To use the Wi-Fi location-based vernacular, several factors triangulate the growing relationship between urban design and computer science. First, having taken over the home and the office, the technology industry has little virgin territory to conquer except the public realm. Second, until recently, there wasn't the technological capacity to do much computing on city streets and sidewalks -- the devices were too big and the network applications not big enough. Third, it turns out that virtual reality, when it comes right down to it, just can't compete with the immediacy and sentience of real-time, real-place encounters.

In the 1980s, technologists and urban planners began to look at virtual communities as a new form of urbanism, says Anthony Townsend, a research scientist at NYU who teaches in both the urban planning and the telecommunications departments. "But they very quickly realized that it wasn't that interesting," he says. "There are some indirect linkages between the desktop web and what goes on every day in urban spaces, but not really very tight linkages." Today, he says, the proliferation of wireless technologies has led to more direct interactions between cities and networked spaces. "What's happening now is that technology and industry are adapting to us," Townsend said. "Instead of us becoming global beings, technology is reorienting around the way we are: visual, local, tactile."

In an article written last spring for the architecture journal Praxis, Townsend offers a primer on new digital technologies, categorizing them according to four different functional applications: mobile communications, positioning services, digital displays and urban documentation. Deployed in urban spaces, these technologies ultimately sort themselves out according to long-standing debates about the nature of people, place and community. Ask today's tech researchers about the next big thing, and instead of obscure lectures on the radio frequency spectrum you'll hear invocations to '60s situationist concepts of "derive" -- urban flows -- or the neotraditional ideas of Jane Jacobs, whose seminal work, "The Death and Life of Great American Cities," focused on the dense, diverse and random encounters that support thriving urban neighborhoods.

"I'll tell you the truth of the matter -- it ain't rocket science to figure out how to do this," drawls Scott Shamp, director of the New Media Institute at the University of Georgia, which set up a Wireless Athens Georgia (WAG) zone last summer covering all 24 blocks of Athens and the university campus. The project catalyzed NMI's Mobile Multimedia Consortium, a cooperative effort involving students, faculty and consultants along with five private industry partners: Intel ExecuTrain, XcelleNet, Air2Web and Hewlett-Packard.

Since the WAG zone -- also known as the Cloud at Athens -- launched last June, says Shamp, he's been getting calls from people all over the world who want to set up similar networks. "People said: 'We want to know what access points you're using, what protocols you're using; tell me how you're mounting them on the poles,'" says Shamp. "But what was most important was not that they understood the technology, but that we turned it into something that enhanced the community."

Registered users take advantage of the Cloud's interactive software to outline preferences regarding specific businesses; then in downtown Athens, they can receive information -- via PDAs, laptops and cellular phones -- about bands, menu specials or discounts at various stores. So far, the Cloud sounds like just another vehicle for advertising, but the goal, Shamp emphasizes, is to invigorate a local business economy by providing community content and applications. "Otherwise," he says. "you can easily make an argument that somebody goes into downtown Athens, gets out that laptop, goes to Amazon to buy that book instead of walking two blocks and buying that book from a local bookstore."

Like a street or a building, WAG zone access points actually inhabit part of the physical infrastructure, orienting the Cloud user to specific resources within the community. "A huge part of this is connecting up the information with the location and making it place-and-time relevant," Shamp said. "To experience it, you actually have to be in downtown Athens." Another site-specific application -- customized for the social life of a student -- is Friend Finder, a Cloud service designed by University of Georgia art, business and music students. "I can come into downtown Athens with a PDA, send a text message that I'm going to be in Blue Sky Coffee for two hours, then turn it off and put it in my pocket," explains Shamp. "Then when one of my buddies comes into downtown, he can use the WAG zone to find out where his friends are."

Global positioning systems embedded in mobile devices add yet another spatial dimension to virtual technologies. As Townsend points out, in cellphone-packing Tokyo, GPS chips are already embedded in most mobile devices, creating hordes of "smart mobs" who navigate the densely built -- and inhabited -- city through use of custom maps and buddy-finder applications. More recently, researchers at Intel's Seattle lab have developed a Wi-Fi positioning system called Place Lab that doesn't require extra hardware to install in mobile devices.

"As computing moves off the desktop into the environment, you and I are going to own a large number of computationally enabled devices," says Anthony LaMarca, a Place Lab researcher. That's going to require a qualitative shift in how we interact with technology. "It's not going to be that every computationally enabled device is going to be able to command your attention," he says. "The devices you own and encounter in densely populated urban environments are going to have to make decisions on their own. For that to happen, the devices need context. And for a mobile device, location is one of the key pieces of context."

Hewlett-Packard's Urban Tapestries project in Bristol, U.K., takes finder and navigator functions to yet another level: leveraging Wi-Fi-enabled networks to allow users to digitally tag real locations with text and images. Thus you can wave your mobile phone at a tagged restaurant to pick up reviews left by previous clients, or download digital audio tours as you wend your way through a museum. Other labs are developing "smart place" services based on detection of embedded radio frequency identification (RFID) tags. Then there's the inverse of location-based services, otherwise known as "computer enhanced location" technologies. At the 2003 UbiComp conference, former Intel researcher Joe McCarthy debuted three "place augmented" prototypes based on scanning and displaying digital profiles -- with information about personal and professional interests -- contained in wearable RFID tags.

"We are just beginning to scratch the surface of this," says McCarthy, who left Intel last month to launch his own company, Interrelativity. "You can imagine scenarios where this is used at work, especially in large organizations with a lot of nameless faces. It gives people something to talk about and recognize that they have more in common than they thought. It also has a lot of potential for coffeehouses and other so-called third places."

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