Mobile's uniqueness makes truly pervasive media feasible
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The idea of pervasive media is one that has been gaining interest for some time. And while these days it often seems as if media is already all-pervasive, this is specifically related to mobile devices.
The idea is that, once you have a high-speed mobile internet connection, your environment becomes a media space and relationships can be built between the real world and the multiplicity of virtual worlds overlaid on it.
Part of the reason why people are interested in pervasive media now is because mobile is losing its separation from the internet. Increasingly it's just another way of accessing the web, albeit a way with certain defining properties.
Speaking at an event a few years ago, I was asked whether the businesses that had survived the dotcom crash had anything in common. My conclusion was that they all did something that couldn't be replicated in any other medium.
It seems to me that all forms of media have something they do that no other medium can, and that while it's perfectly possible to build businesses by importing old business models, the ones that work best are those that take advantage of the medium's unique properties. Search is a great example. It doesn't work in any other medium, and some of the most successful business of the internet age have been based around it. So while mobile marketing has been with us for a while, and mobile advertising is beginning to take off, what's the mobile equivalent of Google?
The unique properties of mobile, compared to other interactive channels, are that everyone has a phone, they take it everywhere, it's always on and the operators know where it is. This is where current experiments in pervasive media come in. Just before Christmas I was approached by iShed in Bristol to help with its Media Sandbox project, which is incubating a number of pervasive media projects, with one to be awarded further funding at the end of the process. The projects seem to fall into two broad groups, one around games and one around location tagging.
The games people are excited about pervasive media because it allows them to overlay fantasy worlds over the real world; it's almost seen as the second coming of virtual reality. The tagging people are looking at ways to enable virtual messages to be left at locations. So if you're meeting friends in a bar and some of them haven't turned up before you head off for a curry, you could leave a virtual message for them in the bar. Or you could allow people to tag locations with general messages, from historical information to how the location makes them feel. One of the Media Sandbox projects is exploring the latter by asking people for locations around Bristol that make them feel happy. This information would then be available to people at the location via their mobile device.
Part of the problem with the mobile world up to now has been that its structure, governed by operators and with significant barriers to entry, has discouraged small-scale experimentation by start-ups. The trouble is that, in this world, you can't just ask people what they want, you have to give them something and see how they respond. A lot of online companies, including Google, have become very good at that. The challenge for the mobile world is to replicate it.
Michael Nutley is editor-in-chief of NMA
