Bill Schilit, Anthony LaMarca, Gaetano Borriello, William Griswold, David McDonald, Edward Lazowska, Anand Balachandran, Jason Hong, and Vaughn Iverson

International Workshop on Wireless Mobile Applications and Services on WLAN Hotspots (WMASH)

January 2003

To be widely adopted, location-aware computing must be as effortless, familiar and rewarding as web search tools like Google. We envisage the global scale Place Lab, consisting of an open software base and a community building activity as a way to bootstrap the broad adoption of location-aware computing. The initiative is a laboratory because it will also be a vehicle for research and instruction, especially in the formative stages. The authors draw on their experiences with campus and building-scale location systems to identify the technological and social barriers to a truly ubiquitous deployment. With a grasp of these "barriers to adoption," we present a usage scenario, the problems in realizing this scenario, and how these problems will be addressed. We conclude with a sketch of the multi-organization cooperative being formed to move this effort forward.

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