Mobile Search, Wayfinding and Matchmaking

Many LBS scenarios deal with mobile search, wayfinding, and converting strangers into friends. They have that in common that they are pretty useless in areas known by the users (home, office and many third places). We do not necessarily need assistance to find out everyday stuff (the closest post office from my home?), how to navigate in these areas, and in artificially making acquaintances. This leaves these mobile LBS being sparsely relevant to unknown areas.

2 posts talked about it lately:
Wayfinding, GPS and social navigation by Nicolas quoting Jan in future perfect.

“Mobile with GPS and map application. So you want to make a map reference in a hurry? “It’s easier to just ask someone” In many instances so it is“.

Is Mobile Search About Local? by Russell in Mobhappy:

Most people actually know the area they live and work in pretty well and don’t need our assistance to find out everyday stuff like this.

Russel also talks about the Need to Know Now Factor (N2KN) being often not really relevant to location and mobility:

The N2KN factor may indeed have a local element to it from time to time, but Local won’t be the factor that actually stimulates the Search. In the short to medium term, when mobiles are so much slower and clumsier to use than computers (or even Yellow Pages), being motivated to use mobile search is going to depend on how urgently you need the information and how important it is.

Scale-Free Networks

In his course on Web Characteristics and his project on the Characteristics of the Web of Spain, Vicente Lopez talked about the properties of scale-free/power law networks that are common in social networks. These networks also exhibit the Small world phenomenon, in which two average nodes are separated by a very small number of connections (The Six Degrees of Duncan Watts, Properties of the Kevin Bacon Absorbing Set, Small World Project at Columbia University).

Ich Soy a Transnational

Dans «Moi, Chinois de Boston vivant à Paris», Le Temps mentionne l’apparition d’une nouvelle catégorie de migrants: les transnationaux, qui passent régulièrement d’un horizon à l’autre sans choisir et sans en quitter vraiment aucun . De plus en plus d’hommes et de femmes réalisent des parcours constituant d’allers et retour et de multiples étapes. Portés par la démocratisation du transport aérien et le développement des télécommunications, et de la libre circulation ils passent d’un horizon à un autre sans plus en choisir et sans plus en quitter vraiment aucun.

Les transnationaux sont un signe de l’émmergence de la creative class [fr] (qui par choix ou contraite vivent dans 2 villes bien connectées en même temps (Barcelone-Genève, Zürich-Paris, Genève-Lyon, …).

The Drop: Pragmatic Problems in the Design of a Compelling, Pervasive Game

In The Drop: Pragmatic Problems in the Design of a Compelling, Pervasive Game, Ian Smith, Sunny Consolvo, and Anthony LaMarca discuss the technical, social, and business challenges faced while creating and implementing a pervasive game. It has some similarities with my Building a mobile, locative, and collaborative application.

The Drop is a capture the flag type of game. The description of its scenario is not the most interesting part of this paper. The pragramtic issues are relevant for moving pervasive game away from labs and implement them in the real world.

• Player movement: prevent physical collisions between people
• Location systems: do calibration only in areas where the enhances accuracy is valuable
• Boundaries and maps: understand the game limites
• Organizational issues and business model: what space would allow such a game

Collaboration in Context-Aware Mobile Phone Applications

In Collaboration in Context-Aware Mobile Phone Applications by Jonna Häkkilä and Jani Mäntyjärvi examine collaboration in relation to context-aware mobile terminals and discuss possibilities on enhancing the collaboration and improving usability of mobile applications if these two technologies are combined.

Dey and Abowd (Towards a Better Understanding of Context and Context-awareness) describe context-awareness to be

any information that can be used to characterize the situation of an entity. An entity is a person, place, or object that is considered relevant to the interaction between a user and an application including the user and applications themselves. Context-aware mobile devices have so far been investigated mainly from the technological point of view, examining context-recognition and sensor technologies. Location is probably the most commonly used context attribute.

Computer supported collaboration scenarios divide according to the simultaneousness, and location in time and space (Groupware: some issues and experiences). Mobility is divided into three different forms: locational, operational and interactional mobilities.

There is an interesting reference to conducting the collaborative task and the importance of the infrastructure:

While executing the collaboration task, the contextual questions related to infrastructure become important. Sufficient and stabile network connection is crucial especially in time consuimg tasks. Network coverage may have an effect on communication and delays may occur. A context-aware system can try to prevent unwanted situations by switching appropriate settings or warning the user of critical fluctuations.

Moreover:

When the collaborative task is in process, the infrastructure becomes to play a bigger role, and the system can help the user by being aware and able to respond to crucial changes in network connection, data traffic and prices.

Critical question with context-aware mobile collaborative systems include privacy issues and technological restrictions (small power consumption, network connections, small memory and reduced computation power. To avoid crucial mistakes in application design, the concerns and criticism as well as positive feedback from phone end-users need to be studies.

