Boulder is lovely. But it's not the kind of place where you can come into town for a conference and find a lot of hotels within walking distance of the venue. So when the Interaction Design Association selected Boulder as the location for their 2011 get-together, they gave Boulder Digital Works students the challenge of designing a transportation solution for attendees.
Part of our comprehensive response was the Shuttle Tracker web application that Emily Smith and I developed. Using basic prepaid cellphones as GPS devices, the program reliably estimated arrival times for conference shuttle routes around Boulder.
Shuttle Tracker in action during the conference. The program displays the position of each vehicle in the system while tracking arrivals at stops along multiple concurrent routes. It can be scaled to any number and arrangement of shuttles, stops, and routes.
