Tower Bridge tracks your journey across it with Bluetooth

Mark of Fad caught this one on Engadget and sent it over…

Link: This week only, London’s Tower Bridge is the world’s largest Bluetooth device – Engadget

Using multi-colored lights strung across the length of the upper walkway, technicians have created a gigantic interactive exhibit wherein sensors located at either end detect travelers’ Bluetooth-enabled gadgets (cellphones, laptops, PDA’s, etc.) and then track their progress in pseudo-real-time as they move across the bridge.

Visually, the movement is represented by a uniquely-colored pixel appearing at more-or-less the same spot on the walkway as the device; to a faraway observer, it would look like this single “pixel” was making the journey from one end to the other. In order to ensure device anonymity, the Bluetooth sensors only send a derivative of each device’s MAC address to the bridge’s main controller, so consider this a Bluesnarfing safe-zone.

There’s a picture at the above Engadget link. Fantastic idea!

It’d be interesting to get some statistics as to how many unique devices the bridge (or the gadgets at the bridge) registered — and how many times the devices went over the bridge 😉

Very cool.

PS: If you like fluffy kittens, you will definitely like this post on the Fad blog.