I was on vacation last week and found two interesting examples of location awareness.

For the first, I was at Walt Disney World where they have something called Pal Mickey. For those that aren’t familiar with it, its a Mickey Mouse stuffed animal that “knows” where you are in the parks and lets you know things accordingly. For example as you walk by Splash Mountain your Pal Mickey may say some sort of silly factoid about it, tell you the current wait time for the ride, or just comment on how fun the ride is.

What’s the big deal about this? Well with more and more phones having fully enabled GPS, and things like Google Maps being out there. The possibilities for having something similar on your phone are growing every day. Imagine if you’re walking around a a theme park and your phone, not something like Pal Mickey that you have to buy, buzzes you and lets you know about a show that is about to happen where you are, or even as you walk around a mall and your phone buzzes you to let you know about a sale that is going on in a store you’re walking by.

These sorts of things are neat, useful, and the sorts of things that make life better by providing you with more information to make better decisions. What could be wrong with this? Well I went golfing with my Dad while on vacation, and saw an example of something annoying, and possibly bad about this. Our golf carts were equipped with GPS devices, they had maps of the course and showed you where you were on a particular hole and distance remaining, overall pretty useful stuff (although my Dad is a stickler about figuring out distance remaining on his own so having it tell you automatically wasn’t great in his book). This thing is pretty neat I was thinking to myself, until my golf cart shut itself off….

See the golf carts are also being told by this application where they could and couldn’t go, that is to say, there are parts of the course that didn’t allow carts to be driven on them, and the golf cart knew if it was in one of these areas or not. When it hit one of the bad areas the cart would just shut down and start beeping for a few minutes before allowing you to drive again for a few feet before you were shut down again (assuming you were still in the bad area).

So what’s the problem you ask? You weren’t supposed to be driving there, its your own fault. In theory I agree with you, but in practice more than half the times my cart was shut down I was just near the bad areas, not actually in them. There were a good 3 or 4 times when I was actually shut down on the cart path. That’s when it really started to annoy me and it started to feel like Big Brother was just smacking me down because it could.

Its this Big Brother aspect that scares me about location awareness. I love being told things that are relevant to me based upon where I am. Its useful, and I can decide what to do with it. Its when that information causes some other entity to force a behavior onto me that I don’t like. The problem is that it can be a real fine line for application developers to toe. If the thing that is location aware is my phone, which I have with me all the time, the potential for forcing me to do lots of things is pretty high. The people writing the golf cart application were trying to sell it to golf courses, not to golfers, so the feature that shut down the cart made a lot of sense to add, I just hated that I had to deal with it.

tagged: location awareness, mobile, mobile phone