DroidLane CB : In-traffic Voice feeds
Posted: September 10th, 2009, 9:48 am
DroidLane CB (CB as in "Citizens Band") is perhaps the most spectacular feature of the DroidLane mobile application. It enables user sharing of voice communication. Any DroidLane app user presses a button to talk. Such "user voice posts" become uploaded wirelessly onto a central server and are instantly made available as Voice Feeds to other DroidLane users who share a certain in-traffic location proximity. In the application such a message is categorised by its initiator as belonging to a certain Channel.
Channels is the way the DroidLane system organizes CB dialogs so that listeners have a way of getting a feed that match their interest and/or standards. It is possible for a user to block input from a specific DroidLane CB user as a way to keep perceived garbage out of his/her favourite DroidLane Chat channels. Each message is tagged with the identity of its initiator, making such filtering easy. The mantra for DroidLane CB is: "Keep your hands on the wheel and eyes on the road, let your voice do the talking and ears receive the responses"
In other words; a kind of good old CB revisited (Citizens Band), a long gone culture that could somehow be reincarnated here. A top prio tech challenge is accomplishing a low enough latency for something that has a chance to remotely resemble real CB to occur.
Wifi will be exploited to allow a premium version of DroidLane CB (better bandwith, lower latency). Some high tech DroidLane users will run Wifi hotspots in their cars. A DroidLane app feature scans for the proximity of such hotspots and autoconnects to that users mobile DroidLane proxy server(!), to allow DroidLane CB traffic via that network.
Typically such in-car Wifi hotspots include a 3G modem that means that hotspot could radiate quite ample downlink capacity, thus at the courtesy of its owner be able to facilitate CB monitoring for nearby in-traffic DroidLane users.
Channels is the way the DroidLane system organizes CB dialogs so that listeners have a way of getting a feed that match their interest and/or standards. It is possible for a user to block input from a specific DroidLane CB user as a way to keep perceived garbage out of his/her favourite DroidLane Chat channels. Each message is tagged with the identity of its initiator, making such filtering easy. The mantra for DroidLane CB is: "Keep your hands on the wheel and eyes on the road, let your voice do the talking and ears receive the responses"
In other words; a kind of good old CB revisited (Citizens Band), a long gone culture that could somehow be reincarnated here. A top prio tech challenge is accomplishing a low enough latency for something that has a chance to remotely resemble real CB to occur.
Wifi will be exploited to allow a premium version of DroidLane CB (better bandwith, lower latency). Some high tech DroidLane users will run Wifi hotspots in their cars. A DroidLane app feature scans for the proximity of such hotspots and autoconnects to that users mobile DroidLane proxy server(!), to allow DroidLane CB traffic via that network.
Typically such in-car Wifi hotspots include a 3G modem that means that hotspot could radiate quite ample downlink capacity, thus at the courtesy of its owner be able to facilitate CB monitoring for nearby in-traffic DroidLane users.