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](img/bosse-small.jpg)
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 :-)