A long time ago, in a Cooperative Research Centre far, far away (well, actually, it used to be just across the road from where I’m writing this post, but it sadly met its demise), a small group of researchers worked on a ubiquitous computing project that came to be known as PACE: Pervasive Autonomic Context-aware Environments. This group produced a framework for context-aware computing, which was the subject of many research papers at Pervasive, PerCom, JPMC and elsewhere. For various reasons, the source code for PACE has only just now come out into the open. Yes, you can now download the PACE framework from SourceForge. Unfortunately, there won’t be a lot of support offered along with the code.
Tag: street computing
What happens when you take computing off the desktop and put it in an urban computing space? The posts in this category are directly or indirectly related to urban ubiquitous computing.
Queensland Rail will be offering south-east Queensland commuters free wireless access to the internet from early 2010, according to the Minister for Transport, Rachel Nolan. This access will use spare capacity on the infrastructure used to transmit real-time video footage from surveillance cameras to QR’s control room at Central Station.
One thing from that story that caught my attention was this:
She (Rachel Nolan) said people living near train lines or stations would not be able to tap into the free internet service because it would be “firewalled”.
That would have to be one pretty intelligent firewall! Here are some actual possibilities to guard against free-loaders. One not so attractive way to do it would be to set a limit on daily downloads. The theory is that there’s only so much you could download on the longest possible trip on the QR network in south-east Queensland (say, Gold Coast to Nambour, or something like that). The other more attractive solution, in my opinion, would be to tie usage to go cards. Your internet session starts when you swipe on at the beginning of your journey, and it finishes when you swipe off. There’d be some kind of web-based login procedure like you get at hotels and elsewhere, where you enter your go card number to gain access; or regular users could have the option of registering the MAC address of their wireless card with QR/Translink to skip the login procedure. Given that it still takes ages for a credit card top up to find its way onto my go card, I don’t hold out much hope for QR/Translink being able to implement this particular solution within the already very optimistic time frame of early 2010. But I do think it’s a reasonable long term solution. It might even help Translink in their quest to move more commuters over to the go card from paper tickets.
Categories
Ben on ubicomp: spot on
True:
Often we seem to use the term Ubiquitous Computing to mean “computers everywhere” as if just having the hardware all over the place was a worthwhile end in itself.
But maybe a better meaning is “computing available when you want it in a way that makes sense for where you are and what you’re doing” which is much harder to do than “computers everywhere”.
It’s been a while in the making, but augmented reality on your mobile is just about here. And by that, I mean that these applications are available for your mobile phone, and it will only be a matter of time before they gain critical mass. So what am I talking about?
In the research space, among others I can refer you to iCam (2006) and MARA (2006) from researchers at Georgia Tech and Nokia respectively. iCam allows the placement of virtual sticky notes on objects in the physical world, through a mobile device. This is neat, since the sticky notes only appear to those whom you want to see them. A limitation of iCam is that, while placement of these sticky notes is very accurate, it only works indoors. MARA overlays information about the real world (and even the people in it if information about objects is being streamed from a central server) in real time.
The there’s this concept device from petitinvention, which takes the idea a few steps further. The user can see information about buildings and locations overlaid on the video stream from the mobile device’s camera. But the same tool can be used to select text from a piece of paper (like a newspaper). Essentially, it’s an augmented reality search tool.
In the commercial/start up realm, a couple of companies have been creating a bit of buzz. First there’s Enkin. Enkin has been developed for the Google Android mobile phone platform. It enables users to tag places and objects on Google Maps, and then to see these tags overlaid on the real world as you walk around with the phone. My favourite is Sekai Camera from Tonchidot. I’m not going to explain it. Just watch the video below. But note that even products on the shelves in shops are tagged in the virtual world and overlaid on the real world. And it’s a very social application.
There’s probably still all sorts of hurdles to overcome, but what a great presentation.
Categories
Another tangible user interface
The GroupLab at the University of Calgary has published a technical report describing Souvenirs, a tangible user interface for sharing digital photos in the home environment. It is very similar in spirit to Bowl, which I’ve previously blogged. Souvenirs will be formally published in the Proceedings of the 2008 ACM Conference on Designing Interactive Systems.
Image credit: Nunes, M., Greenberg, S. & Neustaedter, C. (2007) Sharing Digital Photographs in the Home through Physical Mementos, Souvenirs, and Keepsakes. Research Report 2007-875-27, Dept Computer Science, University of Calgary, Calgary, Alberta, Canada T2N 1N4. July.
Categories
Cool projects by Johnny Lee
Johnny Lee from CMU’s HCI Institute has done some pretty cool things with the Wiimote. His Ph.D. project has also yielded some way cool stuff. Here’s just a few of the things he’s done on his own and with his colleagues.
Truly inspiring.
Categories
Bowl: token-based media for children
Ben delicioused me a link to an interesting paper called “Bowl: token-based media for children“. It describes a media player that is controlled by placing various objects (tokens) into a bowl. The idea was to create a control interface that is easy for children to use and which establishes links between particular physical objects and digital media. Aside from being a really cool means for interacting with a media player, it would have to be one of the neatest uses of RFID that I’ve come across so far. The bowl (or rather the platform that the bowl sits on) is augmented with an RFID reader. The various objects are augmented with RFID tags. When an object is placed in the bowl, an associated piece of media plays on the screen. For example, when a Mickey Mouse doll is put into the bowl, a Mickey Mouse cartoon plays. In theory, various combinations of objects might also have meaning. The system might be configured so that if Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck are placed in the bowl, a cartoon featuring both these characters starts playing. The system becomes very social and conversational when homemade objects are augmented with RFID and linked to, say, home video clips or family photos, as demonstrated by the experiment reported in the paper.
I wonder what sorts of casual, natural interactions such as those induced by Bowl might make sense in the domain I’m working in? What are the relevant artefacts that could be augmented to create new meanings for the people who interact with them?
So Android has been released. As I suspected, Google has not actually released a phone of their own. Could be an interesting platform for researchers in the mobile/ubiquitous computing space who want to develop prototypes quickly. One of the creators of the platform hopes that someone develops an application that can help interpret his wife’s thoughts…
Categories
Meeting of the minds
Enough politics. Back to a more wholesome topic…
Here’s a photo of a dinner we held for Anind Dey at the Brasserie on the River a couple of weeks ago. The photo contains two of my previously mentioned ubiquitous computing inspirators.
Clockwise from the top right we have Jaga Indulska, Anind Dey, Karen Henricksen (Robinson), Ricky’s camera case, Pei Hu, Ryan Wishart, Myilone Anandarajah, Andry Rakotonirainy and Bob Hardian. The food was great and the conversation stimulating. A good night was had by all.