Automotive File Sharing

One of the talkbacks from my first weblog entry last week talked about Wifi Caravan:

The Wifi Caravan is a mobile wireless network comprised of participating vehicles within range of each other using 802.11 networking equipment. A variety of local resources will be present on the network and forwarding to the Internet will be handled transparently when we have an established uplink.

Quite an interesting idea indeed -- I think a lot of interesting things will come about from mobile WiFi networks of people stuck in traffic together.

My friend Kevin Criqi and I have been thinking about building ourselves MP3 jukeboxes for our Audi 4A/VW Beetle cars. These laptop based mobile jukeboxes would pretend to be massive CD changers and interface with the existing stereo head units. However, instead of selecting individual CDs the driver would select playlists or automatic playlist generators.

When the question came up on how we would get music onto the laptop in the car, the natural answer was WiFi. Think about pulling into your driveway when your car's WiFi card realizes that it is home (it finds its home network SSID) and automatically synchronizes with the home jukebox to download whatever music needs to be passed down to the car. Once the sync is done, the laptop in the car shuts down and goes to sleep.

Once we realized that our cars would be capable of being mobile WiFi nodes, we started coming up with all kinds of other crazy ideas for mobile file sharing. Mobile Wifi nodes could automatically form Rendezvous style ad-hoc networks and announce their presence by broadcasting a small audio file to identify the car that just joined the network. Imagine:

... music is playing ...
[beep]
John in the white Ford Bronco has just joined the network
[beep]
... more music ...

Once the networks are connected, what are you going to do? Bust out the laptop and start a file sharing client to download what John has in his mobile jukebox? Not likely. Streaming from other cars probably won't work too well either, since cars are likely to only be part of a network for a short period of time.

One effective way of sharing music on the road could work as follows:

1. Each car can setup a list of recommended music titles, broken down by genre.
2. Each car can also setup a list of wanted music, also by genre.
3. When cars come into WiFi contact, cars can ask each other to send over the recommended music if a genre match is made between the wanted list of one car and the recommended list of the other car.
4. Once new music has been transferred, the user can listen to it right away, or just go on collecting music and then upload it to the home jukebox when the car comes home.

Imagine sitting stuck in traffic and having your car make the best of the time, working hard to provide you with more and hopefully pleasant music.

I think its time to build this car jukebox we keep talking about...

What else can you do with a car based ad-hoc WiFi network?