Limitations make us special

I'm always a little worried about what I'm working on in this project because I'm not sure how useful it is. Now that I'm trying to do some data analysis, that's turned into me being worried that other people have already done this kind of analysis and that I'm going to find that out after investing a lot of time and effort into some problem.

I think I've found a way that OpenSpace is different than other sensor net projects: our limitations. OpenSpace only has the network of motion sensors, put up a little haphazardly by Sarah, Isha, and I. The motion sensors are not perfect, their placement was initially done using pixels on my laptop and those pixel locations were later converted into feet (which I later had to turn into meters... too many different metrics). Oh, and we have no access to cameras or microphones, or really any way to confirm that things are working aside from our own observations.

These limitations let me work solely with the motion events, though. With such a limited data set, I can try to thoroughly explore its capabilities and try to extend its assumed limits. Additionally, I really like the idea that this idea could be extended later into a different space, so having an easy and adaptable set-up would be really nice.

OK, that's all well and good. What do I actually have, though? They're all ideas at this point. I think I can get rid of the placement element completely for data analysis at least. To stay true to the idea of "exploring the social life of a building," it would be best to leave divides like "cafe area," "plw," and "corridor" to the data itself. Maybe there won't actually be names, but we can still construct distinct areas. To do this, we can observe the relations between motion events (perhaps giving them an assigned numerical value). And since we're doing away with the spacial dimension, all we have is their distances in time. Singly, this doesn't say much, but compounding all of these time distances, I'm quite sure we can extend the apparently evident limitations of our system.