WiFi goes to the (motor) races

PC Watch reports on what sounds like a trend that could be taking hold at Japanese motor racing events: streaming live video from cameras around the circuit to a ton of WiFi access points so that anyone with a PDA and a wireless card can view the race live, whatever ditch or hospitality tent they happen to be in. At the moment the scale of the back end is such that providing web access alongside the video and audio streams apparently tends to clog things up, but unplugging the web allows pretty satisfactory results, as shown by a recent experiment during the Indy Japan 300 race at Motegi circuit. Future plans include upping the access points to 802.11g from the current 802.11b, which would allow multiple video streams and faster switching between cameras; one of the cool applications envisaged is the ability to specify a particular car that you want to track and switch camera views automatically to follow it.