IN THE BUBBLE JOHN THACKARA - witz cultural

84 Chapter 4
Handsets allow users to ‘‘geo-mark’’ a location and then send details to
other people, who then can use their own handsets’ positioning capabilities
to go to that spot. A wealth of data about places lies in the heads and
lives of ordinary people—but it is not accessible knowledge. In experiments
called wireless graffiti, augmented-reality technologies connect locations,
people, media, and objects to unlock the ‘‘living memory’’ of a place. In
one experiment in Amsterdam organized by the Waag Society, people
walked around the city carrying devices, and the system plotted their
routes. Amsterdam Real Time, as the experiment was called, was a joint
venture with the city’s municipal archives, which looks after the city’s historical
documents, including old maps. The long-term potential of the
Waag installation lies in overlaying different movement patterns on one
another and in being alerted, as one wanders round, to a historically interesting
episode. Public physical spaces become ‘‘containers’’ for traces of
fragmentary personal histories. 30 Digital graffiti or wireless graffiti have the
potential, in time, to be attached to any object on Earth with an accuracy
of a meter of less. Such a scenario—dubbed WorldBoard by Jim Spohrer, an
Apple researcher—is about putting information in places or, to be precise,
associating information with a place so that people perceive that place as if
they were really there. ‘‘This is in some senses bigger than the world wide
web,’’ says Spohrer, ‘‘because it allows cyberspace, the digital world of bits,
to overlay and register with real space, the analogue world of atoms.’’
Spohrer describes WorldBoard as ‘‘a proposed planetary augmented reality
system that facilitates innovative ways of associating information with
places. Its short-term goal is to allow users to post messages on any of the
six faces of every cubic meter (a hundred billion billion cubic meters) of
space humans might go on this planet.’’ 31
The idea intrigues a lot of people, but it is not entirely clear, as yet, to
what questions digital graffiti might be an answer. To date, the enabling
technologies described here have been used mostly for tracking parolees
and FedEx packages. In Europe and the United States, navigation systems
in cars are popular. And in Hong Kong, a matchmaking service connects
singles in the same neighborhood whose dating profiles match. 32 Other
social uses of user-generated locational content include marking a picnic
spot or a meeting place at a music festival. Business uses include a construction
site manager’s indicating where a consignment of materials should
be unloaded.