Carnegie Mellon Virtual Posters

I heard about this experiement a few weeks ago actually and was quite interested in the possibility of systems like this. Carnegie Mellon students have crafted an interesting WiFi, Peer-to-Peer, Location-Based (had enough yet) system that allows for networking (on many levels) between students based on their movements throughout the University. As reported:

The objective of this study was to leverage contextual information to support Semantic Web P2P scenarios. The study was conducted on Carnegie Mellon Univesity’s campus, leveragring the campus’s Wireless LAN (WLAN) and the MyCampus Semantic Web environment developed by the Mobile Commerce Laboratory over the past few years. Within this environment, users can access a variety of context-aware applications and services from PDAs over the WLAN. Examples of contextual attributes include user location (acquired through location tracking functionality running over the WLAN), calendar information, a variety of preferences (e.g. food preferences, topics of interest), weather information, social information (e.g. classmates, teachers, etc.).

Source: InfoBridge: Peer-to-peer location-aware virtual posters

Though these systems are intriguing in this one direction, they still are rather scary when pushed in the other direction - you know, where the system reports back on my positioning for others to see.