I come up with ideas that could be implemented and could be close to my research interests (studying socio-cognitive processes occuring during collaboration). In a mobile situations (indoor but in real life) I was wondering if we could use two types of problem solving situations in which space is meaningful: - cluedo-like mistery: solving a mistery by investigating rooms. - dynamic situation: there are two options + control room and people on the field (two layers) : a simple application would be to rescue someone and you need a group as well as tools (like a scale...) to get there; people needs to get the tools, bring at some point, coordinates... another idea would be a counterstrike situation (resucing hostages, findings bombs and desactivating landmines) + just people on the field (one layer)
Advantages : - concrete and joint activity - space is involved - activity well described in the literature (firemen), research concering team mental model about this already exists, but they do not focus on team spatial model. - the location-based device is seen as a tool embedded in a scenario (four ipaqs that could indicate the positions of others in an indoor environment like EPFL during 2 hours is sufficien)
Drawbacks : - model of an activity - not a "longitudinale" study - the activity and the environment is not useful for students/Teamframe (TF = the environment devloped by Patrick, Fabien, Yvan and Maniratan)
Any possible connection with TF ? 100 students have an iPAQ ! doing something with it ? A "longitudinale" study ? that would be great BUT do they care about other's positions ? (that's why I want to investigate about how space/location/mobility is perceived and used by students - still in the process of contacting people 3 targets : students/firemen/field study people) Another problem: least collaborative effort: since it's so easy to phone a friend they don't use TF to locate their partners.
OF COURSE, there is still this idea of Virtual Landmarks (location-linked information): people receive an information when they pass by a specific place. The message is posted by someone like a friend. The exchange of message is indeed bound to a specific community : one person receive messages only from their community. It is possible to imagine a rating of the person in order to have a reputation-based system: receiving only messages from the person in whom you're the most confident...