Hasta La Ideas

A different sort of cloud computing

Recently we heard about traffic lights that can sense weather and adjust their signaling to prioritize cyclists, allowing them to get home faster when it’s nasty out. We also honored a set of smartphone-based environmental sensors in this year’s Core77 Design Awards. It seems pretty clear that weather sensing is going to be a “thing,” and here’s an idea right out in front of that trend: A project that plans consolidate meteorological data from smartphones to crowdsource weather information.

The London-based project is called WeatherSignal and their idea is to build up a network of people willing to talk about the weather (which may be all of us.) Cell phones collect a lot of data through an array of new sensors that have been added to the modern phones so WeatherSignal wants to creatively take advantage of that. It’s quite compelling when you see it in action. Go to their homepage and you’ll see the result, weather icons dotted over a global map, powered by Google maps, that provides local temps, humidity, pressure, sun/cloud/rain, even magnetic field ranges. There are filters for indoor weather as well—I suppose wherever the cell phone rests. And there are time ranges, from current, to three hours ago, to last week.

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