If you are around the LUCI lab today before noon and want to see a super-cool demo of Nick Noack's CONRAD project version 2.0, it is up and running in the lounge area next to 5011.

The basic premise of the demo is that calibrating a bunch of infrastructure embedded devices is a pain and difficult to scale. So Nick built a system in which an administrator can walk the hallway with a camera phone. The camera phone detects (cooperating) displays in the environment by reading 2-D barcodes and builds a topological map of the floor plan. Once the map is built, location aware services can be deployed to the screens.

The thing that's different about this location-aware service is that all the distributed devices can work together. So as a proof of concept, Nick can pick one of the displays and all of the other displays will tell you which way to go to get there based on the map that was created by the walk-through.

There is something super cool about seeing all the devices reacting together though that a little blog blurb doesn't do justice to, so if you have the chance swing by for 5 minutes and look in person.