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Michael Liebhold on building a tricorder - the geographic web

location based services


Michael Liebhold from the Institute for the Future is less interested in virtual worlds, than laying a metaverse on top of the real universe. His dream is the “Star Trek Tricorder” model - step anywhere in the world and get cultural, political, historical, economic and social information about that place.
This idea suggests moving away from the “console view of the world”, assuming that the “world computer” is a handheld, mobile device. This device helps you discover the informational labels that have been put onto the physical world. This layered cartographic data is a web attached to physical places and physical objects, which allows you to access those layers of data when you’re in the world, looking at a store, a building or a natural vista.
This new hypermedia is made from web objects - pages, soundfiles, videofiles - that are geocoded with latitude, longitude and elevation data. It could be accessible to a variety of devices - smart phones, automobile dashboards, body extensions - but these devices need to know where you are. GPS is a great start, but it doesn’t work in buildings, or in urban canyons. Your phone knows where you are - triangulating between cell towers to tell medical emergency services your precise location - but it won’t tell you, even if you ask the network very nicely. But a new possibility is that you could triangulate the location of a Wifi device based on pingtime to various base stations - Placelab has released a toolkit that allows you to determine location based on the location of known Wifi basestations.
To move towards this new world, we need two other things - really good map data - either entered in new, open source formats or converted from old, closed formats, and geocoded information, either newly created or converted from the legacy, pre-geocoded web. GeoRSS is one of the likely formats for this new data - a simple coordinate system that can point to anything connected to the web:
<>45.256 -71.92< /georss >
Finding this data isn’t going to be easy - there’s no Google for spacial data, and there’s no metadata currently available for much of the information that exists.
But huge steps are being made - there’s an open source version of Google Earth - WorldWind - and both Google Earth and WWML have cubic cartography markup languages, useful for building 3D objects that render realistically in those browers. And with 2D maps, hackers are creating amazing geographic mashups, which help visualize voting patterns, environmental issues and land ownership - a project in Mumbai helped discover that a piece of land that was supposed to be a public park and had been used for private development.
As users get better at creating geocoded content, there’s the possibility that users start “creating spacial memory”, building paths through the world that are annotated with the cultural memory of the people from that place.
There are also lots of commercial applications to layering information on top of the physical world. Having data about the microclimes in a field makes it possible to customize your planting and harvesting to maximize yield. Having data about where a web user is through geolocating via wifi lets you deliver highly targeted ads to those users… which may be what Google is relying on in providing free Wifi in San Francisco. RFID tagging can add a layer of information on created spaces - warehouses, stores and labs - that can make business more efficient.
Michael’s fantasy is a world where we drape fantasy worlds across the real world - pervasive games and locative art that allow people to play using city streets as the gameboard. Geocaching is a simple example of this, and new live-action games, like the PacMan game, PacManhattan, which turned the East Village into a live action game.
For folks interested in this world of the geographic web, he recommends a del.icio.us feed - starhill_blend - which tries to keep track of the dozens of intersecting topics that surround the geographic web.

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5 Responses to “Michael Liebhold on building a tricorder - the geographic web”
Open the Future Says: May 5th, 2006 at 7:23 pm
Metaverse Roadmap Underway
The first day of the Metaverse Roadmap Project is hurtling to its conclusion, and it’s been a mixed bag of small group discussions and plenary lectures, all playing blind men around an elephant, groping out what the “metaverse” future could…
Paula Perlis Says: May 8th, 2006 at 4:59 pm
MichaelI love this concept!I met this man Michael Smolens whose comapany dotsub.com can create create subtitles for any moving image..you guys should meet!
Mostly..I think your idea would help everyone feel more grounded in new settings..and provide a deeper richer experience.I am hoping to go to the Boston Conference this weekend. Are you speaking?I look forward to learning more about your site!
Best regards,
Paula Perlis
…My heart’s in Accra » Your language or mine? Says: May 10th, 2006 at 7:59 pm
[…] My friend SJ Klein and I spent a chunk of yesterday evening talking about Wikimedia’s language issues. SJ is a wikipedian and a language enthusiast - a polyglot; I am embarrasingly monolingual (and, lately, have been having difficulty spelling common names in my own native language. Sorry, Michael…) That key difference aside, we’re both interested in how generative media projects on the web include speakers of as many languages as possible. […]
…My heart’s in Accra » Virtual Darfur, and why I don’t get invited to technology conferences anymore Says: May 10th, 2006 at 11:05 pm
[…] I was invited to the summit because I’m a metaverse skeptic. (Not the whole metaverse. I firmly believe that the sort of real-world metadata applications Michael Liebhold is interested in are important, and that three-D simulations of the real world are very important. And I can certainly acknowledge that lots of people are finding MMO games interesting and exciting.) Specifically, I’m very skeptical about Second Life, the platform which garners the most attention when people talk about the immersive web. […]
…My heart’s in Accra » An audio tour of Morrisania Says: May 18th, 2006 at 2:39 pm
[…] But it also made me think about Michael Liebhold’s presentation at the Metaverse Roadmap summit and the idea of a “blanket of data” that could overlay physical reality. How does walking through a neighborhood change when you know its rich musical history from half a century before? What if your cellphone buzzed to let you know you were passing by the block where Melle Mel recorded “The Message”? Would access to this layer of historical data make people more likely to explore parts of cities they don’t know about and have never explored? […]
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