Friday 27 March 2009

#brum #buses times mashup in SL, phone and proxy

livebusstops.jpg

Yesterday I spend the afternoon doing a demo of displaying live bus times in SL ready for a council Transport Summit. In doing so I discovered all sorts of council resources I wasn't aware of. Others might be, but in case you too aren't then here they are, and also info about how we did the mash-up, and a proxy you can use for your own mashup (until we get asked to close it down!).

The first site is DigiTV. This was designed for people to access council services from a set top box, but it also works really well from an iPhone (or any large web phone) as its all simple menus and chunky links. From here you can get to council info on what's on, travel information, GP services, job centres, report problems etc. If you drill down on the Transport links you can get to every bus stop in the city and the next bus times - either timetable or real-time derived. And if you break out of the frame (http://www.digitv.gov.uk/digitv/cds/Birmingham/Netgem/home.html) you can bookmark individual bus stops on your phone - I finally get what the Finns had a decade ago - the ability to not walk out my door til I know I can hit a bus!

The other site is http://netwm.mobi/. This gets you into the same live bus data but through a very simple HTML layout - great for older phones, and also does simple Google Maps of the bus stops in a given area.

To get a single bus stop simply the URL is http://netwm.mobi/departureboard?atcoCode=43002200505 - where the atcoCode is the ID of the stop - just look at the URL to see it.

In order to do the mashup we just wanted the bus times in simple text - not HTML or layout. So we wrote a simple Perl proxy that is given an atcoCode and calls the URL above, then strips out all the HTML and gives you the data in cod XML, or plain text (and we're working on RSS). To use it just call:

http://www.daden-cs1.co.uk/cgi-bin/sl/twmbustimes.pl?op=text&atco=43002200505

Guess where I catch the bus! Just change the atco code to the bus stop you want, and change op=text to op=html to see in very simple html, or op=sl to see in cod xml.

Happy to let anyone play with the proxy for further mash-ups - and be great to knwo if you use it.

And before any one asks why would anyone go all the way into SL just to check there bus time that is NOT the intention of the demo. Its just part of a broader demo of how virtual worlds can be used to mash up a wide variety of data in new ways to give city (and business) managers and planners new ways of looking at and sharing information - help help build the national and global Birmingham profile for digital innovation whilst we're at it!


***Imported from old blog***

Wednesday 25 March 2009

Milky Way Transit Authority

http://arbesman.net/milkyway/

Not bad, but could have been done better - and anyway haven't they decided that the Milky Way is a barred spiral now.


***Imported from old blog***

Friday 13 March 2009

World Builder - stunning short film - tech enabled love story


World Builder from Bruce Branit on Vimeo.


Stunning video - SL meets Star Trek Holodeck meets RL love story

Now if only SL building worked like this - but another classic case of its easier to virtualise us (as avatars) rather than try and virtualise things around us.


***Imported from old blog***

Thursday 12 March 2009

BBC Radio 7's Planet B - cult classic in the making?

The BBC's Planet B is growing on me - characters hunting through a series of virtual worlds for a friend, and dealing with "virals", avatars which are not being driven by humans, and "rogues" - virals which have become sentient. With the vagaries of iPlayer you just need to make sure you catch all the episodes before they die - I think I missed the first 1 or 2, and heard some out of order, but am now trying to go back through in the right sequence.

Could become a cult classic.


***Imported from old blog***

Wednesday 11 March 2009

Monday 9 March 2009

Wolfram Blog : Wolfram|Alpha Is Coming!

http://blog.wolfram.com/2009/03/05/wolframalpha-is-coming/

This could be interesting - from the guy who created Mathematica - a plain language factual question answering system.

"It's going to be a website: www.wolframalpha.com. With one simple input field that gives access to a huge system, with trillions of pieces of curated data and millions of lines of algorithms.

We're all working very hard right now to get Wolfram|Alpha ready to go live.

I think it's going to be pretty exciting. A new paradigm for using computers and the web.

That almost gets us to what people thought computers would be able to do 50 years ago!"


***Imported from old blog***