ETH Meeting on Locative and Pervasive Gaming

I lead an interesting meeting with Steffen P Walz, Mathias Ochsendorf from the ETHZ, and Nicolas Nova, Mauro Cherubini from CRAFT. We shared experiences, thoughts and ideas on locative and pervasives games as well as on spatial annotation. Nicolas bloged his notes taken during the meeting. (God brings you here Nicolas!).

Self-Organizing Maps for Internet Exploration

Throw me rocks and stones (Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me…), I was not familiar with WEBSOM. WEBSOM is a document exploration tool that generates self-organizing maps for Internet exploration.

Geoloqus

Geoloqus is a blog on the exploration of spatial annotation and locative media

ShoutSpace Scenario Examples

Rune’s wishful thinking on the wide usage of a PMA 400 in his university and the link to the iPod at Duke project page provide some examples of scenarios for ShoutSpace.

Spatial Annotation Getting Mainstream in Two Years?

Spatial annotation is getting more and more light it seems. The mainstream PCWorld mentionned Siemens Digital Graffiti project in Post-It Notes Go Mobile. According to Siemens, there are about two years from commercial roll-out. It is unclear on how the handle the message positioning (with simple cell IDs?) and how (un)accurate it is. They do not talk about any specific scenario either. I guess that is why there are not rushing it out of their lab.

Jargon Watch at PLAN

The Pervasive and Locative Arts Network (PLAN) cross-disciplinary workshop on pervasive and locative media provided me with a bunch of new angles and words to watch in the world of locative media.

• We need to create more engaging technology
• Seamful games, the need to go around and play with the weaknesses of the technology
• White shadows are shadows of ray (areas not accessible by the rays, GPS signals), In the Wi-Fi worlds white shadows can be called Wi-Fi “cold spots”
• Some of the technical talks were around tolerance and reliability, about dealing with unconnectivity (be without a network), useful GPS errors, maps are approximations and not the truth
• Use of p2p epidemic algorithm for “slow” mobile games
• Design can highlight, comment the existing situation, not bringing new content
• Situated != located (I did not really get this one…)
• The audience is part of the environment of a mobile game. The is a need to bring passive audience as part of the game
• Doing psychogeography with an antic map of Strassbourg
• Relation of place to meaning, real and fictional, physical and virtual
• Public space versus commons (still don’t get the difference)
• Public values versus commons
• Presence beyond proximity (asynchronous inhabitation of places)
• Some artists do not want to be responsible and question the responsibility of the others. This made me think that some artist are failed researchers
• I was surprised that some artists/researchers only satisfy themselves with paper protyping
• Supermaket is the most interesting media!
• Location-based service live the feeling of trust and non-trust. We would like to trust the technology (to enhence a situation) and in the same time we hope that technology cannot be trusted (privacy issues, surveillance, tracking)
• Physical Markup Language
• Artists and corporate researchers are not so different. Corporate researchers having a tendency to have even more deontology

3 Days in Freeky Britons' Country

Ekahau

Ekahau launched Wi-Fi tags called T101 that can compete with other real-time indoor location solutions (RFID and bluetooth). They mention the possible uses in people tracking (patients and caregivers in hospitals and lon, field Engineers in factories and production plants, warehouse staff, security people in enterprises, visitors and contractors on corporate campuses, elderly care) and asset/equipment tracking (Hospital mobile equipment, yard containers, warehouse pallets, warehouse lift trucks, mobile data terminals).

The Ekahau T101 Wi-Fi tag enables real-time people and asset tracking in any standard Wi-Fi network. The T101 tag can be attached to any mobile object or asset, and can be carried by people as well. The Ekahau Positioning Engine software reports the continuous location and movements of the tag within Wi-Fi coverage area both indoors and outdoors.

Espace Virtuel et Distance Physique

Dans Loin des yeux, loin de l’écran ?, Daniel Kaplan parle de la distance et proximité dans le monde des espaces sans distance (réseaux).

Les études montrent que deux correspondants qui se rencontrent fréquemment télécommuniquent aussi plus souvent que la moyenne. Ce qui, par parenthèse, montre aussi que les réseaux numériques ne contribuent pas particulièrement à isoler les urbains les uns des autres. On sait aussi que certaines équipes, voire certaines entreprises peuvent fonctionner de manière chaleureuse et efficace à distance ; mais les exemples d’échecs sont tout aussi nombreux et dans la quasi-totalité des cas, les équipes qui marchent prévoient des moments réguliers de convergence physique.

From Position to Place

In From Position to Place, Jeffrey Hightower about the need for application to reason about “place”, not coordinates. Existing systems rely on manually defining places which, while useful, does not scale to ubiquitous deployment. Generically, place is a human-readable labeling of positions. Current approaches require manual definition of places. I must, by hand, delineate and label my neighborhood, property, rooms, furniture, and service areas of my devices. Manual definition does not scale. Instead, ubiquitous deployment requires automatically learning significant regions and semantically labeling them as places.

The challenge is to augment maps of physical features with the dynamic data to, over time, suggest geometric regions which are good candidates to label as places. Label directly represents the place�s demographic, environmental, historic, personal, or commercial significance and is the desired abstraction for emerging proactive applications.

The interface should be capable of answering both �What place labels are associated with my current coordinates?� and �What is the probability I am currently is in a place P?