Smart Dust Leads to Smart Parking
It’s always cool to see presentations from CHI (and related conferences) end up in commercial products. At the time they are presented, they usually seem far-fetched or appear to have no real-world application (but, of course, we need crazy ideas and unconstrained thinking).
Smart Dust (CHI 2002) is being used commercially by a company called Streetline to create smart parking spaces. It is essentially a tiny transmitter with bi-directional communication.
Streetline are using Smart Dust to create “smart” parking spots. The idea is that the chips can sense when there is a car in their spot, and transmit data wirelessly in real-time to a server. The server can then be tapped into by commuters on their mobile devices that are looking for parking spots in a geographical region (e.g. San Francisco). I looked at the results of their San Francisco pilot test, and was amazed by their Google Analytics-like reports. I wasn’t able to find a UI prototype of their parking management system though.
(Streetline Networks via Gizmodo)
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