The Promise of LBS, a Current Business View

A techno/marketing push article in Red Herring about The Promise of LBS that explains the current market situation of LBS in the US, Europe and Asia. Stunning and depressing analysis. Depressing because these people are blind of the main issues of LBS. The user should be in the center of concerns, not the customer nor the technology.

It describes Asia as the eldorado “where cellular subscribers depend on location in their daily lives” and pin-points the elements why no revenues are emerging from the US and European markets:

• Consumers just need more education on the benefits of location, and—of course—a little more time before they’ll start paying for the services
• Bad technology used and poor positioning accuracy
• Lack of cash to implement the right technologies with the right timing
• Privacy issues

Kenneth Hyers, of ABI Research is the freakiest of all:

‘If I could have a magic ability to know where my kids are at all times, I would pay almost any amount. Most American parents would.’

Russel Buckley has probably the best answer to it in a post about Worst Technology for Girls started by Nicolas.

Wanting to keep an eye on your kids and protect them is deeply ingrained parental behaviour. But spying like this actually can cause more damage, by breaking down trust between the parent and child.

Scaling Counties to Map Election Results

The problem with cartograms is that is can obliterate anything recognizable. Style.org propose to maintain the physical shapes and added scaled symbols to represent the size and proportion of the vote. Scaling each county relative to the number of delegates it elects produces a more accurate visual weighting. Although county size is distorted, the relationships between adjacent counties are preserved. One advantage of this presentation is that the relative voting power of each county is made immediately apparent.

Via Cartography Mapping election results

Autonomous Mobile Agents on Mobile Devices

Via pasta and vinegar, Designing a Mobile Music Sharing System Based on Emergent Properties by Maria Håkansson, Mattias Jacobsson, Lars Erik Holmquist (Future Applications Lab, Viktoria Institute, Sweden), describes an autonomous sharing of music files on mobile devices with bluetooth

It made me think about an old project of mine on autonomous and mobile agents. Done in Jini, agents could move from one system (agent hosts, not mobile devices) to another and take along their program code as well as their data.

Geographical Distribution of Search Queries

Interpreting the Data: Parallel Analysis with Sawzall by Rob Pike, Sean Dorward, Robert Griesemer, Sean Quinlan (Google Labs) refers to a gif animation that displays the geographical distribution of search queries throughout a day.

via Cartography

Defining Uncertainties in Can You See Me Now?

Can you See Me Now? by Steve Benford, Andy Crabtree, Martin Flintham, Adam Drozd, Rob Anastasi and Mark Paxton is a journal paper to appear in ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, ACM Press. Nicolas considers it as a seminal article about ethnographical analysis of a location-based game. I see it at cornerstone of my current interest in the uncertainties inherent in pervasive environment. Projects like Can You See Me Now? are important not only to offer glimpses of potential new applications for location-based technologies, but they also provide a useful vehicle for HCI research, especially for studying how participants experience location and context sensing technologies and how they manage to coordinate distributed collaborative activities in spite of considerable technical uncertainties. Uncertainty is a complex issue that can affect users in different ways depending on their role, the extend of their technical knowledge, the context and the information available to them. Moreover, uncertainties are fundamental characteristics of location-based and mobile experiences, and they will remain so for the foreseeable future. While technology providers suggest that there are not limits to connectivity and mobility, service coverage and stability is anything but seamless in the real world.

I plan to have a look at theses issues from a different perspective by investigating other methodologies like mixing quantitative data from the system logs and qualitative data from post-game interviews to compare them with a performance index on the task. That is quantifying the impact of uncertainties on the task, while the work on Can You See Me Now? is to talk about the impact of uncertainties on the experience. I think there is a gap to fill between engineers delivering ubiquitous technologies and the practitioners envisioning services and solutions and the researchers analyzing the impacts (understand and explicit the combinations of social processes and technologies). That might explain the boring state of current Location-Based Services. Providing designer of pervasive games with cues like this paper does is good but not enough. It does not change an engineer’s perspective. Performance and impact indexes might do.

Overview
Benford et al. explicit the diverse ways in which players experienced uncertainties inherent in GPS and WiFi, including being mostly unaware of them, but sometimes seeing them as a problem, or treating them as a designed feature of the game, and even occasionally exploiting them within gameplay. They argue that designers should explicitly consider four potential states of being mobile participants – connected and tracked, connected but not tracked, tracked but not connected, and neither connected nor tracked. They then introduce five strategies that might be used to deal with uncertainty in these different states for different kinds of participants: remove it, hide it, manage it, reveal it and exploit it.

