Friday, July 22, 2011

WoW in Realspace, a Software Suggestion

If I am in a group in World of Warcraft, I can view a map that shows where all members of the group are. It occurs to me that the same ability would be useful outside the game—and that implementing it would be straightforward. Simply have two (or more) smartphones with gps talking to each other. Your phone tells mine where you are, mine shows me where both of us are, while mine tells yours which shows you. Useful for finding your spouse in a crowded art and wine fair, shopping mall, or equivalent.

Does it already exist?

10 comments:

Unknown said...

Google Latitude, available for iOS and Android.

Extraordinarily useful.

Anonymous said...

Once I was feeling sick and was laying on some grass. My wife was trying to come get me with the car and I was struggling to give her directions to my position. I wished I could just text my position to her gps.

Tim Worstall said...

There's certainly an app that uses that sort of functionality. Grindr (which is a location service for gay males. Who is gay, near you and interested in a meet up?).

Lex Spoon said...

Four Square, for more of a social take.

Implemented with Scala.

Dagonell said...

Yes, I once wrote a paper on "Ubiquitous Technology". I discussed several technologies that did this very thing along with current and possible applications. I then compared it to the "Maurader's Map" from Harry Potter as an example of Clark's Law. :D

Anonymous said...

Ground Crew, groundcrew.us

Stephan Kinsella said...

Glympse on iphone. I use it on occasion. Very handy.

Mike K said...

Here are a couple of others:

http://cocoyon.me/ for iPhone, simple and easy

http://fastsociety.com/ support Android, iPhone, and also lets you interact with non-smartphones. This latter one lets you create "teams" that can expire at a certain time or last forever, and lets team members post their location, messages, photos, that get sent to the whole group. That lets you coordinate multiple people, etc.

Adam Gering said...

Trying to find my son in the Pike Market the other day, I came up with the same conclusion -- the utility of "sharing" your active location with another phone allowing for a "Maurader's Map"

And I happen to both do and employ mobile application programming/ programmers, so I may get one written. I don't know if any decent one's exist that work in the way I describe.

The problem with GPS alone is that it is not accurate enough (20-30 meters) and doesn't work indoors. So to get this done very well will require some trickery/magic.

Modern phones already do some of the magic themselves (using last useful GPS position + direction/momentum), but there is a lot more that can be done (e.g. using the camera and pattern matching could work great in photo-mapped places).

Anonymous said...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ew94okDkCwU

circa 2006