Neighbourhood Satellites: cozy up to local pollution

Myriel Milicevic (as part of her thesis project) has developed a prototype "Neighbourhood Satellite" capable of sensing air quality, light, and the presence of cellphone signals. The human transport is then able to interact with the data in one of three modes: status (display current conditions) — game (navigate among offending pollutants) — map
(display conditions gathered by other satellites in the area). Her aim is to "enable people for playful grass-roots monitoring, where the presence of contaminants in a community can be known and charted by anyone." Great, so let's drop a few hundred (thousand) of these little guys onto the increasingly summer-pungent New York City streets to track and avoid the unexpected bum nest or makeshift public toilet... hey, Urinetown The Game! The prototype is a bit unwieldy (requires laptop) at the moment but with a touch of manufacturing finesse it's feasible to foresee these integrated into various mobile devices (cell phones, GPS). Just think, data collected from a few hundred million mobile weather stations could finally deliver a truly accurate 5+ day weather forecast.