Find an old photo taken with a film camera and ask yourself, “Where was that picture taken?” Now find a whole bunch of old photos and try answering that question for all of them in a split second. Thanks to digicams we now have time and date stamps along with other photo-specific data embedded with each shot but there’s something missing: GPS information should be in your photos too. Imagine taking a photo journey based on location (Zooomr is already working on this).
Likewise, GPS information should be downloadable from your car’s computer to tell you whatever you’d like to know about your driving (heck, how many people even regularly download their car’s computer data?). Or how about combining GPS with orientation sensors in your video camera to create a Disney-like viewing experience some day (it could happen).
Well, I suppose some of these are closer to reality than others but it would be nice to see the inclusion occur a bit faster.
In any case, for a nice writeup on some items that are available now see O’Reilly Radar’s post on Location Awareness in Hardware.
