Spirit

The Spirit project was a fun and for its time futuristic adventure. With a group of students from Uppsala University we built a location aware information system. The system could feed information to a person on foot in a city environment and sources of information was coupled with physical objects in the environment.The idea was at first to build a audio based system but technical limitations at the time reduced it to a text based system.

Spirit

We didn't meet all our goals in the project but the project was successful in that it inspired both students and others in thinking about what could be done in the future. A GPS based guide is something that today exists in a mobile phone but this was in 1997. We only have had mobile phones for a couple of years and the packet based GPRS systems were still several years away. At that time building a server bases system was quite novel. Most other systems at the time were built as a stand alone client. The server solution opened up the possibilities for more dynamic content and multi-user games.

In order to understand the problems we encountered one has to remember how little support for mobile applications one had in 1997. We used a hand held computer, the Ericsson MC12, running Windows CE and connected this to a mobile phone, a GH 688, and a GPS receiver. With extra batteries we had to buy a fishing west that could hold everything. The GPS had two antennas, one mounted on a base ball cap and the other, a FM antenna for receiving differential information, in the back of the west. All of this is today included in a mobile phone :-)