Impulse: Location-based Agent Assistance
Jim Youll, Joan Morris, Raffi Krikorian · 2000
In the physical world, a user experiences products and places, explores physical surroundings, and participates in location-specific activities. Software agents, trapped in their electronic world, offer users valuable assistance online, for example by personalizing searches and queries. The Impulse research project at the MIT Media Lab [1] examines what happens when the rich experience of the physical world is augmented with the low search costs and information resources available through the Internet. This paper presents a subset and implementation of one aspect of the Impulse vision: a scenario demonstrating a mobile device which uses location-aware queries to digitally augment and explore the physical world. PROJECT OVERVIEW Related research on learning agents within wireless devices [6] and the combined work of wearable computing and ubiquitous computing [5] explore placing agents into our physical environment. Our work takes these previous explorations and introduces the idea of...