Some after-thoughts of an accident in the mountain in Japan

Japan is an exciting country, Tokyo a jumping city, thus, I took the chance of catching some more silence in the beauty of Nikko mountain. The weather was kind of bad, rainy and stormy, but we did not really care. Next morning when we departed from the shelter a Japanese joined us on the tour to Mt. Shirane. He was not in as good shape as we were but we could not leave him alone either. The paths had been in really bad conditions, really different from the Alps. Obviously, we were a little bit slower, therefore the Japanese was good help decrypting kanchi from sign posts.

On a very steep descend he suddenly slipped, slided down out of control and only came to stop 80m later.

He was tough guy took out a first scarfe and I helped him to get it over his 1.5cm bleeding wound on his head. I could reveal our position from the built-in GPS of my phone, gave it to my friend who continued hiking down to a spot with cellular coverage to call the rescue service. It took almost 2h until the rescuers came and got our wounded down to the valley.

Finally, we and, especially the Japanese, had been lucky, however, I spent some thoughts what could be improved and how technology help:

1. My phone has GPS but there is actually *no* pre-installed application to query GPS location. Luckily, I managed to start a map application (Pocketmaps) that gave me the coordinates in some hidden options sub-menu. Still there is no simple way of just "send coordinate to...".
2. Eventhough we had the coordinates the rescue services couldn't make sense out of latitude/longitude values. I still don't know why, I had the coordinates in the standard format WGS84 and the coordinates where right: http://www.gorissen.info/Pierre/maps/googleMapLocation.php?lat=36.816400&lon=139.3914&setLatLon=Set
3. My friend finally found out which number to call, in Japan it is 119. He could get forwarded and called back a few times. They also could give him an email adress where he could send images of the sign post and shrine close (to share kanjis of the sign posts he couldn't read) by his position. Today, there is no standardized emergency interface where you can send data to. We have shown some development for car accidents [1] but this sms/mms/email interface would be really required to make use of state-of-the-art technology in our pockets. Today emergency numbers are voice only.
   
4. My friend accidently found cellular coverage. When I crawled up 10m back to the path to have a better space to wait, I also had very weak signal again. Couldn't we just collect locations in a public database of phone-calls being made in mountain and make that available to everybody? (Let's not discuss about full coverage, it's already worth something to have discrete locations were you can make calls - even network operators might like it and send out volunteers to measure signals). At a later stage that could be even marked in maps.
   
5. Luckily, our phones had enough power. Years ago mobile phone adoption was driven by the need for safety, today that has shifted towards entertainment. However, in remote areas such as mountain it is still about safety again, eventhough the use pattern is different. Thus, couldn't the phone warn you while doing fun stuff as listening to mp3 "your phone can only guarantee you safety for ten more hours...".
6. We both had priceplans for our phones. What happens if you run out of prepaid during an emergency call. Is there a simple way for rescue services to convice your operator to waive your limitation, I doubt it.
   

Our mobile devices today are far more powerful today than the landing gear of Apollo 11. Hence, let's make some effort of exploiting that not only for gaming and entertainment but for more essential applications, such as survival.

Real world meets virtual world

Today when I watching my colleague Thorsten playing with our Wii station I suddenly could observe how real-world experience can interplay with virtual feedback:



So what`s really the difference between doing sports and playing a computer game triggered through the very physical interactio? Besides the fascination about something new, it`s certainly safety, fun, and the possibility of trying something new. Real boxers will laugh about WII, but newbies get motivated to try movements they would have never done otherwise [1]. Assuming that the virtual experience might become better, the virtual characters on WII still look clumsy to me, the difference between boxing and Wii might become obsolete. Does that mean once we can acquire the same amount of information by our senses stemming from feedback systems as in the real-world, real-world activity and simulated activities in virtual worlds become the same? Does the equation total feedback = physical activity hold? What (apart from nutrition and excretion) does still stop us from moving our lives completely to virtual worlds where we can strip off our physical limitations?
At least it looks really funny watching people being engaged in virtual worlds...it looks like plain activity without context [2] - and we are getting closer to the The Lawnmower Man:



[1] Mhurchu, C.N., et al., Couch potatoes to jumping beans: A pilot study of the effect of active video games on physical activity in children. International Journal of Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity, 2008.
[2] Mayra F. 2007. The Contextual Game Experience: On the Socio-Cultural Contexts for Meaning in Digital Play. DIGRA 2007 Situated Play Conference Proceedings