receiver magazine      #21 | Space is the place!

Dan Simmons has been a BBC journalist for 14 years, working in local and national radio and on the rolling TV channel, BBC News. He joined the corporation's flagship technology show, Click, as a reporter and producer in 2004. His main area of interest is the mobile phone market. He has three hobby horses when it comes to any consumer technology: ease of use, ease of use, and ease of use. And what could be easier than applications that just run by themselves? That's how Dan became fascinated by location services that cover his leisure activities. So, what about you? Feel like tracking yourself?

Website: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/click_online

Illustration by Lars Uebags ...........................................................................................................................................................................

GPS is used for many extremely important things: guiding aircraft, ships, or cars; monitoring goods as they are delivered around the world; and telling us where the nearest coffee shop is. Its job to date has been to place us in context with our surroundings so we may make better decisions; turn left; call a client to say their package will be late; or to give coffee a miss. There are already hundreds of products and applications that help us do this, all working in the here and now. But can GPS be fun as well as functional? And can it help us make sense of our lives, rather than simply tell us where we happen to be?

I believe, as GPS gets more personal and embedded in our everyday lives, primarily through the mobile phones and laptops we carry with us, so a fresh historic perspective of where and when will become apparent. Put another way, we have a new tool that will readily offer up an exact history of where we have been and perhaps even recognise what we were doing. Ahem ... I'm getting ahead of myself: a diary that writes itself!? Pah!



Carving out a position for GPS

So there I was at the top of a black run in a beautiful Alpine resort. I don't really do "blacks" but something always pushes me on, as if to prove something. On this occasion, it was my "we were born on skis" friends who were egging me on. They then bombed off, wiggling their backsides and I was left to consider my options: the sensible red; or the death-defying-icy bobsleigh-run of a black before me. Of course I took the black; of course my friends were having far too much fun to appreciate my bravery/foolhardiness; and of course they did not believe my version of events, come the traditional après-ski bar crawl that followed. But that evening I produced the evidence. I had signed up to what was then (in 2005) a new service which would track not only which slopes I had skied but in which order and the average speed down each. The application ran on my phone, with a separate GPS receiver provided. Bluetooth completed the circuit. It wasn't completely accurate – some of the runs hadn't been picked up (dropped signal?) and my phone had run out of juice too early – but there it was, a map of the slopes and my little red line down that (now) "impossibly lethal" black run.

The bragging rights were mine and GPS bought me beer that night, in a roundabout sort of way. Today apps like www.slopetracker.com do a similar thing, recording your top speed, calories burned, and total mileage as well. There are similar apps for golfers too, but that's when my zigzagging gets me really depressed.

The new buzzword: sportstronics

Location finding has added a new dimension to a growing market being dubbed "sportstronics". A completely new range of keep fit gadgets is blossoming, not least in the field of running. The Garmin Forerunner not only monitors the distance you travelled, your speed, and the calories burned but, using GPS and Google Maps once you have finished, you can see the route you took. In conjunction with the heart monitor, details of your condition at each stage in a run can be compared. Now these standalone gadgets are prime targets to be replaced by our mobile phones.

OK, they may not yet be as sophisticated, but with GPS on board you'd only need to hook up a wireless heart monitor and suddenly we're not buying new kit, just a downloadable app. The Samsung F110 MiCoach phone suggests that the South Koreans are on the right path. It has a tiny "personal trainer" on board and will pick songs from your library to match your running pace. Wayfinder Active, a free app, does a similar job turning your mobile into an all-knowing personal training guru (http://www.wayfinder.com). Maximum, average, and current speeds are stored, together with altitude, calorie burn, and the route you took, just in case you get lost. All this info is uploaded while you are on the move (if you have an internet connection) and collated for you in a rather useful training diary.

And Nokia's Sports Tracker (Beta) app http://sportstracker.nokia.com combines the best of both worlds. Got a GPS phone? Just download the app. No GPS? Just buy the satellite receiver and connect via Bluetooth. Again, all your vital details are recorded and presented in a rather flashy display so you can huff and puff over something pretty. It also lets you add photos, which it places on your route in the position where they were taken, thanks to geotagging. In future, Nokia promises to let you upload your current position and the "track" on which you are running to your blog in real-time, so you won't have to make it to the Olympics to enjoy live coverage.

Got an iPhone? There are currently more than 300 health and fitness apps for the iPhone 3G, many taking advantage of its accelerometer and GPS receiver.

