Virtual Air - another location example

Virtual Air is something that the British futurist Ian Pearson came up with some years ago that I happened to pick up a couple of weeks ago.



Virtual Air is basically a connection between the physical reality we all live in here and now. Whatever we do it stays in the real world so to say. To experience what happens you have to be there when it happens. Virtual Air on the other hand connects the virtual reality with the physical reality. Imagine that you standing at the bus stop waiting for the bus. Suddenly you see two beautiful birds sitting and chatting with each other. You pick up your camera phone and takes a quick picture, attach it to the virtual air surrounding you. Someone else at that bus stop can then see your picture (if you put it public) and read the attached note. You can add lyrics, or a sound recording on how it sounds here and now. There are no limitations. Later on people can see what has happened at that place and read about it. The Virtual Air becomes both a virtual extension of the current here and now and also a historical repository of what has happened in the past.



In the future when you're wearing VR glasses you can equip yourself with an avatar, different depending on who's looking at you. Houses can change look during the day etc. There are no limitations!



Why would you do this? First of all it's a way for people to communicate with other in time and space. It lets people contribute to society in a quite new way. You can have different privacy levels to allow different people to see your notes and media.



Technically it would be quite easy to develop. Have a special short code for Virtual Air. Send an SMS with your notes and the system will collect your location and store the note together with the location. When someone wants to see what's in the current location you can either send an SMS to the Virtual Air number of have a client application running. The important thing here is to make it as simple as possible to enable the masses to use it. In IMS you can use presence to add the current presence status to the message. Also using a Media Server and a Video Sharing application that comes with Nokia smartphones it is very easy to record a See-What-I-See stream and upload it to the Virtual Air.



Once again a quite interesting example of a location based application together with messaging.