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Description Place Lab is a research project at Intel Research Seattle to produce software that provides user positioning for location-enhanced applications. It uses existing radio beacons to determine location and it runs on Windows XP, Mac OS X, Linux, Pocket PC, and Series 60 and Windows Mobile cell phones. Place Lab has recently become a commercial success as part of Microsoft's Virtual Earth software. I was the original Place Lab minion (Undergraduate Research Assistant). I have worked on Place Lab since January 2004 and I was recommended for the position by a professor because of work that I did for class. I was one of the original Place Lab team members and so I got a chance to contribute to almost all aspects of the project. I wrote, tested, and improved many of the core classes in the toolkit. I was in charge of the Macintosh distribution of Place Lab. I wrote the sdk documentation and the developer's guide. I developed the server side application that accepts wardrive traces for the access point database. I wrote numerous demo applications that were shown at demo days within Intel (such as lab open houses and IDF) and that supported talks made by researchers working on Place Lab. I also helped with the studies and experiments for the Place Lab academic papers and so you can see my name as an author on some of the papers or in the acknowledgements of others. The original aim of Place Lab was to reduce the barrier to entry to providing location aware applications. Prior to Place Lab, there was GPS which is expensive, and very limited for the usage models that people really want out of location aware applications. There were also a couple of research projects that did localization using wifi with very limited scope and hardware support. Place Lab aimed to provide a location system that had very widespread availability, initially using a database of ubiquitous WiFi access points and later expanding to support mobile phones and GSM cell towers. Place Lab runs on all sorts of commodity hardware that people own. Laptops running Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X using many common WiFi adapters are supported. Chances are that if you own a recent model laptop, Place Lab will be able to work for you. Place Lab also supports many models of Pocket PC handheld computers as well as Series 60 and Windows Mobile phones. The original aim of Place Lab was founded on the belief that if we could just make localization inexpensive, widely available, and easy to use in applications, compelling applications would follow. At this point, Place Lab is looking at writing compelling applications. The first application that people always want to see out of Place Lab is the "dot on a map" application. That is, they want to turn on their phone or their laptop and see where they are. The map visualization applications included with Place Lab and used in demos are my applications, and writing them was a lot of fun. Another application that we did using Place Lab that I found compelling was the Sun Valley social mobile application. The full writeup of Sun Valley is available in our paper, Control, Deception, and Communication: Evaluating the Deployment of a Location-Enhanced Messaging Service Recently work on Place Lab has shifted to focus more on applications. To that end, we have chosen the Audiovox SMT5600 as our current platform of choice and we have developed a .NET Compact Framework port of Place Lab in C# (code named Minneapolis). The capabilities of these phones, particularly the ability to report up to 8 radio towers and their respective signal strengths have enabled us to provide high quality localization with better availability than any other location technology on a handy, small device that people actually carry with them and use all the time. For instance, my current (and final) project is an application that uses my map visualization software to show on a map the location of the person calling your phone and also to reply to them with your location, if you and the person making the call so wish. To demonstrate the usefulness of this application, consider the sort of conversation you so often overhear amongst cell phone users: "Hi, What's up? Where are you at? Where!? Ok, so you need to turn around, then make a left, then drive 6 blocks, and make a right. We're at the bar 3 doors up from the corner." Then after 10 minutes another call follows up with, "Hi, I"m lost." With my new application, that conversation becomes: "Hi, What's up? Oh, I see where you are, see you in 10 minutes." |
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Links Place Lab developer documentation GPS vs WiFi demo (quicktime movie)
Downloads
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Media Gallery
Place Lab Stumbler, one of my wardrive applications configured in Quadruple Threat mode (WiFi, Bluetooth, GSM, and GPS)
An early version of Place Lab Stumbler running with a map.
CallMap, an application to show the location of a caller.
Reno/Sun Valley usage scenario from Control, Deception, and Communication: Evaluating the Deployment of a Location-Enhanced Messaging Service
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