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Location-Aware Services >> Where on Earth...?
2/1/2007
As ubiquitous computing efforts expand, the need to know where other people and devices are becomes critical to split-second decision-making. The question is: Will higher ed lead the LAS movement for the mainstream, as well?
Ask any college student attending a university
in the Northeast or Midwest, and you'll discover that in the world
of frigid-winter academia, there is nothing worse than just missing
the campus shuttle bus in 12-degree weather. Today, however, students
at a handful of colleges can stay warm and cozy inside their dorm
rooms while they track the location of the shuttle bus on their cell
phones—all thanks to the implementation of location-aware services
(LAS) on their campuses.
But just what are location-aware services? To put it simply, they are applications that deliver location-based information whenever and wherever it may be needed. Ideally, these services are accessed via whatever means is convenient to the user: mobile phone, PDA, pager, laptop, or desktop. LAS is part of the larger location-based solutions (LBS) picture that comprises GPS-enabled mobile computing services (communication and computation via mobile devices), location-enabling services (used for user-locating), and locationaware services (IP-based applications).
The Campus: Ideal Environment for LAS
In a nutshell, the technology behind LAS enables people, computers, and other devices to know, within a few feet, where another is, at all times; such services or applications then allow individuals—or their devices—to make "decisions" based on that knowledge. There has been much talk recently about the over-hyping of these kinds of services; for instance, Gartner's July report, Hype Cycle for Wireless Hardware, Software and Services, 2006, which details high expectations for LAS, now climbing out of a mainstream adoption "trough" and finally heading into a two-year adoption forecast. But the fact of the matter is that LAS may take off faster on US and worldwide campuses than in the general consumer environment. That's because via their devotion to web tools such as MySpace, Facebook, and newer campus-generated social networking offerings, college and university students are now accustomed to "social networking" applications and thus are conditioned to communicating with each other 24/7 via the campus intranet or the web. Yet, this kind of connecting takes place in the virtual world only. What if kids want to "connect" with each other in person, almost as instantly as they connect online? What if they want to find things they need in the physical world—a bus ride, a pizza, a study resource—as easily as they locate things in the virtual universe?
As it turns out, any number of technology providers has anticipated this eventual need of the mainstream consumer. What's more, the partnering among computing and mobile computing device makers, wireless service providers, geographic information systems (GIS), and/ or global positioning systems (GPS) vendors has been quietly going on behind the scenes for some years, with huge players like Nokia, Sprint Nextel jockeying for a leading edge. Much academic discussion has centered on the need for open standards in this area, but even with that as an obstacle, and the emergence of only a smattering of players in the dedicated application space—WaveMarket and education-focused Rave Wireless are two—location-enabled services (comprising both LAS and LBS) have been predicted to become an $8- to $11-billion business by 2008 (depending upon what you read and who you speak to).
Still, despite slow adoption by the general public, the uses of LAS on college and university campuses appear to be wide-ranging, from tracking the nearest campus shuttle bus (our opening example), alerting the campus community of inclement weather conditions or other potential threats to safety, and monitoring a student's progress as he or she crosses an urban campus late at night, to the simple act of quickly finding a study buddy or tracking a pizza delivery van. Not surprisingly, colleges are beginning to embrace (or at least look seriously at) LAS as a value-add for their students, and also as a useful teaching and learning tool.
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