use of mobile devices in augmented reality, or the ability of people to leave behind virtual artifacts like text, photos, video, avatars, and game clues for people to discover with their phones.
As an example, you can enter a building, view the lobby through your cell phone, and see messages and art pieces left behind by others for you to see and enjoy. Or, if you’re at a conference downtown, you can view a restaurant or bar through a mobile device and see comments made by other diners and patrons on food, service, atmosphere, anything they want to leave behind.
“Imagine what it would look like at the Washington Monument if people left behind their comments,” Terry said.
In a more practical, immediate example, Jason Devitt of Skydeck showed an example of data generated by your cell phone — the calls you make, to whom, when, how long — and how this information can be mixed with your address book and social network to become more dynamic.
See also: ReadWriteWeb's interview with Skydeck's Jason Devitt
“You can see who you talk to most frequently, who is most important to you, and you can drop out the noise,” Devitt said. “All friends are not equal. Some are more important than others.”
This post is syndicated from last100, our digital lifestyle blog covering Internet TV, digital music, Mobile Web and more. You can subscribe to last100 here.
Top image taken from Augmented Reality: My Mobile Pet; Flickr video by Dean Terry
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This sort of capability is what I described on another thread here, about mobile context-awareness (in which location-awareness is a sub-category) via the use of autonomous software agents. Context awareness will be huge, no doubt about it, such as automated recommendation, for instance.
An example, is when a person goes into to any supermarket (where this supermarket does subscribe to a mobile awareness service), and his/her mobile device is fully aware that it is currently in a super-market, the device activates its grocery-shopper-assistant agent to communicate (automated) with the super-market-help-desk-assistant agent to find out if there are interesting (only to the owner of the device, perhaps based on his/her past buying patterns) items on sale on the day. The super-market-help-desk-assistant agent, might return a list of interesting items back to the device owner's grocery-shopper-assistant agent to be relayed to the owner about the prices of the sales items, ie, the agent displays those special prices on screen (or by other means) to the device's owner/user.
With this type of service, the device user/owner, doesn't have to waste time in going thru a huge list from the super-market's help desk to find out interesting sales items to him/her. The device, does sense its location (becomes aware) and can tell that the user is in a supermarket and not in a movie theater, so it could try and communicate with the appropriate super-market help-desk agent to seek info on sales items on the day rather than trying to communicate with movie theater's help desk agent to find out movie screening times. So, the accuracy of device's self-awareness is important. There are tons of research materials in this domain that have been published in the last few years.
Here is another example, that I have just cut & paste the abstract from this link.
Abstract:
This describes the context-aware mobile tourist application COMPASS that adapts its services to the user's needs based on both the user's interests and his current context. In order to provide context-aware recommendations, a recommender system has been integrated with a context-aware application platform. We describe how this integration has been accomplished and how users feel about such an adaptive tourist application.
The Skydeck's service, is neither location-aware nor generally context-aware at all, so I don't see the usefulness of this service. There is not much point in knowing the social graph of your past calls, because there is nothing to be gained from it.
We've been saying this for years and have already built the solution that enables this "contextual information" to be easily shared to any Web service.
All this is required are two components - a widget that reads the sensor information and a browser plug-in that takes that data and sends it to the web service as part of the original web page request.
The simplicity of this approach is that it adds contextual data in real time to the HTTP protocol. Protecting the privacy of the mobile user is also easily control. The widget has a simple on/off check box and all data is encrypted in transport (inside the HTTP request headers).
You can see how easy this is to do by looking at our web site.
Cheers,
Peter
www.5o9inc.com
Environmental sensors built into mobile phones make a lot of sense, since together with GPS positioning, and universal communication capabilities they turn the devices into spimes. It will be important to see if the industry gets fragmented and only after losing many years reunite behind a given interoperable standard.
We should soon see mobile phones with a CO2 sensor from Blue Telephony / Onyx Innovation, which will be based on our open specification for the data collection and aggregation protocol.
It is exciting to see the Internet Of Things becoming quickly a reality!
David
"There is not much point in knowing the social graph of your past calls, because there is nothing to be gained from it."
Don't forget to call your mother.
Alas Visitthebest is a good site to work ...got my important information about Virtual World Games through your user friendly site….keep your good works yar
Does anyone know how I would site this article?