Sources of uncertainties
Sources of uncertainties in the game were GPS and WiFi. It proved to be a constant battle for a runner to get a GPS fix at all. Then analysis of system logs showed that reported GPS error ranged from 4m to 106m with a mean of 12.4m and a standard deviation of 5.8m. Even with a dense WiFi coverage. Both connectivity (packet losses) and latency were problems. Periods of short loss (less than 5 seconds) that account for 90.6% of loss intervals and were largely due to communication errors; 278 moderate periods of loss (between 5 seconds and 10min) that were largely due to detours out of the connectivity or interference; and finally two loss periods of about 15min and one of about 40, resulting from a major equipment failure. Although variable, there was a typical delay (latency) of six seconds or more between one participant acting and another participant seeing the actions. A final source of uncertainty was occasional technical failurs such as cables working loose and connectors being damaged as weel as “soft” failure such as batteries running out of charge.

The Mobile Player Four State of Being

• Connected and tracked
• Tracked but not connected
• Connected but not tracked
• Neither connected nor tracked

Designers need to consider how a player might end up in each of these states and should be done about it.

Five General Strategies for Dealing with Uncertainties

• Remove uncertainty: improving performance of existing technologies, mixing multiple sensing technologies or more pragmatically design the experience to closely fit the capabilities of the technology.
• Hide uncertainty: avoid setting unrealistic expectations through metaphors that cannot be delivered by the technology (i.e. avoid creating the illusion of a seamless world)
• Manage uncertainty: fall back to a downgraded but continuing experience. Uncertainty of connectivity might be dealt with by implementing baseline experiences for both street and online players that can continue when the connection between them is lost.
• Reveal uncertainty: Greater dialogue between users and ubiquitous technologies rather than designing for invisibility. The experience of Can You See Me Now? suggests that runners were better able to work with the uncertainties of GPS and wireless networking once they had build up a working knowledge of their presence and characteristics, provided by some information about estimated GPS error and connectivity on their mobile interface. This approach of revealing uncertainty is familiar from everyday mobile phones where information about signal strength is routinely made available to users to help them deal with uncertainty of connectivity. Experimental evidences state that revealing uncertainty can improve user performance. However this might lead to the trade-off between revealing and mental workload.
• Exploiting uncertainty: deliberately use uncertainty as a positive feature of an experience (creating engaging and provocative interfaces). Users can reflect more deeply if they are provided with a fuzzy representation that creates ambiguity.

Visualization that Reveal the seams
An ongoing work of Benford et al. is exploring how visualization revealing uncertainties can enable players to effectively interpret the ambituities encountered in gameplay. Their studies of gameplay show that players are already aware of seams in various ways.

Figure: Visualization of predicted GPS availability

BCN Trends Spotting

Current trends in BCN are torturing elevators, the designing 4th places bible, sleeping awareness signs, and the return of manual street cleaning.

Notebook Ban

I got kicked out of the restaurant car in a Swiss train because I was reading my NetNewsWire with my 12″ PowerBook. I was shown a the written “restaurant” policy booklet containing rule 11: “notebooks are NOT allowed”. Reading newspapers, books, and yelling on a mobile phone are allowed. Even smoking cigars is a more than accepted activity. I did not go into explaining that I was actually reading the news with my small electronic device and having an IM conversation with GPRS. It is interesting to notice that a notebook is still perceived as a working tool and not a communication device. Until december 2005 (when smoking will fortunately be banned from all trains) smokers are more welcomed than geeks in swiss train’s restaurants.

Ogo for IM and Mail

Swisscom is the first european operator to launch a mobile device (named Ogo) that offers instant messanging (via MSN) and email capabilities. Ogo costs 49CHF for the device, then 19CHF/month for the services. Swisscom targets teens and “enfults/adulescents” (teens in theirs 20s and ealry 30s). Carsten Schloter, the ever-opptimisitc Swisscom CEO, envisions Ogo as an SMS killer. I might go down into history for that statement.

You mean I have one device to phone, sms, take pictures, listen to mp3s and FM radio and another one to handle my IM contact and mails? Plus chatting and writing mails need advanced keyboard capabilities that people will need to adapt (ever written a mail on a Blackberry and done IM on a PocketPC?). Adults like integration or at least smooth interoperability (geeks are ok with interoperability). Let’s see how teens accept multiple devices for multiple purposes… It might just work since it is not rare to see (pre-)teenagers moving around with their phone, digital camera, iPod and the occasional Nintendog.

Vessels Live Trackers

Yesterday, Julian Bleecker mentioned FlighAware that provides real-time tracking of not just of flights or traffic to airports, but actual unique, tail-number identifiable equipment. Sailwx provides the same live tracking capabilities, but for ships.

Map of Road Traffic Noise in Paris

The “Mairie de Paris” offers an applications that maps the road traffic noise in the whole city. Maps are both in 2D and 3D with daytime and nighttime data.

Found in the Radical Cartography spectacular links.