Tracking Urban Movements using a $25 dollar Boost phone
Nicolas Sheon, PhD, UCSF Center for AIDS Prevention StudiesI bought this phone at BestBuy for $24.95 on Monday night, registered it at http://www.boostmobile.com. Next I connected the phone to my computer and, using instructions provided by Instamapper, was able to start gps tracking pretty easily. You need a Windows computer and a mini usb cable. Instamapper is free, but the cost of airtime to transmit GPS data to the web is 35 cents per day. Since the phone comes with a $5 credit towards phone usage, I did not have to provide any credit cards to Boost to get it started. Not only can you track the position of the phone live from the instamapper website, but you can select data, such as a trip out to lunch, as a discrete event and save the data for display in several formats.
GPS tracking powered by InstaMapper.com
This map is a record of my trip to Lunch on Tuesday. The Green dot at Spear and Market represents the place that my phone found the satellite and is hence marked as the start of my journey. It then continued to track our movements to the Ferry Building where we had lunch near where the Ferry takes off and then got coffee and sat at another bench. The main treck was up and down Market St., however the satelites are not entirely accurate. This is especially true on the way back when it thought I was at 99 Leidesdorff Street near the corner of California. It could be that the tall buildings interfere with the satellite's ability to track my phone. I found further evidence of the effect of tall buildings. Instamapper is quite simple to use. I log into my account which is password protected, and look at my map data from any number of devices. I can then select a start and end point to create an event that can be shared with others. I can click "share" to generate html code to embed a map in another website, as I have done here, or I can simply include a link to this trip for others to see along with pictures and landmarks. Click here.
I can also export the GIS data from this trip as a KML file to use with Google Earth. For example here is a trek I made down Market and Mission Streets from Civic Center to 50 Beale. Google has a photo viewing site called Picassa which allows users to geotag photos with Google Earth. This process requires a good deal of familiarity with the photographs and the geography. In other words, I think this would have to be done by the photographer and it is time consuming unless you know exactly what you are looking for on the map. I imagine that cameras with gps chips will probably be affordable in the near future. In that scenario, each photo would already have gps data and so geotagging would be much easier. Here is my kid schleppage, starting from the bay bridge, to home, to Merrit College, to pizza at Zachary's. Here is my morning commute. |
