Background

Locus is an internal project at Normative to explore the possibilities of location aware publishing. This new platform is a work in progress that allows people to easily publish digital content to any geospatial location using the Locus API and iOS framework.

The Challenge

Create a platform that allows anybody to easily harness the power of location aware publishing and explore what the means in different contexts and industries.

Project Components

We began exploring these ideas during the summer of 2010 while working on the Red Rover project. Our initial experiments revolved around game play, and over time evolved into the question of putting content out there in the real world to enable those games. How do we publish a “flag” for a game of capture the flag?

This question, and the experimental trials during Red Rover, led us down the path of creating a publishing system that allows you to take any type of content or feed and tie it to specific geospatial data.

Solution

The Locus framework let us continue to explore and experiment with concepts of situated digital publishing. Creating an easy to use API and app framework, for our own use initially, ended with an innovative new way of storing and retrieving location data, multi-user interactions, and more. The results are now available to the public at www.getlocus.com. Locus is still a work in progress, so keep checking in for updates.