Description: 
Location awareness is an important capability for mobile computing. Yet inexpensive, pervasive positioning—a requirement for wide-scale adoption of location-aware computing—has been elusive. Place Lab is designed to overcome the lack of ubiquity and high-cost in existing location sensing approaches. Place Lab is software allowing commodity laptops, PDAs and cell phones to estimate their position by listening for radio beacons such as 802.11 access points, GSM phone towers, and fixed Bluetooth devices that already exist in large numbers around us. These beacons all have unique or semi-unique IDs, for example, a MAC address. Clients compute their own location by hearing one or more IDs, looking up the associated beacons’ positions in a locally cached map, and estimating their own position referenced to the beacons’ positions. Place Lab clients can determine their location privately without constant interaction with a central service. This talk will provide an overview of Place Lab, show research results on coverage, accuracy, and beacon densities in the greater Seattle area, and present a survey of the many ways Place Lab has been used in both applications and research. Web: www.placelab.org

Runtime:01:16:37

Rating:TV-G