ReGroup: Using location sharing to support distributed information gathering

Many shared group activities, such as determining the range of different foods offered at a market, require that group members know which parts of the market will be covered by which people. In this paper we report findings from evaluating ReGroup, a mobile distributed information system that enables group members to "see" the current and immediate past routes of other group members within a defined area. ReGroup collects and shares GPS location data on a number of participating mobile phones. Past routes are visualised as coloured lines on a map of the surrounding area. An initial evaluation of the system at a busy marketplace suggests that there is a great deal of potential usefulness in sharing previous locations amongst members of a group.