geotagging
Blended reality, and moving online offline
I recently stumbled across Semapedia, a service that generates QR codes from Wikipedia links, letting people paste “physical hyperlinks” that can then be read by people with the right software on their phones. This is a first step, of course — geotagged information linked to GPS-enabled phones, and RFID-equipped physical artifacts, will allow for an even greater penetration of rich, networked data into the real world.
How will we view the world when layers of information are available for everything around us? At what point will we start disabling the automatic retrieval of such data in order to preserve some of the world’s mystery for ourselves to discover?
There are a few applications I can think of in a learning context:
- History and background of local buildings, important people, etc.
- Products that tell you their names (in a foreign language context, this would be a killer app)
- An extension of Amazon’s “people that liked this also liked that” functionality to everything once products and places are all mappable and queryable
There are millions of possibilities, and many of them will undoubtedly change the way we live. How will online moving into the offline world, and being accessible anywhere through persistent, mobile network connections, affect your life?