Place-Based Media: a New Alumni Experience

What if alumni could return to campus and view virtual pictures and signs; could experience spoken stories and written memories of other alumni, students and faculty?

What if students could learn about campus history and personalities the same way, and all they needed to view and hear these stories was a PDA or a cell phone?

A few years ago, during a cross-country flight, I looked out at the landscape below and thought about how cool it would be if someone invented an interactive overlay for the window, like a heads-up display. It could tell you the name of that river, the town in the distance, the height of that peak, and even the history of the places you were flying over.

Now something like this is within reach, with prototypes being created, deployed and tested.

Dean Terry and others are working on it. Dean is the director of the new Emerging Media area at the University of Texas – Dallas. He's also director of Mobile Lab & the Online Worlds Lab. He thinks and writes about mobile media, virtual worlds, social networks, and more. He's also a film-maker, and he teaches.

Dean recently gave a talk titled Conversations in Place – Research, Collaboration and Art in the Emerging Mobile Space. A core project Dean is driving revolves around what he calls a "virtual visual layer of place-sensitive data" or "place-based media."

"When you're on the web," he points out, "it doesn't matter where you are physically." So something local, something geographic is missing from our web experience. We do create virtual "places" online (such as Second Life). But, he asks, why not turn that paradigm on its head and add virtual content to real places?

Mobile devices, he says...

...can be context sensitive so that where you are not only matters, but is a primary driver of interaction and use of the device. We can create a kind of "augmented reality" by delivering information about place. Hold your device up and view the data in real time on the screen, or hear a recorded message delivered to the spot where you're standing.

Now picture a campus landscape like the one outside your office, but silently and virtually augmented by content from alumni, faculty and students.

Dean's group is working on an application for iPhone called Placethings. It's still not quite in beta, but it's not too early to think about its potential for higher ed advancement or instruction.

In his talk, Dean also mentioned that the legal, political and ethical implications of this technology are potentially enormous: would you like it if your neighbor hung a virtual sign on your house that said "The person who lives here is a jerk"?

These "annotated experiences" raise many complex issues: social filtering, community standards, and the question, "how much information is too much?" It's all part of the world beyond Web 2.0. And it's coming, with or without our participation. But if we engage in the discussions and planning, and anticipate the benefits and potential pitfalls, we'll be positioned to evaluate these tools for our constituents' benefit.

Can you go outside the box and suggest alumni relations, admissions, development or communications uses for a technology like this on your campus, at events, or elsewhere in higher ed? Leave a comment.

Think this is going too far, or that it represents a risk? Leave a comment.

And if you're interested in hanging out with the people making these things happen, check out the Where 2.0 Conference in San Jose, California:

Where 2.0 Conference 2009

Photo of Where 2.0 attendee using analog recording device, copyright James Duncan Davidson.

Comments

[Morgan]

"would you like it if your neighbor hung a virtual sign on your house that said "'The person who lives here is a jerk'?"

There's a whole site devoted to this, actually: http://www.rottenneighbor.com/ It's not geo-aware, I don't think, but its integration with Google would make it easy to take that step.

It raises yet more issues around privacy and the freedom of information.

[Andrew Shaindlin]

That's pretty interesting. I loaded my home address in the site, and the nearest "rotten neighbor" was labeled "Jerk." QED.

The site itself is horribly designed. I tried three browsers and the maps don't load, among other problems. But you're right: it provides more or less the same info as described in the posting, displayed in a different way. Thanks!