When a technology is in its relative infancy, it can sometimes be a bit odd and a bit difficult to say exactly where it’ll be when it’s a teenager, or heck even an adult technology.  I feel in many ways, we’re in that infancy for consumer based GPS.

That said, currently it is a little on the difficult side to predict where GPS technology will end up in the hands of those aforementioned consumers.  You can’t really say if it’ll grow even more popular for only certain uses, of if it will just be a sweeping, blanket technology that we grow to see as second nature.  On the side of the latter, I just found a sweet new use of GPS that involves a new principle called “biomapping.”  Basically, with about 80-100 volunteers hooked up to devices called Galvanic Skin Response devices, an “emotional map” of an entire square mile can be formulated that can show, emotionally speaking, how a specific area might feel.  WOW.

Properly studied and applied, this technology could help show how crime is perceived in areas, helping to gauge how safe or unsafe a neighborhood might be, which in turn could help law enforcement change their tactics, or investigate if it really IS more dangerous or just higher population density.  Basically, these emotional maps can show us a great deal about, well, a great deal.  From Travel to Security, the emotions of people inside certain areas can create landscapes of feeling.

Ok, with that last sentence, I’ve officially excited myself, and gotten even more happy that I work for a company like WHERE that is at the cutting edge of the innovative application of GPS technology.