Spatial Information Appliances
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3. Conclusions
The spatial information appliances sketched in this paper do not yet exist. While they may sound like fiction, they are pretty realistic goals for the next 5-10 years. In order to make them reality, however, two types of advancements are needed. The first area of developments are technological advances. They include improved quality of displays of hand-held devices (e.g., larger screens, foldable screens, readability under sunlight), more stable and much higher-bandwidth wireless communication, and low-cost GPS and gyroscope cards. At the same time, miniaturization of GPS receivers, digital cameras, and gyroscopes needs to continue. These hardware technologies are developing rapidly and we foresee little impediments for them to become available as the basis of our family of spatial information appliances. The second area in need of advancement is know-how. In order to design successfully spatial information appliances, we need better knowledge about human-computer interaction, including how people work in the field, how they perceive geographic space, and how the new technologies influence their working habits. These new devices will need to make predictions about human behavior and performance as their users perform spatial tasks. It is necessary to identify appropriate, human-centered models for a variety of spatial tasks, to formalize these models so that they can be implemented in an information system, and to test whether these implementations match with the expected human behavior. We will need more knowledge about the implications for ethics and privacy as this next generation of Mobile GISs will be able to track the devices (not necessarily their users’) movements more than any other technology used today. Finally, to tailor spatial information appliances to user groups, a better understanding of cultural differences will be necessary as they may form the basis for adaptive user models.
4. Acknowledgments
An earlier version of this paper was presented at GIS PlaNET, Lisbon, Portugal, 1998. Discussions with Werner Kuhn and Doug Flewelling helped me focus focus the concepts of spatial information appliances.
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