Great brainstorm session today at CRAFT. We played attaching messages to a map of Lausanne. This can be an initial step in building an ontology of spatialised communication. Some ideas are here reported:

1. Maybe is possible to concatenate the messages so that the receiver can retrieve the follower once taken the one before. This can be achieved giving the user the possibility to set the spatial range at which the message can be retrieved.

2. A spatial wiki approach may be taken. We can give control to the participants to comment, rate and override messages.

3. We can use vector landmarks that shows the intentional direction of the emitter.

4. We can envisage an approaching alert to be used in a crowd scenario.

5. Gaming application.

From the evaluation of this activity I realised that it is difficult to relate the message with the position unless you can see the historical trace of the emitter. We have to consider that retrieving the message is asynchronous so by the time you retrieve people can have moved. From Nico’s descritpion:

…we tried to sketch out possible uses: recommending system (good/bad), help, threaded discussion, wiki-like (to reach a consensus), reminder system, spam/virus/breakdown, I’m late, anchors (like rave party system), synchronous/asychronous use, query (anybody wants to paly tennis here?), crowd scenario…

Other interesting comments about a possible criteria to categories the messages depending on the retrieving time (limited / unlimited) versus the receiver (one-many / range limited / everybody).