Normative Design is a interactive company that provides a full suite of web and mobile consulting services to clients -- as company COO Jon Tirmandi says, that's "how we pay our bills." But as a sideline that is of growing interest and importance to the company's bottom future, Tirmandi says, they have been conducting research into location-based mobile services.
This began last year when the company partnered with
OCAD University's Mobile Innovation Experience Centre on the
Red Rover project, which used a developmental location-based gamin platform to facilitate city-wide games such as Red Rover, tag and capture the flag. Users are able to map their interactions and movements within the game using their mobile phones.
In a new project
announced last month [PDF], also in conjunction with OCAD's MEIC and
with support from a grant from FedDev Ontario, Normative Design is working on the Sousveiller Project, which will use crowd sourcing techniques to map the presence of security surveillance cameras throughout the city. Tirmandi says that at some point the map, which will show both the locations of cameras and the areas they are able to see, it would be possible to plot games in which participants move through the city without appearing on camera, for instance.
In the long-run, Tirmandi says, these experiments have a variety of practical, marketable applications, ranging from enabling physical gaming to innovative hyper-local news media delivery options.
Writer: Edward Keenan
Source: Jon Tirmandi, COO, Normative Design