Friday May 29, 2009

Florence EyeStop Interactive Bus Stops

An interesting project has recently been developed by MIT’s SENSEable city lab, a research lab at the school dedicated to exploring a new approach to the way we understand and relate to urban environments.

Partnering with the city of Florence and ATAF, the agency that runs the metropolitan buses, the MIT researchers developed prototypes for a next-generation bus stop and bus shelter scheme that utilizes numerous interactive technologies to create a highly functional and contextual experience for riders while waiting for the bus to arrive.

The researchers specifically reference the interactivity of the iPhone and the intent to provide a similar level of interactivity within the bus stops themselves. The white paper talks about the intention to customize each bus stop to the local environment and the needs of the riders at that stop, but the stops seem to generally follow two basic form factors - the full shelter pictured above, and a more minimal stop indicator, as shown below.

These poles are the most adaptive element:

Unlike mass-produced bus poles commonly seen in cities today, the Adaptable Bus Pole is designed to fit optimally the physical characteristics of the location in which it is installed. Because of the variation in site conditions each pole looks slightly different from one another. Simple materials like shiny steel, extra clear glass and gray stone, together with an elegant shape and a sharp design let the pole fit into the different settings that an historical city like Florence offers.

But beyond the form factors, the really cool stuff is in the interactive technolgies employed. Last month we blogged about a fun interactive marketing deployment here in New York that was retrofit into the existing MTA bus shelters.  The EyeStop design, driven by an academic group and the municipality, focuses instead on functional features that can be useful to bus riders.

The poles and shelters display real-time information about how quickly the next bus will arrive, which is probably the most useful feature. And possibly the most challenging to implement. Each pole has a wifi and bluetooth antenna. I imagine that some kind of transmiters would also be required on every bus in order to communicate with each pole, but since all stops would be networked together, buses could be effectively triangulated  in dense urban environments (for which EyeStop is targeted.) But that sort of tracking might not extensible to suburban settings.

While riders are waiting, EyeStop provides numerous interactive features, allowing riders to explore route maps, browse community message boards, and given the internet connectivity of the poles and shelters, any number of  other  information services could be offered, including of course centrally managed advertising (which the SENSEable lab folks do make room for, as shown below.)

An exciting innovation is the use of the e-ink technology instead of traditional screens. That’s probably vital to the viability of EyeStop, because e-ink can be brighter in sunlight and will eventually be far cheaper to deploy and run, since it requires very little power to run compared to an LCD screen. What power is required is mostly gathered via photovoltaic solar cells embedded within the post or shelter.

There’s also mention of mobile integration, allowing interactions from riders’ cell phones. Although from our experience, getting people to pair their mobile devices with digital installations is a fairly tough sell to the consumers themselves, who are rightly nervous about privacy. But possibly a large installed base by a trusted source like a municapility could overcome this resistance.

All-in-all, EyeStop is a pretty compelling vision of what bus stops could (and should?) be like in the not-too-distant future…

posted by josiah at 2:25 AM