quicklink | Windows Sensor and Location Platform

The Windows Sensor and Location platform, which is new for Windows 7, enables your computer and applications to adapt to their current environment. With location sensors — including GPS devices, WWAN radios, and even triangulation technology — your applications and gadgets can know exactly where they are, enabling them to provide more locally relevant content and functionality. Ambient light sensors, for example, can allow your computer to automatically adjust your screen’s brightness based on the current lighting conditions

So with great interest with the 3G intergration on the netbook last week i totally missed the fact that it has a-gps functionality. for those not in the know the ‘a’ part is assist which means that it can help the startup time of the gps unit but it also does a variety of other smart things – check out the wikipedia entry for those if your interested. Having a mobile device that does not require to have a dongle attached for 3g or a gps connected up are two less things to worry about power for and the battery life on the nokia certainly makes using the a-gps onboard functionality a dream for a mobile media maker.

I found a pretty neat application this morning for windows called GooPS (terrible name!) or google earth gps tracking and navigation. This got me all excited about how we could use this data tracking for something like roadcamp. the fact that it has intergrated ftp support suggests that i could actually upload data from the program to a remote location and that data could be fed into a layer on the doorstepr system. I’m yet to discuss this with @subwolf but i am thinking that would could actually have a pretty realtime trail (we obviously would offset the time in some circumstances or if cellular dropped out) of our location as we travelled across the country. We could use this data actually to center the map on where we are thus making it easier for any content we post on the map with other services having a centred reference point. Very useful.

Exciting. I’ll be having a play with this!

other resources for this blogpost

- discussion over on the nokia forums