Research

[Research] Encounter Bubble: Yet Another Location Based System

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Encounter Bubble: another Location Based System that seems interesting. It is based on relative awareness.

The system is built around the concept of “encounters." Each encounter consists of a pair of devices, a start time (when one of the devices detects another), and an end time (when the devices pass out of range of one another). An encounter can be registered when two users (represented by two mobile devices) come within range of one another, or it can be registered between a user (represented by a mobile device) and a place (represented by a stationary device such as a wireless Internet access point). Mobster currently works with wi-fi (wireless internet) devices, but it can be extended to work with Bluetooth devices, cellular telephones and with devices that will use future wireless protocols as well.

The Mobster client application lives on a user’s mobile device or laptop computer and it registers encounters. The client sends its encounter records to the centralized Mobster server application which maintains a database of users, places, and encounters. On the server, each place can be “tagged” by users with a text place name. Users are recognized by unique identification numbers associated with their devices. For instance, if Mobster runs on my laptop, the Media Access Control (MAC) address of my wi-fi adapter card would be recognized and recorded by the Mobster system, and by registering with Mobster via the Web I can associate my name and profile with that MAC address. Privacy mechanisms will enable users to mask some or all of the information they submit to the system from others.

[Research] just fell on this FLIRT thing...

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This flirt projects seems interesting:

A European Comission project under the 'IT for Mobility' theme. The development of digital cellular structures by the mobile communications industry has generated a genuine fusion between information space and urban territory. City location, time, day and date can all shape relationships to information sources. The tight constraints of mobile displays, juxtaposed with the spontaneity, unpredictability and transcience of everyday mobility, requieres a fresh approach to how this relationship might work.

FLIRT investigates the potential of location-specific information, not only as an information resource, but also as a medium for social interaction and play.

FLIRT is a collaboration between Philips Research Laboratories UK, Philips Consumer Communications France, Helsinki Telephone Corporation Finland, Infogrames Entertainment France and the Royal College of Art UK.

[Research] Today at our seminar: Hiroaki Ogata

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I am attending a seminar by Hiroaki Ogata, Ph.D., University of Tokushima. The presentation is entitled "Computer Supported Ubiquitous Learning for Language Learning"

This talk will present a computer supported ubiquitous learning (CSUL) environment, called CLUE. In CLUE, three sub-systems have been developed. The first one supports sentence learning, with which learners provide their own experiences about the language learning in their everyday life, share them in the community, and provides the right expressions in the right place at the right time. To facilitate collaboration between learners, knowledge awareness map is proposed. The map visualizes the relationship between the shared knowledge and the current and past interactions of learners. The second system is a Japanese polite expressions learning environment, which provides learners the appropriate polite expressions deriving the learner's situation and personal information. The third system supports vocabulary learning, which detects the objects around learner using RFID tags, and provides the learner the educational information. This talk will discuss the design, the implementation and the evaluation of those systems.

[MyResearch] Connection between game design and cognitive psychology experiments design

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I was wondering about connections between experiment design (in psychology) and game design. I was mixing my reflection I had when working for video game companies and what I am currently doing (setting up a mobile game experiment). This is quite close. When doing the experiment design, we have to build an environment (virtual or not) and some stuff that can gather data generated by users (when interacting with this environment). The purpose is different in game design (gathering data to know if the game is usable, fun and fits to users' expectations) compared to psychology (understanding a phenomenon) but it is quite close.

[Research] A tool to analyze user's path in video games

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David Lanier developed a tool for Ubisoft's Splinter Cell Pandora Tomorrow Online, which allows to do data-mining of user-testing data in 3DS MAX, i.e. see exactly where players in various test sessions went, where they looked, what they did, etc. and analyse it statistically. This enables quantified analysis of test data and an empirical approach to game and level design as described by intelligence artifice. The tool:

[Research] Moving forward mobile gaming

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In the feature, about the potential of using mobile devices and their features (voice communication, location, text communication, contexte sensitivity...) to play:

The rich potential space created by these powerful tools is just now being explored by software designers and by the users themselves. The more powerful our phones, the more fun they are to play with. (...)We are the first generation of humans carrying powerful personal computers in our pockets. What kind of collaboration is possible? How can we find and organize our contacts and connections in an entire city? By playing together, we come to understand the shape of wireless living.

[Research] Observation framework/method to study mobile activities

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I already commented it but still...Notes taken on a paper by M. Zouinar, M. Relieu, G. Calvet and P. Salembier about a new methodology to analyze collaborative mobile activities and multimodality. Constraints for designing an observation framework/method to study mobile activities:

In order to analyze mobile situations, there are two solutions: - lab situations: for instance observing a cell phone user on a running machine. The problem here is that you don't take into account elements of natural context (people who pass by for instance). - natural situations with the observer who films the pda user, the problem here is that you have a specifi interactions between the user and the observer and this is a bias.

