Bill Perry
The Invisible Ideas Project: Using Mobile Devices, Macromedia Flash, and Global Positioning Systems
"Imagine you're a mouse and the physical world is your screen"… this is the experience of Invisible Ideas.
In October of 2002, Smart Worlds, a Cambridge, Massachusetts–based company, asked me to collaborate with them to develop a Pocket PC-based Macromedia Flash application for the Boston Cyberarts Festival, which was being held in May of 2003. This application came to be known as "Invisible Ideas."
Invisible Ideas is a location-aware application that displays site-specific audio and visual content on the Pocket PC to users as they stroll through several Boston parks. Invisible Ideas also tracks their GPS (Global Positioning System) coordinates, saves them to a text file, and uploads the data to a web-based Macromedia Flash application. The Macromedia Flash application draws a line tracing the user's walking route on a scaled map. This was the first time anyone had created a distributable Macromedia Flash application for a PDA device integrating GPS for real-world use, so it's quite revolutionary.
Figure 1. Invisible Ideas in action
I believe the best thing about creating new technologies is the creative process that comes from sharing information with others. I've received lots of inquiries regarding the specifics of how we developed this solution. In this article, I hope to provide information about the technologies, methods, and testing scenarios involved as well as a little background about why we decided to do the project.
Requirements
This article is more of a look "behind the scenes" of the project and not a tutorial with sample files, however, you can download and run a desktop version of the Invisible Ideas UI.
Download the desktop version (EXE) of Invisible Ideas:
Download the sample code (TXT)
Throughout this article, I reference different sections of the UI. If you download the EXE, you can follow along and have a better understanding of what I discuss in the following pages.
Table of Contents
- Overview
- Developing the UI
- Using GPS
- Macromedia Flash Application
- Tying It All Together
- Lessons Learned
- Summary
- More Information
About the author
Bill Perry is in charge of developer relations for mobile and devices at Macromedia and is helping to shape the future of mobile devices using Flash technologies. He interacts and supports developers, content providers, media owners, mobile operators, and handset/device manufacturers from around the world. When he's not busy with work, Bill enjoys cycling and spending time with his wife and friends.
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