Inventor / co-creating with 2 other developers in working with Arduino and Google App Engine. Marco is a desktop device that displays a message based on its owners physical location.
© 2011 | michael massie | all rights reserved
Marco allows the ability for users to create virtual fences around geographical locations or place, and then tie them to outputs displayed on the screen. - e.g. “Out of the Office”, “In the Downtown Campus”, “Gone Fishing” or even “Elvis has left the building”. To create a frictionless experience we leveraged Google Latitude to get your physical location on a map without the need for user intervention to change and update the display.
I saw the opportunity for being able to tell co-workers a little more than an empty desk when they walked by. I work out of two different campuses and additionally can work remotely. Often I would receive emails about where I was working out of that day. This created an opportunity to create a smart device that ran during office hours that would display what campus I was at.
Design Consideration:
First build was to leverage the external monitor that was left orphaned at my desk. Field research showed most office spaces of mobile/laptop workers to have a blank external monitor available to offer info about where its user was. The concept was to develop a step device that the monitor would plug into and pass thru video if a monitor was present, or display the users notes if there was no laptop connected. I may seek to prototype this later, but development was larger than my technical levels versus a self contained unit.
