When you talk with the person at the information desk, they have a complex knowledge base that can pick and choose what is the best solution for you, giving you tailored, custom results. The same with the Concierge at the hotel lobby, they know what’s happening on a daily basis, what’s changed, what’s new, bad, good and a whole lot of other factors. Can mobile technology compete with that? Not hardly. Yet.

Mobile technology is great for factual information, and in recent years, it has started to provide more of the ‘fuzzy’ logic parts of information that humans do naturally every day. Yes it is true that humans have extended their local knowledge into forums, groups, chatrooms, social media sites and so on, but short of Twitter, all of these are still asynchronous, meaning that they’re not real-time, on the fly, according to your current condition. There’s no way that your mobile phone can tell that you only have 30 minutes to grab something to eat, and you’re looking for a small local favorite watering hole that serves a local favorite dish that’s not on the menu. The phone could tell you all the restaurants around you (including MacDonalds and Starbucks), and could probably tell you about the genre of restaurants, but which ones are really good, bad, and which ones have the local favorites? Usually locals don’t want tourists to come to their watering holes, so they usually don’t show up on the map.

This is when the question turns to less of “what” you’re seeking and more into “how” you seek it. Mobile technology can give you the “what” but have a lot of difficulty in the “how” part, which is inherently a human trait. For example, when people travel, either they stay a tourist, seeing all the tourist spots, stay on the tourist path. They send post cards, usually pack a large suitcase and don’t try to blend with the local customs.

The other part tend to immerse themselves in the local custom and culture, trying to remove their foreign status and try and connect on a local level. They seek local knowledge, and don’t pride themselves on being a tourist. They’re experiential, seeking the real cultures, opening their minds to find something new and exciting.

There has been several academic research projects on this subject over the past 10 years, but as with most academic projects, they tend to stay academic. Researchers like Scott Fisher from the University of Southern California who heads up the Interactive Media Division has explored this area in some detail, using augmented reality to superimpose virtual information over real world scenery. Ultimately the problem with this technology was that the user needed to wear about 100 pounds of gear and a virtual reality headset to see everything. Not too practical.

Other researchers and location-based amateurs have started ‘geo-tagging’ which is pretty cool, where using your mobile phone, you can write something about your current location, then upload it to your blog with the coordinates to ‘tag’ that location with your comments. Problem with this is dissemination, i.e. how does another person find the tag, and know that it is contextually relevant to them. It’s back to the same problem of “how” does the technology give you better contextualized local knowledge.

At the moment, there is no one great answer to solve this incredibly complex problem, but with the recent change in accelerated technology capabilities, i.e. broadband speeds and sufficient computing power onboard a small device, there will be a point at which the technology will be technically capable of doing it. The question will stand of whether humans will have to adapt to a new style of discovery and local knowledge, or will a new style be invented. Exciting times.