Now for the fun part

The fun side of GPS is now beginning to shine through. Yes, it's damned useful in getting us from A to B, but what if we don't know which letter we want to get to? What if we don't care? In that moment, we often turn GPS off, as it's a technology born of necessity (or, in my case, panic)… but that, my friends, is beginning to change. Microsoft's Photosynth is perhaps one of the best arguments for just leaving GPS "on" in the background and then having done so, you are suddenly able to bring a whole new world to life. When taking pictures, cameras with GPS or Wi-Fi positioning on board are still just used as cameras, but upload the photos to Photosynth (http://photosynth.net/) and because they've been geotagged with the exact co-ordinates of where they were taken, this ingenious bit of software uses your photo as one piece of a puzzle. It searches other databases, like the photo-sharing site Flickr and creates a wide vista (if you'll excuse the pun), or 360o vision of the location. You can then move around that virtual area and explore; relive; have fun.

At this year's BBC Mashed (http://mashed08.backnetwork.com/) event, where developers get together and create something new by combining existing technologies, I saw a live Snakes game. In the early days of mobiles, and indeed video games themselves, there was a game where you were a snake, travelling around the screen eating food and scoring points. Each time you ate some food, you became longer. The object of the game was to keep snaking around the tiny screen without colliding into your own tail. At Mashed, two developers showed us this in the real world using mobile phones with GPS. The real world is slightly bigger than a mobile phone screen so this was a two player game where each player had to "entrap" the other by leaving him nowhere to go but to cross his deadly trail. Can you imagine the looks of passers-by?

Real life games, like paintball, could also be enhanced with GPS tracking, not exactly giving away an enemy position but perhaps telling you when an enemy is near, or the direction of the flag you need to capture.



Homing in

GPS is not entirely accurate. Until 2000, the US military deliberately threw the readings out by a hundred metres or so for any commercial users for "security reasons". But even when it is working properly, it's only accurate to within a few metres and frankly, that could be the difference between the supermarket and the sex shop next door. You can, of course, cross-reference GPS results with any Wi-Fi signal strengths in the area, using a database of registered hotspots, or triangulate your position using mobile phone mast signal strengths... but real pinpoint accuracy will come soon. New satellites are being launched from 2009, and a second GPS system called Galileo (http://www.esa.int/esaNA/galileo.html), co-ordinated by the European Space Agency, promises accuracy to within one pace. It is hoped Galileo will come on-line by 2013.

Another exciting development comes in Nokia's recent announcement of a tracking system that will work inside buildings. It's the sort of statement that would make the US military wet its pants with excitement had it not already perfected thermal imaging. The Finnish giant is trialling "Indoor Positioning" in forty of its buildings. It uses wireless networks and clever mobile mapping to do many things – like tracking down specific stores in shopping centres or finding your motor in an underground car park. A public trial is due soon.



The diary that writes itself

With these developments in place, my diary is almost ready to be written for me. Knowing where I am to within a pace means I'll know which shop I am standing outside of, or inside of with Nokia's system. Hey, if I knew to within a few paces where I was inside a building and at what time, that could answer a lot of questions. Like whose round it is next! Or, more seriously, whether I was (or was not) at a murder scene, or to be more precise, whether my phone "did it".

If the ski program and jogging program recognise what you are doing because of how you move and at what speed, would a Bluetooth wristwatch with accelerometer, help my phone know I wasn't just laying about in the pub but had actually managed to conquer four pints?

Might I find out for myself which airport terminals get me through security the quickest, by simply looking at my past data? Or the best time of day to go shopping, based on how long I queued at the checkout in the past? Over time, your own database could tell you a lot. It could be very powerful – until you move house and your routine changes.

As long as GPS tracking and data transfer are free, and given how sponsor-friendly that combined service might be to advertisers that's a real possibility, why not just leave them on? Why not collect lots of information about yourself? Everyone else seems to be doing it. Why not link up an accelerometer device, which might talk to the GPS and work out what you might be doing, and add any relevant geotagged time-coded photos from you or anyone else on the network, to illustrate your diary. Why not have your diary write itself? *

This article was written for receiver

* Small print
Please note:
a) Emotional events and "feelings" may not be reflected in the finished diary.
b) While the makers of your diary and its partners aim to reflect places visited and activities undertaken by the user, the diary cannot be relied upon as being an historically accurate account of past events, nor used as proof in a spat between couples.
c) When involved in activities of a "personal" nature, it is advised that your diary and its associated products be switched off.
d) Any information transmitted as part of your diary service, whether for personal use or in conjunction with the application, is the property of the service provider, who may use it in whatever way they wish. If you don't like it, don't sign up.
e) Your diary cannot be held responsible for any lack of data in the event the user wipes out on a black run and slides down on his bum. Although if it were accurately recorded, we agree not to tell anyone.

Contact: Dan Simmons