I've been throwing around the idea of having a kind of conference tracking application. Use the fact that at tech conferences most of the attendees have bluetooth devices which broadcast an id. It'd be great to mine the data anonymously, who stayed for the whole time, who left early, people who attended x session also went to y and z. Kind of like an audience version of what Schuyler presented at FOSS4G in Victoria, but of the people not the session descriptions.
Then with that data you could do some hallway visualizations, show which rooms are crowded, which are empty... I think it could be really interesting. For people who wanted to share their bluetooth id, they could then share their location with Fire Eagle, so other people and apps could then poll it. Then social apps could build upon this data which is really already there ambiently, it's just being ignored. You could enter a list of friends, and find out what sessions your friends are at. Or what sessions other speakers are at. So i think i know how to build this, but i figured the wonderful geowankers here might have other ideas. At first i was thinking, i'd probably want custom boards, maybe arduino, which you can use to control bluetooth chips which log traffic and then post the info to a central server. Then i realized that i'd have to add wifi or some other way for the arduino to get online. I realized that perhaps a better solution was to reuse existing hardware, gather up all the symbian phones i could find which run python and have bluetooth. Then i could use GPRS or wifi as the net transport and write the gathering script in python. The web server part is easy, but that's probably because i'm a web developer, not a hardware / bluetooth hacker. Anybody know of anything like this which is out there? Something i could look at to copy or build on? Anybody else been playing with ambient location tracking of crowds? -rabble _______________________________________________ Geowanking mailing list [email protected] http://lists.burri.to/mailman/listinfo/geowanking
