Re:call launch at Granville Island this morning
By Roland Tanglao on April 7, 2005 - 3:37pm
Julie Zilber, Re:call research director 
Moragh Goshinmon, Re:call multimedia designer
Blair Rosser, Re:call technical lead
Re:call, a trial (or what the director calls rapid public prototyping) for wireless location based services launched today at Granville Island (more Re:call launch photos on flickr).
Click "read more" for full details.
Here's what Mobile Muse (who along with 7thfloormedia, SFU and Exponentia form the team behind the project) says in their February pre-launch press release about Re:call:
Mobile MUSE has recently announced the development of re:call, an innovative wireless application using groundbreaking wireless technology that will enable Granville Island visitors to explore one of Vancouver’s most distinct cultural and commercial communities via PDA.
Research Leader Julie Zilber explains, “re:call will enable visitors of Granville Island to create a time-stamped personal journal of the places they visit, complete with historical and professional facts, community comments, and personal notes and pictures. The objective is to create a more dynamic, fulfilling experience for visitors to Granville Island, using emerging technology.”
I tried it out and it works well (Re:call screenshots on Flickr) with the usual rough edges you expect from a research prototype.
You wander around Granville Island with a PDA and based on where you are, you can watch location specific videos, find out about shops, restaurants, etc. close to you and you have a journal where you can leave audio and text comments and take pictures.
The rough edges came from the lack of decent WiFi coverage on the island and the slowness of the iPaq PDAs used (or was it the prototype software?).
This fits in well with my 2010 Vancouver OlympicsOnline community blogging vision. Imagine a ubiquitous high speed wireless network with this software on steroids running on a phone with the same backend that powers UrbanVancouver that allows people to share, blog, text, video and audio (with RSS for everything for high search engine ranking and to allow people to subscribe to what they want and to slice and dice the content in ways we can't imagine) AND give them location specific info on shops, restaurants, and historical info! This is all doable and I look forward to help making it a reality for 2010.