In situations where you use multimodality (switching from one modality to another one like using text instead of audio), the context is of tremendous importance.

COnstraints are: - to preserve in an optimal way the natural character of the context in order to access to the link between people's activities and the context, turn it into something that could be analyzed. The point is to see how people change of modalities. - mobile constraints: the method should be light, and don't require too much energy (battery), not disruptive (for the user and the people who pass by).

Replay: they used logfiles enriched by users' self-confrontation (they were shown their interaction's traces like video of what they saw). This is meant to make them remenber interaction episodes and eas e 'verbal production' about their activities during the task.

[Prospective] Don't build applications. Build contexts for Interactions

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While reading old ETech stuff, I stumbled across notes from "Transcendant Interactions" Stewart Butterfield, Ben Cerveny and Eric Costelloby. I fully agree with their manifesto:

Manifesto: Don't build applications. Build contexts for interactions. and: - Not application based computing (completing tasks) - Not document based computing (better understanding of what you have) - Relationship-based computing (ever-changing view of the docs you have access to, that others have access to, and your relationships with people)

The blogroll AND the blog for instance offer a context for interacting since a blogpost can 'ground' the interaction and embed it into a context (for instance discussing this blogpost). The blogpost in itsefl is a reason to write to the author and discuss his point with him.

[MyResearch] CatchBob! logfile + analysis

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The template might be something like: time|x:y|author|action|arrival point author: A, B, C action: refresh or message if message, the arrival point is the coordinate of the point recommended by X.

Here is an example: 12:28:32,587|533289:152499|A|messageC|533289:152499 12:29:32,587|533289:152499|C|messageA|533289:152499 12:32:02,389|533275:152512|B|refresh

From this, we can compute: - game duration - path length of A, B, C and for the whole group - number of refresh per person + frequency - number of message per person (then (a)symetry among the group) + frequency - redundancy of place position: if X went in a place where Y already went (maybe we shoudl discretized) - if X obeyed to Y's recommendation ? (acknowledgement rate) - the number of rooms that each participant searched - the number of rooms that all the participant searched - overlap: number of rooms at leat 2 partners searched - backtracking: number of times one partner entered a room they had already entered

[Research] CatchBob! now has its own logo

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CatchBob! now has its own logo, a poor google ranking of 24 and is in its final beta development. This game is intended to be used a testbed for my phd thesis experiments (modelling coordination, and how space is used as a resource for collaboration). I work on it with Fab and vogi

CatchBob! is a mobile game in which groups of 3 team-mates have to solve a joint task. The aim of the game for the participants is to find a virtual object on the campus and circled it with a triangle. They are provided with a location-based tools running on an iPAQ. This tool allow each person to see the location of his or her partners with a colored dot on the campus map. Figure 1 shows a screenshot of the location awareness tool. Another meaningful piece of information given by this tool is whether the user is close or far from the object. This proximity sensor corresponds to the fact that the person is closer or further from the object since his or her last connection to the network. In addition, the tool also enable simple communication: if a participant points on a dot (representing a person) with his stylus, (s)he can draw a vector that correspond to a direction proposition for his/her partner: going in this direction.

The team comes at our lab and we describe them the purpose of the game as well as the instructions, They have 5 minutes to discuss a strategy and then have to go on the field and find the object. The only way they could communicate is the semi structured communication tool. They leave their cell phones at the lab. They have to coordinate with each other in order to catch this object and circled it with a triangle.

Users also have to press a "refresh" button in order to get a new representation of the map, the whereabouts of the partners and to send information about direction to their team-mates.

[Research] Map for soldiers

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A SuperMap for Soldiers — Or Business Travelers:

Decades worth of detailed, accumulated geographical information is now available to front-line special operations troops in a concentrated, portable, easy-to-use laptop package created by the University of Southern California.   HeraclesMaps can instantly solve life-and-death tactical questions like, "Help us find a route from point A to B where we cannot be observed (or shot at) by someone at point C."

