Tag: headmap

Locative Games

JOYity uses the GPS in the Android phone to let you play games and go on adventures based on your location in the real world. JOYity is a gaming platform in its own right. When you download the app you can play 1 of 3 games (YouCatch, Roads of San Francisco, City Race Munich) or design your own. In Roads of San Francisco, for instance, you have to go around the city picking up clues. When you get to a destination, a text or picture message tells you where to go next. It is a Scavenger Hunt with a story line. You can also design your own Scavenger Hunt games and play them with large groups of people.

the mainstream discovers locative. can headmap be far behind?

Enkin

“Enkin” introduces a new handheld navigation concept. It displays location-based content in a unique way that bridges the gap between reality and classic map-like representations. It combines GPS, orientation sensors, 3D graphics, live video, several web services and a novel user interface into an intuitive and light navigation system for mobile devices.

wow. headmap, here we come

Playing tag

But to those building so-called “mobile” social networks, it is nirvana, linking virtual communities such as Facebook or MySpace with the real world. The idea is not new, but so far such services have not gained much traction. They have to be able to pinpoint people in order to work, but satellite positioning does not work indoors. More importantly, it is hard for such a service to gain critical mass: why join, if it does not already have many users?

A new generation of mobile social networks may have found ways to overcome these barriers. One is Aka-Aki, a start-up based in Berlin. Users of its service download a small program onto their mobile phone. The software then uses Bluetooth, the short-range radio technology built into many mobile phones, to check whether any friends or other members with similar interests are within 20m. If so, the program pulls down the person’s picture and whatever information he or she is willing to reveal from the firm’s website.

Where the economist gets all headmap.

Google LBS Services

After reading comments and looking at the overall architecture view of the framework, I decided to investigate the android.location API a little more closely. The first item is interesting because it would allow you to conserve battery life and, I assume, toggle between (free) GPS positionning and perhaps (not so free) cell-tower triangulation. The second item is where the interesting stuff can happen. Imagine an application that knows the location of all your friends and the location of their favorite spots along with the permission associated to all those locations. When you are moving around the mobile application on the device could register some intents (by obtaining specific lat/long information from a dedicated server) to alert you of interesting places but also of nearby friends.

Wikicity

Rome’s Notte Bianca is all about the city, the people and the events. How are the people moving within their city in response to this exceptional pulse of activities and events happening? Below you see a project that has been projected live on screen during the night of September 8th in Rome. Overlaid on the map of Rome, you see different dynamic real time data as a fast forward view of that night.

anonymized cell phone records, etc, as art