Links: GPS-based Navball, human rights on the Hub

  • Awesome: NavBall by Dutch developers The Saint is a GPS-based game for mobile phones that pits two teams of 11 players against each other in a 45-minute quest around urban environments to “kick” a “ball” into opposing “goals” by lining up as best as possible behind said ball in the intended direction. Sounds and looks very tiring:-) Just take a look at the video:

    And yes, they’ve already thought of the idea of making a Google Maps version for spectators — after all individual players already need to broadcast their location in order to “kick” the ball. As the website says, it helps to be in a country that has flat-rate data plans — like the Netherlands &mdash and all your friends have GPS phones — like the Netherlands.

    (I wonder if you could get this to work inside Second Life? Just kidding.)

  • Peter Gabriel’s human rights project the Hub, a “YouTube for Human Rights”, entered public Beta today. You can upload your own videos or embed existing ones on other sites like YouTube. Importantly, you get to georeference the video, just like on YouTube.

    But now that YouTube is so ubiquitous, why do we need the Hub? Because the Hub is more of a home-page creator and collector of media (videos and photos and links and text) for activist groups. In other words, it can be to activists what MySpace is to musicians, minus the ads, plus the access to activism resources, plus a receptive target audience. If I were an activist, I would upload my videos to YouTube and then reference them on the Hub, getting a double whammy of exposure. Can a Shozu uploader be far behind? And a Google Earth layer? (Via Lawrence Lessig’s blog)

  • Google Earth Library, a repository of good KML, gets a new URL.
  • Some more Google Earth-based intelligence gathering by the blog China Confidential, this time regarding a North Korean frigate imported from Russia for scrap that could possibly be refurbished.

One thought on “Links: GPS-based Navball, human rights on the Hub”

  1. As the Hub is running on Drupal and looks like it’s using Drupal’s location module, all they’d need to do to get a Google Earth layer would be to install the KML module ;)

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