Penn State seems to have just started a video series dealing with the emergence of geospatial information as a significant cultural force – it looks very interesting:

We live in the Global Location Age. “Where am I?” is being replaced by, “Where am I in relation to everything else?”

Penn State Public Broadcasting is developing the Geospatial Revolution Project, an integrated public media and outreach initiative about the world of digital mapping and how it is changing the way we think, behave, and interact.

The project will feature a web-based serial release of eight video episodes—each telling an intriguing geospatial story.

There’s a preview video on the site that’s worth a watch.

Infoaesthetics posted about some researchers who downloaded 35 million geotagged images from flicker and did some data mining.  The images below show the paths travelled by photographers in New York, based on images from the same camera taken within a few minutes of each other.

The researcher’s site has links to the full paper as well as a few more images including this heatmap:

This seems like an interesting way to analyze people’s movement patterns – you could make interesting video showing the frequency and location of pictures taken at different times of the day , days of the week, or days of the year.

Imagine 20 years from now using the accumulated photos of billions of people to create time-lapse fully immersive 3d environments which would allow you to ’slide’ forward and backward in time.  The technology to create 3d models from a set of images already exists:

A virtual reconstruction of the Statue of Liberty, created from tourists

The coming ubiquity of GPS-enabled gadgetry will undoubtedly create all sorts of interesting information visible (for better or for worse).

Google just released a service called Latitude, which enables people with certain types of cell phones to publish their physical location.  From Computerworld:

How does Latitude do that? Google is using technology that’s similar to that of Skyhook Wireless in its Latitude service. Like Skyhook, it is a software-only location solution that allows any mobile device with Wi-Fi, GPS or a cellular radio to determine its position with an accuracy of 10 to 20 meters. What sets XPS apart is that it uses land-based Wi-Fi access points, GPS satellites and cellular towers to determine location information.

In other words, Latitude can use any of the three kinds of signals — Wi-Fi, 2G/3G/4G mobile or GPS satellite — that a device can pick up to work out its location. By leveraging these wireless capabilities, the software can combine positioning data from satellites, carrier assistance servers and Wi-Fi base stations to significantly speed up positioning, or TTFF (time to first fix). TTFF for some devices can be up to a minute, but by using multiple reference sites, Latitude can reduce TTFF to a few seconds.

Basically, the software installs on your phone and  periodically checks to see where the phone is located, then send that information to Google.  Aside from the slightly creepy privacy implications, this seems like an interesting way for buildings to ‘know’ where their occupants are located (or their cellphones at least).

I could imagine houses closing the windows, turning off the lights, and dropping the temperature when nobody’s home, then reversing the cycle as the owner starts driving home from work.

I could also see some interesting urban dynamics research using this system if it were widely adopted and the data were public (again, my privacy nerve is twitching…)