Location-Based Services – DAT503

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Location-Based Services, LBS for short, use real time geo-data harvested from mobile devices or smartphones, in order to provide information, entertainment and security.

We explored this technology in order to further understand what we need and what we can achieve in this short period of time.

The first thing that needs to be talked about is one of the simplest ways for people to interact with this sort of technology. It is widely known between teenagers as “Check-in”, and since Facebook released this feature in 2010, it suddenly became a very popular trend in technology. Of course other companies used this long before Facebook, a good example is Foursquare, but without a big user base, this technical achievement couldn’t have grown this big in our current society, and most of all, it couldn’t improve this much at all.

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To be more precise, Social Media Check-ins boosted the Location-Based services based on the large amount of GPS-data sent by users, which was used to improve the accuracy of this technology. Of course some would argue against it with strong arguments, such as violation of privacy, but being honest, it is a small price compared to how much our society can develop based on these gathered pieces of data.

Stepping outside the Social Media world, the LBS can be split into 5 categories, each of them having a different purpose that suit different needs.

  • GPS – Global Positioning System
  • Wi-Fi
  • Li-FI – Light Fidelity
  • NFC – Near Field Communication
  • Beacons

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Two of them are a point of interest for this kind of project and I will present them briefly.

Wi-Fi

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Most of us might be dead till now if we don’t use this technology. In the last years, it became almost a living part of the human life, everybody who goes out of his house is searching for this kind of networks. With such popularity you would expect everyone to know something about this, but actually, we don’t even try to understand it, we just know that we need it to socialize, keep connected to our emails/friends/documents/files and simply just to exist.

Many people and organisations thought “Wi-Fi” was kind of similar to “Hi-Fi” or “Li-Fi” where every part is an acronym, but actually, it doesn’t stand for anything. “It is not an acronym. There is no meaning […] We (the founding members of the Wireless Ethernet Compatibility Alliance, now called the Wi-Fi Alliance) hired Interbrand to come up with the name and logo that we could use for our interoperability seal and marketing efforts. We needed something that was a little catchier than ‘IEEE 802.11b Direct Sequence’.” (Phil Belanger, member of the WI-Fi Alliance).

GPS (Global Positioning System)

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Unlike the other categories, GPS can easily be integrated in almost every game because it offers the developers a lot of flexibility. GPS-based games are trying to interact with the real world, making people get out of their comfort zone, the 4 walls of their house, and roam around different places, discovering new exciting things in the environment.

In the past 10 years, we have seen a huge movement among game developers who are willing and trying to implement this feature in a more complex way. With this big step in development, we are seeing more and more enthusiastic users trying mobile games and leaving their common in-door habits. Having a large number of players can actually improve the GPS overall accuracy, which is an advantage for everyone, not only those who are interested in the entertainment area.

A more positive aspect is that GPS technologies are tried to be combined with different systems, like Augmented Reality or 3D concepts, which can eventually be used in the future as a beneficial way to improve our knowledge into cultural or historical practices.

This implementation is a different method of interaction with other people and it kind of pushes the typical game idea to a more social type of person, not one which is just stuck in a closed environment.

Because of its current growth, the location-based services are estimated to worth $11.6 billion in the year 2015 and are predicted to grow five times more by the year 2020.

 

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