How to virtually block a road: Take a walk with 99 phones

Ninety-nine used smartphones, rolling down a sunny street...

It turns out, if you're creative enough, you can use one of the most common of childhood toys to make Google Maps display false real-time data. All you need is a little red wagon-and a hundred cheap smartphones.

The little red wagon full of phones is the idea of German artist Simon Weckert, whose projects focus on "hidden layers" in technology and examine the social and moral effects of the modern electronics-based lifestyle.

Google Maps determines congestion by gathering the location and motion speed of phones in a given area. Generally speaking, those phones are going to be in the road because they're with drivers, inside vehicles, and so measuring the phones' speed is a reasonably decent proxy for measuring vehicle speed. Those data points, aggregated, make a road look green on the map if traffic seems to be moving smoothly, or they look red on the map if traffic appears to be severe. When traffic is severe, the map's navigation software will reroute drivers around the congestion when possible.

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