Bluetooth enabled phones are constantly transmitting an ID which can be set by their user. A simple scan with a phone can reveal these names which people are outputting often without realising.

I have come up with the idea of using a laptop with a bluetooth adapter to record the names which people have assigned to their phones as they walk by. Similar to wardriving but staying still and with the people move around the receiver. The information that can be gathered from this is the ability to see the movement of these devices and therefore the people carrying them. This data could then be visually represented on a website in real time and projected onto the side of a building.

I suspect there may not be enough pedestrians during winter passing through to do it how I would like and the busiest part of Stonehouse, Union Street, isn’t really busy enough to show the information in real time as I would prefer so we would have to present it in a way that displays it for a while. A problem would be to get the data to output in a usable format and setting up the stream and possilby combining the information with another feed of some kind.

Maybe it would be an interesting thing to do in the city centre…