IAP 2006 Rethinking Location Based Services

 As advanced, location-aware, mobile devices make computing power both personal and ubiquitous, new opportunities arise to offer services to citizens based on their location. In 2006, the MIT Mobile Experience Lab, partnering with Alcatel–now Lucent–held a workshop in Paris to explore the possibilities for location-based services.

In the past five years, a number of location-sensing technologies have made their way into the mobile device market. The most familiar of these is GPS, which now comes standard in every new iPhone. Connected, location-aware devices can be an exciting and powerful platform for services of many different types, from content-generation and sharing, to tags that tie together the physical and virtual spaces.

In 2006, the MIT Mobile Experience Laboratory partnered with Alcatel for a workshop in Paris to generate and develop ideas for services that could be delivered based on location. Students from MIT collaborated with researchers from Alcatel’s Research and Innovation Division in multicultural, pluridisciplinary teams. The groups came up with and shared a number of ideas with one another.

ComplemenTV is a framework for incorporating mobile devices into broadcast television content. Individuals can use their mobile devices to have an enhanced TV viewing experience without disturbing other viewers. Very Smart Tags is a concept that allows people to imbue their surroundings with ambiently intelligent “smart tags” as a way to store messages and memories–in photo, video, or text form–in specific locations. Personal Content Generating and Sharing provides a framework allowing people with mobile devices to better produce and share content: photos, audio, video, etc., thus creating a vast shared archive of content, generated in real-time.

2006

Paris, France