Coming soon: Mortal Peril!

If you've seen or read anything from the mythos of Harry Potter, you know of the Weasleys' whereabouts clock that uses magic to display the general location or condition of each of the members of the Weasley Family. If you didn't know of it, you do now... Some of the statuses mentioned in the series to which a Weasley family member can be assigned are Home, School, Work, Travelling, Lost, Hospital, Prison, Mortal Peril, etc.

Anyways, a few days ago, I was Skyping with my sister when my girlfriend/roommate instant messaged me saying that she was on her way home. I absentmindedly restated the message aloud saying, "Jenni's on her way how." And my sister was rather confused.


"How do you know that?" she asked. "Do you have that clock from Harry Potter that tells you peoples location? Is Jenni 'traveling'?"


We laughed and then I start thinking. It would be totally doable to make a simple version of that clock in real life. Nowadays, with everyone carrying around a smartphone with GPS, you'd just need an internet connection and a simple program that taps in one of the numerous GPS-based social networking features (e.g. Facebook Places, Google Latitude, etc). Wiring it so that the program then moved physical hands on the clock face would be relatively easy actually. Admittedly it would be a good deal trickier to set up the "lost" or "mortal peril" statuses but with some creative programming you could probably find a way. [Comment below if you have any ideas]


In fact, while researching  for this blog entry, I found an actual working version of  this concept. Apparently a man was talking with his  kids about Harry Potter and wanted to show them that science and engineering can be even cooler than magic, because science actually works (in theory...O-chem lab...grumble...grumble...).


To prove the point, he built a beautiful version of the Weasleys' clock that works by retrieving Twitter updates and scanning for keywords that indicate the person's location. Super cool! Also, on his website he points out that he's not the only one that's tried something like this even Microsoft has given it a whirl.