BBC Innovation has started a trial this week about citizen journalism, combining GPS (with direction, velocity and elevation) with mobile phone capabilities (pictures, video, sound and text). 18 students from the University of Brighton will be equipped with a Nokia Nseries handset and a Garmin Etrex GPS device, and will create an online gallery on Jan 18th intended to “explore how people in the future might use mobile devices to capture and share multi-media stories”. The site is run by Ymogen.
It appears to be more than just adding GPS data to mobile content…“As an example, pictures and video captured from multiple devices around a sporting event can be mapped in time and space automatically, creating a rich view of the entire game from multiple perspectives.” A lot of content taken from mobile phones isn’t very good, at least not nearly good enough to replace professional content, but if all the content can be combined in some way it would become a lot more powerful. If the content is automatically tagged with location and time it also adds an increased layer of authenticity.