On the final day of WhereCamp, it was time for location-based games. After a late night of geohacking, several WhereCampers returned early to play PacManhattan, where city streets become the game board.

Four ghosts and a Pac-Man run around, each receiving information from a representative in the control room and reporting their locations over cell phones. Pac-Man collects virtual pellets, avoiding the ghosts. Four “power pills” can be activated at specific intersections.

To win, Pac-Man needs to clear the board of pellets within three lives. In two runs of the game at WhereCamp PDX, Pac-Man wasn’t able to finish. By the looks of things, everyone still had fun, as well as plenty of ideas to make it better (automatically-updated map, anyone?)

For an interview with Pac-Man and a view of the control room, see this PacManhattan video I created (embedded below):

[PacManhattan pictures by Selena Deckelmann]

Among the social uses of location-based services is in helping new people meet each other. Many people would like a device that identifies serendipity by alerting you when a friend—or someone who should be a friend—is nearby. Technology can serve as a virtual cupid, given the right information.

For example, imagine if your dating profile information was accessible on your phone and able to be broadcast to those nearby. Then imagine if the phones of single people were constantly comparing attributes, in an attempt to connect two people with similar interests, a shared friend, or maybe just an equal level of desperation.

It turns out this is not a new idea, and it has been in practice for some time. Our sister publication Wired wrote about it over ten years ago. In Japan, a little device called the Lovegety became quite popular. Owners could set the type of interaction they were looking for and it would alert them whenever a match is found.

Lovegety only had three settings, but it was followed by several similar devices. Wireless protocol Bluetooth has been used to create services similar to Lovegety. MIT has even studied location-based dating.

As fun as it is to consider the possibilities, many people are uncomfortable with this connected a future. Privacy and security are major topics in most sessions at WhereCamp. To gain utility often means giving up something. Could it be that we’re just not used to it yet, but it will be normal, the way mapping directions is now? Or, will this sort of random meet-ups always be creepy?

There’s a certain amount of irony in the title of this WhereCamp PDX session. At a conference focused on location-based technology, everyone is enthusiastic about ways to apply location. It’s this technophilia that makes us want to make it better, because we’re a long way away from the perfect user experience.

Declaring your location is a mostly manual process at this point. The interface is awkward out of necessity. For most cases it requires typing the address, or looking up a business. It’s either easy and inaccurate or difficult and takes too long.

At the same time, our cell phones already know where we are. Whether it’s cell tower triangulation or GPS, we’re “phoning home” to our wireless providers. This data is not available, for obvious privacy reasons. But shouldn’t my own information be available to me, if I say so? Can I also decide who else to share it with, including services I trust? Examples like this really show how open the web could be.

Even with access to the data, the quality is sometimes questionable. Certainly with cell tower triangulation, the granularity can only be so good. But even GPS has its errors, especially for tracking trails and and routes. The accuracy just isn’t good enough.

Finally, the way we display the data we do have is also error prone. The quality of GPS maps is spotty and the content is kept under lock and key. Correcting mistakes on maps is difficult or impossible.

The shortcomings of location-based apps leave a lot of room for improvement. The pieces of extremely useful technology already exist. We’re just starting to be able to put them together.