Living in a digital world

Nokia’s “Welcome to the 4th screen” video (above) takes an interesting angle on the technological developments of the past century and the way they have come to affect our lives. Taking a dramatic stand against fears that technology is destroying the natural order of things, it optimistically describes how the (implicitly Nokia) mobile brings all that is good about the digital world together with all that is good about the real world, and hints at some kind of transcendental state of being that can be attained at that sublime intersection of realities.

Personally, I think the most interesting and important developments in linking those worlds have to do with geolocation data and location based services (LBS), something hinted at in the video with the line ”We discovered new people and places and experiences.” But is the general public really going to embrace this vision of the future?

Jan Chipchase forecasts a difficult transition period into a world of shared location information, and makes an informed prediction that ”we are all only one or two compelling, highly social applications away from shared location information being indispensable.” Anyone skeptical about what promises to be another digital revolution should bear in mind that the technology required to track the location of your mobile phone has been in place for years, so there’s no need to wait for GPS to become standard in handsets.

Such a technology can only really take off if all the handset manufacturers get behind the idea, and recent acquisition activity shows that this is already the case (not least Nokia’s $8.1 billion acquisition of Navteq).

The real sticking point was arguably the lack of well supported geolocation platforms that everyone could write applications for, a problem that has now been addressed by Google, Yahoo, and Firefox in the form of support for the W3C draft specification of a geolocation API.

One way to get an idea of what a technology offers is to look at the games that are made for it. From a certain point of view, games brought computers into the home, they brought portable technology to the masses, and MMORPGs anticipated social networks. (One could reason that early adopters are mainly geeks, geeks often find socialisation difficult, and since games offer a conveniently codified form of social interaction, geeks tend to play and make them… but that’s another story).

Geocaching is the geolocation equivalent of Pong, in that it is about the simplest idea for a game that exploits this technology that you could come up with. But it seems clear that the possibilities go far beyond this.

A step up from geocaching can be seen in the form of Mscape, a geolocation platform for certain Windows mobile devices developed by HP Labs in Bristol. This is the platform I’ve been experimenting with in the last few months, and I’ll be writing about my findings in the next post in this series.