The Street as a Platform is an interesting essay from the Digital Sound blog.  It covers the growing trend towards augmented reality, which is a digital layer of data that is being added to a growing number of physical locations. 

The article describes this as:

"We can’t see how the street is immersed in a twitching, pulsing cloud of data. This is over and above the well-established electromagnetic radiation, crackles of static, radio waves conveying radio and television broadcasts in digital and analogue forms, police voice traffic.  This is a new kind of data, collective and individual, aggregated and discrete, open and closed, constantly logging impossibly detailed patterns of behaviour. The behaviour of the street."

The post is quite long with many examples of how digital technology is being added and used in urban environments.  Lots of the examples fall into the category of location-based services, where location data and mobile computing are combined to provide location specific information and services.

As this article shows, urban environments are using digital technology to get smarter.  For more on this topic, see IBM's Smarter Planet blog.  It has a lot of interesting articles on smart cities. 


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