Invisible Infrastructure and Communicating Failure and Malfunctioning to the User

Quotes from Norbet Streitz and Paddy Nixon their editorial of the March 2005 special issue of the Communication of the ACM on the Disappearing Computer:

Since the infrastructure structure is meant to be invisible it will be necessary to develop an understanding of what failure means and how malfunctioning is communicated to the user.

and in a more general level:

The increasing ubiquity of computer and their diffusion into our environment requires reconsidering the complex interplay between technology and the human.

How Do Users Think about Ubiquitous Computing

In How Do Users Think about Ubiquitous Computing, Kai N Truong, Elaiine M. Huang, Molly M. Stevens and Gregory D. Avowd investigate how people describe and conceptualize ubiquitous computing applications and technology. Current systems that allow end-users to create ubicomp applications generally embody a technology-centered perspective. There is a need to bridge the needs-technology gap in such systems.

By surveying 45 participants, the authors examine how users express their ideas about ubicomp applications, specifically for the purpose of capturing event and information in the home of the future. Ideas are grouped in three categories of applications:

• provide peace of mind: to help users feel secure by allowing them to monitor their home and children
• collect records of everyday tasks or objects: keep track of objects (such as car keys)
• preserve sentimental memories from experiences: the house should capture memories of people during special events instead of people having to manually capture them

Not surprisingly people tend to conceptualize ubicomp in terms of human needs, situations, and tasks rather than devices and interactions between devices. There was a general lack of reference to devices of any kind. Participants rarely mentioned cameras, microphones, digital displays, sensors, or any other type of device in their responses.

Recording and Understanding Mobile People and Mobile Technology

In Recording and Understanding Mobile People and Mobile Technology, Paul Tennent and Matthew Chalmers present the Replayer system to record and understand the activity of people moving and interacting with each other via mobile technologies. Their focus is the combination of observational techniques, usually based on video recording, and system-based techniques that log or instruments the technologies in use.

Their approach mixing qualitative and quantitave data is explained as:

One one side we have the more exploratory and qualitative assessment often favoured by ethnographers, and on the other hand is the more hypothesis-driven and quantitative approach often favored by technologists. Replayer does not subscribe completely to either of these views instead seeking to enhance each with aspects of the other.

One main challenge of such analysing tool is to synchronise hetegoreneous data comming from multiple distributed sources (clients, server, videos, audios, …). Logs may be inconsistent (i.e. when users are out of wireless network hotspots). One approach to this issue is keying:

Manually examining a single data set in great detail, for example a video recording of a system trial, and then using it as a “key” to select important or relevant periods of time in the experience to investigate with the help of relevant subsets of other data such as system logs

Analyzing User Confusion in Context Aware Mobile Applications

In Analyzing User Confusion in Context Aware Mobile Applications by K. Loer and M. D. Harrison analyse that would allow designer of context-aware interfaces to predict potential pitfalls before the design is fielded. Instead of building and explore experimental prototypes, their exploration highlights the possibility that early models of an interaction system might be used to predict problems with embedding in context before costly mistakes have been made. The goal is of course to make user interfaces more intuitive and prevent subtle and confusing mode changes in context-aware environment. It can also be used to find recovery strategies in a “fail-over” situation.

The benefits that context awareness brings can be obscured by difficulties. Techniques are required to help predict these difficulties at design time. The work underlying this paper uses formal modeling techniques and model checking. In this case study the environment is described simply in terms of physical positions in the environment and transitions between these positions (the context is oversimplisticly modeled).

In their scenario (operators in a power plant), context is used in identifying position of an operator, checking validity of a given action, inferring an operator’s intention, checking action against an operator’s schedule assessing and indicating urgency. Confusion can arise if there is more than one plant component in close proximity, if the operator forgets which component they have saved, if one operator forgets that another operator is nearby. These problems can be exaggerated by poor design. Context confusion can be avoided through design by changing the action structure (for example, using interlocks) so that these ambiguities are avoided or by clearly marking the difference to users.

One question require more exploration is “What are the key features of the design that are relevant to these context confusions?“

Supporting Mobile Applications with Real-Time Visualisation of GPS Availability

A current investigation topic already mentioned in Defining Uncertainties in Can You See Me Now? is to visualise the current state of GPS availability in real-time for scenario planning for certain types of mobile applications and as aid for analysis of location logs. Supporting Mobile Applications with Real-Time Visualisation of GPS Availability by Anthony Steed introduces a tool called satview which visualises the current likely availability of GPS coverage. The tool takes a 3D model of the local environment, and the satellites positions. In real-time, the tool shows where on the ground plane one would likely be able to get a position fix from three or more satellites.

GPS units usually report position estimates and the satellites in view (azimuth, elevation and signal strength) using the NMEA 0183 communications standard. Anthony uses a graphical shadow algorithm on a 3D model for any one satellite (acting as the light source).

The development of satview was motivated by two scenarios

• Predicting and showing current black spots to GPS users and therefor prevent frustration caused by inaccuracy or availability.
• Planning data collectiong sessions that need GPS. Satview is used to plan which regions are more favorable at what time to collect logs of pollution levels.

A reference I should get my eyes on is:
Galileo Performance: GPS Interoperability and Discriminators for Urban and Indoor Environments. GPS World June 2003