Top 10 Trends: Locating You

Top 10 Trends: Locating You

Location-based technologies have given birth to new games, learning systems, and public services.
December 31, 2005 Print Issue

In a schoolyard in Bristol, England, young boys and girls scramble across a playground, running to avoid an African lion. These 11- and 12-year-olds are not fleeing an animal with real claws and teeth, but a virtual lion that has popped up on their handheld computing devices.

The children run through a digital landscape created as an experiment by scientists at Hewlett-Packard’s labs in Bristol. They listen intently to roaring lions and bird calls through headphones and view pictures of the African Savannah on their handhelds. Every few steps across the yard, the children encounter different scenes of wildlife and ecology digitally mapped onto the playground surface and activated by built-in GPS technology. In doing so, the kids learn from firsthand, albeit virtual, encounters with African wildlife and ecology.

This digital African safari foreshadows the next wave of location-based services being readied for consumers and businesses, a wave that spans gaming, entertainment, and new media. The coming phase of this technology promises a bounty of applications with strong search capability and tools that help make location a part of every digital encounter.

Asia Leading the Way ABI Research estimates that the global location-based market will grow to $8 billion in 2010 from the current market of $981 million. The Asia-Pacific region currently accounts for 55 percent of the world’s subscribers. Already, consumers in Asia have access to a variety of location-based cellular services, helping parents locate their children, providing directions for drivers, and ferreting out the closest movies or restaurants. In Japan and South Korea, for example, millions of subscribers pay monthly fees to service providers for location-based services. In South Korea, SK Telecom is estimated to have 12 million to 15 million GPS phones with access to 150 location-based services. And analysts expect SK Telecom to push location services in the United States when it launches cellular services in 2006. What about Europe? In the past few years, attempts to popularize location services on the Continent have failed, largely because of a lack of accuracy—locations were pinpointed only to within 500 to 700 meters (1,600 to 2,300 feet). The outlook for more accurate location services is bright, especially with the launch of the Galileo satellite expected in 2008. In recent years, wireless providers have been promoting location-based services to help differentiate their service offerings. But the adoption hasn’t been as rapid as market research analysts predicted, especially in the United States. The top three wireless carriers in the U.S.—Cingular, Verizon Wireless, and Sprint Nextel—all seem hooked on the notion of next-generation location-based services. Sprint Nextel offers driving directions via its cell phones in selected locations and in November Verizon announced three new map applications for mobile wireless customers that help identify traffic snarls and locate low-priced gas stations. Landscape Interaction or Surveillance? New digital location services and clever games that permit cell phone users to interact with the physical landscape are not far off. Applications that capture consumer interest will surely seize the market opportunity in 2006. One possibility for the tourism industry is the ability to recreate historical events. Another HP Bristol Lab project takes children and adults to the Bristol Riots of 1831, which lasted three days and cost hundreds of lives. Students walk around historic Queen Square listening to Riot! on wireless PDAs with headphones. Each step through the landscape triggers the recreation of a segment of the event with video, vivid sound effects, and strong language designed to immerse the person in the scene. “It is like a time machine, turning the clock back 174 years,” says Phil Stenton of HP’s research labs in Bristol. However, as these applications become available, they will raise new issues about how much companies and governments can track the movement and habits of mobile users. “There are also incredible intelligence-gathering ramifications with the widespread adoption of the technology that raise serious privacy concerns,” says Jody Westby, president and CEO of Global Cyber Risk Group, a security consulting firm. For adults, it may not be virtual lions but a virtual Big Brother that stalks them.

Top 10 Trends: Online Games, Flash Memory, Internet Video, Wireless Net, Precision Drugs, Micro-Payments, Locating You, Sensor Motes, Supply Chains, Nutrigenomics