Yesterday brought an inspiring talk by Jun Rekimoto, the director of the Interaction Lab at Sony CSL and Professor at the University of Tokyo. The topic of the talk was Sensonomy, a new term coined by Jun which fuses Folksonomy with wireless sensor networks.

The basic idea behind Sensonomy is to integrate the virtual and real world environments. For this, determining the location of the user is of particular importance. Jun has found, that using WiFi for this purpose gives very good results in urban areas. Their research was tested in Tokyo, where there is more than one million WiFi access points! Check out this map. All of these points can be used to determine the location of the user. Here, Mr. Rekimoto compares the quality of GPS position determination vs. WiFi in downtown Tokyo.

It can be seen that the WiFi red line is usually more precise than the GPS black line. WiFi can also be used indoors unlike GPS and it has a much shorter startup time for determining location.

They call this technology the PlaceEngine. Anyone who downloads the client can use it to determine their location while they are online. This technology was used in their lifelogging application. Further information on this can be found at the web site of Mr. Rekimoto’s lab, which is partly in English. Check it out, it’s really interesting.

Furthermore, this research connects very well to the KLAS project which was developed by Mark Taipan and Matt Lape at our lab, Project54. They have used WiFi for determining indoor location. It seems that it is not impossible to take the system out of Kingsbury Hall and “wire up” the whole UNH campus!

Oszkar Palinko

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