If you are interested in figure out where the whole Locative Media idea and movement started take a peek at “Beyond Locative Media” by Marc Tuters and Kazys Varnelis. It does go over Ben’s HeadMap Manifesto and picks this line from it:
“Cell phones become internet enabled and location aware, everything in the real world gets tracked, tagged, barcoded and mapped.”
And here a nice summary for the movement:
“Broadly speaking, locative media projects can be categorized under one of two types of mapping, either annotative—virtually tagging the world—or phenomenological—tracing the action of the subject in the world.”
And a motif for the movement:
“Locative media strives, at least rhetorically, to reach a mass audience by attempting to engage consumer technologies, and redirect their power.”
Which sums up a critical view of the current state of disconnectedness in the words of Coco Fusco:
“In the name of a politics of global connectedness, artists and activists too often substitute an abstract ‘connectedness’ for any real engagement with people in other places or even in their own locale.”
Or Calgary, Victoria, Vancouver, New Zealand… The coverage map for British Columbia and Alberta shows what is currently available and what is planned. The Canadian-based GPS Tour Guide developed and distributes the product/service.
“The hardware, a handheld computer running Microsoft Windows Pocket PC, will be rented to tourists in Western Canada at $49 CAN for the first day and $35 CAN for each additional day.”
Install the PDA to the windshield, plug the AC adapter and turn it on. Select a tour and check the comments in English or German coming out from the FM radio according to the G&M story below.
“The tours are ‘themed’ to be organized and logical rather than just a random selection of facts and figures. There is a mixture of human history, natural history, current issues, quirky tales, and more. You will enjoy a far more fulfilling experience than someone who is traveling without the guide.”
Reservations are suggested and you can also pick the PDA at Vancouver and Calgary airports. Globe & Mail has the story.
New Zealand
Kruse developed a similar system for travelers to New Zealand. According to their National Tourism Organisation website:
“Auckland-based Jonathan Kruse has developed a talking tour guide based on GPS. Kruse’s systems are available for hire: plug it into the cigarette lighter and drive around New Zealand listening to recorded narrations.”
Check the current coverage and sample comments. Wired wrote about it.
Montgomery, Alabama
But these are not the first GPS guided tours to come up. The Montgomery (Alabama) Area Transit Systems (MATS) launched about a year ago the Lightning Route developed by IntelliTours and Spotlight Mobile.
The tour of Montgomery includes “audio narration at 45 locations around downtown, recounting Civil War and Civil Rights histories”. Montgomery is the place where “in 1954, Martin Luther King accepted the pastorale of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church” according to his biography at the Nobel Prize website.
S.F. & Downtown Seattle
We covered the GoCars from Frisco a while ago and it seems that Gray Line also has walking tours for Downtown Seattle.
Before we get flooded with location-based advertisements head straight into the HeadMap Manifesto. A 100-page PDF with quite a punch for your neurons. Not news, but that doesn’t really count when one is trying to design the future or just “find sadness in New York”.
If you feel like performing a little B&E with your old receiver, check this article on how to add an external antenna to a GPS unit.
It is based on a previous mod for the Talon GPS, sold by Rand McNally for the Palm III a while ago but not available currently and probably hard to find nowadays [There is at least one on eBay going on by Apr 1st].
You might try with a “suitable receiver” as suggested, but as the comments to the article made clear, a bit tad risky.
GameBoy, Explorist, Meridian
For a better set of hacks check this site which describes how to use GPS with the GameBoy Advance (GBA), creating custom maps for the Magellan Explorist and tons of good materials on Garmin tools and receivers plus utilities including the shareware AddMagMap a tool you can use to “add custom objects to Magellan MapSend maps”.
Great site!
Another reason not to have GPS in your car? Oregon is studying the use of GPS data to tax gas at the pump.
Tricky. Well, the Brits had some other ideas about this too.
Check the article at the N.Y. Times and the comments from this post at the DailyTech.
On the footsteps of Sirf’s announcement that it had acquired TrueSpan, now Mio is getting ready to produce handhelds capable of displaying TV brodcasts, either from DVB-T (digital video broadcasting-terrestrial) or DVB-H (DVB-handheld):
“The screen will be divided into two parts, one for GPS navigation and the other for receiving mobile TV, [according to Mio’s president Samuel Wang]”
But this won’t be a walk in the park as explained on this article from EE Times Asia (free registration). Meanwhile just imagine the possibilities (but now stay tuned for these ads from our sponsors…).
From DigiTimes
I did say that 2006 was going to be the year when the P in GPS would spell Privacy. Guess I wasn’t too far off.
NY cabbies are protesting the use of GPS in their taxis (yes, they have to pay for it to be installed from their own pockets) alleging discrimination and possible misuse of the data.
Weird times.
To substantiate my claim that if you have an A-GPS cell phone turned on it can be tracked here is a recent article on the subject that shed some more light on it. The point being that you don’t need to be on a call for that.
If you try to add things up you will notice that something is missing: remember the case when Sprint didn’t want to give the location of a cell phone sitting in a hijacked car with a 10-month old baby inside.
Then read the N.Y. Judge rulling about why he granted permission for cell tracking:
“Gorenstein […] said that because the cell phone user’s location is only available to police when a call is in progress, and because the location information is only a rough estimate, such tracking is permissible under the Fourth Amendment.”
If your provider is selling, sharing, opening up, doing whatever it isn’t saying with its PDE (Position Determining Entity) data, the server that keeps the tabs on your phone, it is a good time to ask about it.
Dealt TrueSpan, “which makes chips enabling cell phones to receive TV signals” as announced by Red Herring.