Location-enhanced applications are poised to become the first real-world example of ubiquitous computing. A large number of research and commercial location systems have been developed over the past few years, and the Place Lab is one of them. The authors describe, in short, the main idea of the Place Lab project: getting location-enhanced applications deployed on existing devices, such as laptops, tablets, personal digital assistants, and cellular phones, without needing to purchase additional sensors or to install special infrastructure for highly accurate location systems. The paper covers ambient intelligence and pervasive computing environments, and deals with location services through real-world deployment. The technology evaluation and study on user experiences of commodity devices uses 802.11 and global system for mobile communications (GSM) beacon readings to show that they could provide full coverage with acceptable errors. The authors also conducted privacy experiments to find users’ attitudes on privacy issues when their personal locations were disclosed to others.

The authors’ findings are stated and explained in an unconventional way. The authors used mailing lists and subscribers’ threads later organized by topics. The topics are about practical issues dealing with the Place Lab infrastructure and users’ devices, platforms, and operational problems. The authors collected some valuable findings, such as the fact that users preferred independence on the fixed project infrastructure, and that pervasive applications should search automatically for their critical configuration data, allowing users to run the applications provided to them quickly and easily. The authors also noticed that the attention they gave to privacy concerns paid off as a result of Place Lab’s own infrastructure that is used for location systems. Since no other infrastructures are in use, Place Lab safeguards private location data that cannot be disclosed to the third party without a user’s consent. This is a distinguished article on real-world deployment and location-enhanced computing, and should be included in lessons on pervasive computing.