Wireless Wilderness

The problem:
How do you make the park an educational resource without destroying its natural ambience with too many signs, displays and other man-made improvements? How do you allow maximum access to the park without having so many visitors that the environment is disturbed?

Our answer:
Our answer is to make the park a Wireless Wilderness. This will allow us to provide educational content and expanded public access with low environmental impact.

The plan:
We will make the park a wireless hot-spot that allows free internet connectivity for any wireless device such as a PDA or laptop PC. Think of it as a Starbuck’s in the wilderness. Park visitors can use their wireless device to access our web site. Natural resources in the park can be marked with small metal plates containing an identification number that will be listed on our web site. The educational content can be displayed or downloaded.

Some examples of how this idea can provide useful educational content are as follows:

1. Customized walking tours can be created based on the season or the interest areas of the user

2. An audio file of bird calls could be downloaded to help users identify birds heard but not seen

3. Counters on our web site will record how many times each content area is accessed so we will be able to evaluate the success of the various content packages.

Some examples of enhanced user access from this idea are as follows:

1. One or more microphones could be placed in a tree to pick up bird calls and this could be accessed as a real-time feed from our web site. People in other cities could listen to the activity as a continuous feed from their desk top PC……great advertising for Houston; they could even use our audio file of bird calls to help identify the birds they hear

2. A web cam could focus on our butterfly waystation so that people everywhere could check out the Monarch activity.

3. A remote-controlled infra red web cam could be used to search for owls at night; users could sign on to gain control of the camera and owl sightings could be saved in a time-stamped image along with the identification of the user. It could become a popular game.

Date of last edit: 25 Jun 2006

Created by: V.H. Hitchings