[Research] Powerpoint Cooking Secrets

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Beyond Bullets presents a good powerpoint cooking recipe:

Reduce visual overload by moving text off-screen, and shift processing to the auditory channel by narrating the content instead. A practical solution in PowerPoint is to approach each slide from the Notes Page view first, placing written explanation in the off-screen Notes section below, and using the on-screen area above for an illustration and a few descriptive words. This solution offers a better projected media experience, plus more comprehensive handouts when the PowerPoint is printed in Notes Page format. (...) If you’re short on time, here are five tips to help you apply Rich's research-based design principles to PowerPoint: 1. Do your slides contain only words? Show some pictures. 2. Do your slides contain words that you also speak? Stop being redundant. 3. Do your slides contain things you don’t explain? Get rid of them. 4. Do you pause for a long time on a single slide? Break it up into smaller pieces. 5. Do you have lots of information on a slide? Keep it simple.

[Research] Vodafone's receiver new release

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Receiver no. 10. Two cool papers from Ben Russel and Anne Galloway. Ben discusses the social qualities of locative communicatio and Anne asks herself what the design of mobile and ubiquitous technologies can teach us about emerging relations in urban space and culture.Quotes from Anne's paper:

The consumption of mobile phones is connected to identity – or how people, places and goods simultaneously become interconnected and differentiated. For example, in worlds where a telephone number indicates a certain stability and reliability, mobile phones allow homeless people a sense of permanent connection.

[Research] Cool Workshop Topic

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RAM 5 is an open source media architecture meeting in Latvia. Several workshops are interesting like this one:

SEMANTIC DATABASE CARTOGRAPHY [w003] workshop facilitated by Jo Walsh locative packets

This workshop will explore applications of 'locative packets', a metadata description dreamt up at the locative workshop in Karosta, July 2003. We use FOAF - the Friend of a Friend vocabulary - to describe networks of people connectioned to spatial annotations, events, places, and organisations.

We'll offer a short introduction to the 'semantic web' of machine-readable pages - such as RSS feeds and FOAF files - demonstration of a 'data aggregator' written for locative media at Karosta, which allows different applications to share and exchange metadata.

We hope to develop tools to build and share spatial 'ontologies' or taxonomies, metadata descriptions which can connect traditional GIS (Geographic Information Systems) with psychogeographic and narrative systems like PML, and the 'aware' moblogging system. We have an infrastructure, and want many interfaces!

We'll also cover some basic collaborative mapping techniques that should give participants a good idea of what's available to write their own maps-as-stories.

Links: http://space.frot.org/ http://www.mappinghacks.com/

[Research] Swarm wiki: multi agent simulations community

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Swarm wiki is the place to be for information about the multi agent simulations community.

The Swarm Development Group (SDG) was founded in September 1999 as a private, not-for-profit[1] organization to support the development of the Swarm Simulation System (Swarm) and the interests of the group members. The purpose of the SDG is to: 1. advance the state-of-the-art in multi agent based simulation through the continued advancement of the Swarm Simulation System and support of the Swarm user community 2. promote the free interchange of multi agent based simulations among computing specialists and the public 3. develop and maintain the integrity and competence of individuals engaged in the practice of agent based simulation.

[Research] Nokia's design philosophy

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Panu Korhonen, Nokia’s Research & Development Manager (a nokia visonnaire guy) in design for all:

“Some models are very small and not easily operated by disabled persons. Also, we do not make special solutions for disabled people, but we try to enlarge our target groups for new products by means of sound and visual feedback.”

A New Way of Thinking

Continues Korhonen: “Maybe we ought to think of disabled people in a quite different way. I mean – if we develop a telephone for skateboarders, who would like to have an SMS message read aloud by an audio device while skating and being unable to watch the display – we will have reached the target group of blind and visually impaired people as well.”

“That’s why we are not all that concerned with Design for All, but rather with giving each product the broadest possible appeal. This aspect is very important to keep in mind, especially when we are developing small models. The more we consider our users, the harder it is to make the very small instruments. A small display, for example, requires a highly intelligent software to become functional.”

At CHI, he also explains that cell phones have a huge potential for disabled people. For instance, some services for illeterate could be designed. He cited the metro in Mexico where each station are depicted by an image of an animal. Let's transfer it to a cell phone...

[Research] Location based services ideas

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I missed this very smart post!:

There is much talk of Location Based Services and geographical annotation these days. We either see scary LBS (network tracks you all the time, sends you Latte coupon when you walk near Starbucks) or query based services -- "based on where I am, where's the nearest good place to eat?" That's something Vindigo does without nearing a GPS, and does it fairly well.

One I envision works like this. Imagine your cell phone or other portable location-aware device has a big yellow button. The button, if you press it, means "The service here sucks." Not the cellular service, but the service (or quality, or prices) in the store you're currently in. Pushing the button sends your opinion to a reputation database associated with the location.

This is very close to the thumbs up/down rating I mentionned last week. And this is even more proactive! Users wont be pushed! THEY want to push info!