Place-based Communications
Overview
Most places today are dumb when it comes to knowing who’s there and how to communicate with them. As soon as your ticket is scanned at the Dallas Cowboys Stadium, the place (i.e. the stadium) basically has no clue about you anymore. Yes, a human can find out where you seat is and go find you if necessary, but beyond that they won’t know your whereabouts, what you needs are, and how to communicate with you.
Whereas my projects at the MIT Media Lab are more advanced and complex than pretty much most place-based technologies we see today, I believe there are a lot of low-hanging fruits that we can solve now (and that many startups are trying to solve currently). With the rise of location-based social networking tools, this topic is not going to go away any time soon. I wish every place would experiment so we can get the futuristic versions during our lifetimes.
The following are some projects I did for place-based communications.
- Real-time Backchannels
- Mobile Venue Guides
Real-time Backchannels
How do we gather what visitors think in real-time at places like museums? I designed and developed these real-time backchannel installations for an exhibit at The Tech Museum in San Jose. The exhibit itself was very interesting - users around the world created their concept exhibit in Second Life and the best ones were selected and implemented. The backend technology developed was very similar to Twitter - a number of channels of feeds that users/programs can subscribe to.
Mobile Venue Guides
With the iPhone, we can replace all those physical maps, fliers and save some trees - all of these information should and will be living in our phones within the next few years, I predict. We developed some early apps for real conferences. The following are screenshots of an app we did for the Boston Music Conference:
