Making Sense of Sensing Systems: Five Questions for Designers and Researchers

Via Making Sense of Sensing Systems: Five Questions for Designers and Researchers, here are Belloti’s �five questions� on sensing-based interface. Designers of user interfaces for standard applications, devices, and systems rarely have to worry about questions of the following sort:


• When I address a system, how does it know I am addressing it?



• When I ask a system to do something how do I know it is attending?



• When I issue a command (such as save, execute or delete), how does the system know what it relates to?



• How do I know the system understands my command and is correctly executing my intended action?



• How do I recover from mistakes?

Future Location-Based Experiences

In Future Location-Based Experiences Steve Benford makes a technology watch report on the use of location-based experiences in the education. He gives examples of location-based experiences, categorizes the technology used and introduces the future challenges for location-based experiences. I should make a graph out of this report, because Benford presents location-based expericencs as series of russian-doll style folder hierarchies:
Types of experiences in education:

• Information services and guides
• Games
• Field visits
• Field science

Technologies

• Mobile devices
• Wireless networking (cellular telephony, wireless Ethernes, Bluetooth
• Location sensing (GPS, Wireless network, Ultrasonic systems, RFID tags, accelerometers, vision techniques)

Future challenges

• Dealing with uncertainty of location (limited coverage, accuracy, variation of performance over both space and time.)
• Dealing with uncertainty of connection
• Interoperability
• Privacy

Delivering Real-World Ubiquitous Location Systems

In Delivering Real-World Ubiquitous Location Systems, Borriello, Chamlers, LaMarca and Nixon, emphasize the praticle aspects of getting location-enhanced applications deployed on existing mobile devices without the need to set up special infrastructure. It contains many similaor content to my post mortem on CatchBob!. They mention that the cell phone is the most ubiquitous computing platform and therefor is an excellent condidate for location-based service deployment. However, accuracy, privacy, and cost ore concerns in phone-based location. They mention the problems of using radio frequency signals-based location, because it is hampered by inherent technology problems such as limits on coverage, signal interference, and reliance on infrastructure, and by broader issues such as privacy concerns. There is a high demand from users for security, privacy and trustworhiness. By 2008 the European Union will deploy Galileo, a next-generation GPS system that promises greater accuracy and operation covering both indoors and out, due to stronger radio signals that should penetrate most buildings.

Developers of applications will have to accept variation in the accuracy and availability of location data for some time. Systems that expose the variable accuracy and availability of location systems should not be seen as standing in opposition to research aimed at improving accuracy and broadening availability.

Different Measures of Location

I stumbled on a couple of slides of Chris Heathcote on location, its measures and its usefulness. He says that instead of throwing technology at the problem we should match the needs to methods for the developper and the user (appreciate the toolbox). There are different measures of location:

• accuracy
• availability
• reliability/trust
• output useful to humans
• output useful to computers
• acquire or refine?

In each of this category, what is good enough, useful and useable by the users?

He advocates for the use of technology for quick rough location and then the use of people to refine. How accurate the positioning should be to be useful, especially when humans can read/recognise 50-100m.

Building a Mobile, Locative, and Collaborative Application

I wrote a postmortem on CatchBob! a treasure-hunt type, Wi-Fi based locative and collaborative mobile game I developed at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne, Switzerland. The document describes the whole development process, from the technical architecture to the user perception of the game. I talk about the positioning system, the data, the communication tool as well as the the user interface. I finish by introducing a few topics I find interesting in the field of locative media. This document addresses a large audience. Non-tech-savvy people should not be afraid to have a glance at it.

“Building a mobile, locative, and collaborative application“, by Fabien Girardin.

ShoutSpace Zoom

I implemented a zoom and simple message vizualisation for ShoutSpace. A .mov (2.4MB) features it.

Methodological Paper

A methodological paper is expected to demonstrate the proposed techniques and evaluate the performance relative to competing techniques.

Massively-Collaborative Game Models by McGonigal

Point to me by RoRk a few weeks ago, Jane McGonigal has research interests in massively-collaborative game models and games that are played in everyday public space

Accuracy Charaterization for Metropolitan-scale Wi-Fi Localization

Yet another excellent Place Lab publication. Accuracy Charaterization for Metropolitan-scale Wi-Fi Localization talks about the feasibility of building and the accuracy of a wede-area 802.11 Wi-Fi-based positioning system with very little calibration overhead. Their experiment show that the can estimate a user’s position with a median positioning error of 13-40 meters (depending upon the characteristics of the environment). They point out that building and deploying location-aware application that are usable by a wide variety of people in everyday situations is arguably no easier now than it was ten year ago. Moreover, most current location systems do not work where people spend much of their time. GPS does not work indoors and works poorly in many cities where the so called “urban canyons” form by building prevent GPS units from seeing enough satellites to get a position lock. They prone a mix approach to positioning to reach ubiquitous availability of location information.

Absurd Humor in Spam

A spam message out of nowhere ended up in my inbox: “is that your finger?” Great absurd humor!