After a mind-bending day of talks and demos and then a lively and packed exhibitor hall reception, the hands-on Where Fair event still did not dissapoint. For those that were at the first Where 2.0 conference, it’s really striking what a difference a year has made in the progress and uptake of these location technologies. I think John Hanke of Google summed it up well when he told the audience this morning, “I think we all share a sense of collective shock at how much has happened in the past year.”
The Where Fair is a fun event that highlights some of the new and smaller projects in the location space, often led by young and independent developers, and was a great place to sample the energy and excitement that many are feeling at this conference. There was a wide range of varied technologies and applications on display — from spy “Bat” planes, to location-tagging applications, to an awe-inspiring “Tilty, Twisty, Twirly” table for interactive map displays. I can’t cover all the neat projects that were on display in this space, but here’s a few details on some of the ones that caught my eye.
OnomyLabs seemed to be drawing the biggest crowds with their “Tilty, Twisty, Twirly” table display. The innovative display responds to, well you probably guessed, being tilted, twirled and twisted. It’s an immersive and impressive way to view maps, especially in fly-over mode. OnomyLabs was created by alumni of XerocPARC, and it shows. They have sold some of these table displays to museums, planning centers, and real estate ventures. They win the prize for the funnest, hands-on demo at the fair.
Julain Bleeker was showing off the new Geotagthings application. Geotagthings is a new web service that allows you to quickly and easily assign anything with a URL to a location in the physical world. Using the Yahoo! Maps’ interface and API, Geotagthings really does make it simple to add location tags to any web page, and it provides an open RSS-based mechanic for retrieving geotagged resources and displaying them in an RSS newsreader.
The coolest model on display prize would have to go to MLB, who were showing off their Bat spy plane which can be used for inexpensive high-res mapping. The plane weighs in at under 25 pounds (with a full fuel tank), and is fully automated. Not much bigger than your typical model airplane. the bat plane contains high resolutiuon cameras and can gather geo-referenced images with resolutions of 3 inches/pixel. These little planes can be used for many surveillance applications, but at this show they were mainly being touted for their ability to map areas at higher resolutions and lower cost than traditonal methods.
There were many other cool projects and programs being demonstrated at the Where Fair, including Ning, PlaceSite, Poly9 Mashups, CabSpotting, and Justin Gregg’s SmackBook - a unique input device that uses the built-in accelerometer in Apple powerbooks for controlling virtual desktops by, you guessed it, smacking the powerbook. Now if I’ve got any more energy left I’m heading over to the Loki Skyhook Wireless Funk party, if I can just pull up the geo-tagged location up on my GPS-enabled cell phone…
