Hi ecebloggers,

In the past I’ve discussed the imaging application, and in particular, the tagging capabilities it provides.  Now it’s time to put the application to work.  Tagging of media, particularly photographs, has become a very popular and efficient means of organizing material on the internet and on personal computers.  Over a short period of time the technique has evolved from an optional feature to a must-provide service, and can be found within modern desktop and internet photo galleries.  However, tagging is normally accomplished long after the images have been captured, and possibly at the expense of in-the-moment information.  In this view, we hypothesize that tagging photos right after they are taken, or on the spot, will result in a larger number of tags than tagging photos long after they are taken.  We also hypothesize that the tags created on the spot will be perceived to better describe the photos by consumers of the photos.  Finally, we hypothesize that a convenient way of tagging photos on the spot is by using voice commands.  

To test these hypotheses we will conduct a study in which participants will be asked to introduce the University of New Hampshire campus in a number of low-resolution pictures captured using a Symbol MC50 PDA. Participants will be divided into two groups.  One group will be able to issue voice commands to select tags from a list while the other group will have to manually select or type in tags from the same list.  The images and their tags will be posted to an internet photo gallery, such as Flickr, which will allow us to recruit a third group of participants who will compare the quality of the tags created by the first two participant groups.  The study will be conducted throughout the months of November and December, so check back for the results soon after.  Below is a sample image of UNH posted on Flickr.  The tagging section is highlighted in red.

Michael Farrar

Check out this cool multitouch game (via Interactive Multimedia Technology):

Multitouch Space Invaders! from multitouch-barcelona on Vimeo.

Andrew Kun

As posted a few months ago, Matthew Lape and I were given the opportunity to work on KLAS, the Kingsbury Location Awareness System. With the help of Professor Andrew Kun as our adviser and Oskar Palinko as a source of valuable insight, we were able to create a simple navigation application and tour guide application using the Project54 framework as our software development platform. While the work is still in progress, here are some of the results of our summer work.

Taking a look at KLAS, there are primarily two software components: the location determination application and the user-interactive applications. I will briefly describe the user-interactive applications while Matt will discuss the location determination side of things in another post. KLAS is a location awareness system that utilizes IEEE 802.11 RSSI readings to obtain a user’s location. This location information can be useful in various applications. The applications we decided to focus on for KLAS is a tour guide application and the navigation application.

This is an example of the map display in the KLAS Navigation application. The PDA on the left depicts what a user will see if they are in the shaded orange region. The arrow is the direction the user needs to go. If the user follows the arrow, the image on the right PDA will be shown. The right PDA image depicts where the user is currently and shows how to get to the destination.

This is an example of the Tour Guide application for KLAS. The image on the left depicts where the user is currently (somewhere in the shaded orange region) and a selected room (in red) that the user wishes to learn more information about. The user can cycle through nearby rooms to learn more information about it.

The image on the PDA on the right is shown if the user selects the “Room Info” button in the left image. Currently, the room number, the occupants, and some information about the room and occupant is given. The user can also cycle through the rooms in this screen and also press “Map” to navigate back to the map display.

As we continue to work on this, we plan on playing a lot more with the GUI and using Project54’s SUI as well. We hope to perform some user studies and experiments with different methods of pedestrian navigation and also conveying information. Stay tuned for some more information about KLAS brought to you by Matthew Lape!

Mark Taipan

Hello ecebloggers,

As some of you may know professor Andrew Kun is teaching a Ubiquitous computing course this fall. So far it’s been a lot of fun

I’m a big fan of Nine Inch Nails. The band is known for its good music as well as their visualizations on shows. Recently they published their first post and revealed their secrets for visualizations: ubiquitous computing!

They’re on tour right now so you may see it yourself. If you’re from the area (NH) you may join me at Verizon Arena, Manchester on November 8th.

Have a good one,

Nemanja Memarovic

We have already reported on the arrival of the TouchKit as well as on its initial run. This time, we present our sturdy new mounting solution for the whole system. We have accomodated the display screen of the TouchKit in the middle of a hollow desktop. Here is the author with the solution.

It can be noticed that the TTT is tilted. This allows easier manipulation by a single user either by standing in front of the screen or sitting on a higher chair. The tilt angle is adjustable. The TTT can also lie flat which would allow easier information sharing around the table. The tabletop is mounted using hinges and a simple prop-up mechanism shown in the following image.

The table itself is a standard office desk which was customized for our needs.
Besides for running TouchKit projects, this setup can also be used for TouchKit development. The image below shows the mount of a keyboard and mouse on the tilted table, which provide a basic development environment.

Further action plans include buying and installing a short-throw projector device, which could be mounted onto the bottom of the tabletop. This would allow the screen to be lowered to a horizontal position and still have a maximum projection window size.

Let me know below, if you have any comments on the solution. Thanks,

Oszkar Palinko

Over the last year I’ve written about the Kindle, about ripping books and about the future of electronic readers. Clearly, I’m pretty excited about this technology. However, I still don’t own an electronic reader, mostly because I haven’t found one that would help me with a major need: reading pdf and Word documents. The problem with the Kindle and other readers has been their size. With a 6″ screen they’re considerably smaller than legal size paper (14″ diagonal) which is the size used for conference papers, theses, student assignments, etc.

However, now there’s a larger device. The iRex digital reader has a 10″ screen. I haven’t read a review about it yet that would tell me how well it works with pdf and Word documents intended for legal or A4 size paper. Here’s a CNET review by David Carnoy to which I posted a question regarding pdfs, but apparently David doesn’t bother responding to questions. Another review may soon be posted here by Adam B. and he is clearly a lot more responsive to input from the community than David.

Other e-readers with large screens will soon be on the market. Here’s one such device by Plastic Logic (impressive!):

I’ll let you all know if (or should I say when?) I finally purchase one of these.

Andrew Kun

After a couple of days fighting with scarce documentation, the TouchKit project, which I have written about here, is finally operational. It was tested with a helloworld and a drawing application, which came with the system. Here, you can see my colleague Mark operating the touch screen, which reacts by putting a red circle at every location where the fingers touch the display. The size of the circles depend on the amount of force exerted. Very nice!

We have also tested how the system works in dark. It seems that there is not much difference, since the TouchKit camera reacts only to infra-red light. The system appears to be fairly robust in this sense. Here, Matt is experimenting with the multi-touch display:

The installation process was a little bit bumpy, because it is described on the TouchKit web site in a concise manner. After “googling” and downloading the drivers for the firewire camera, the exemplar code had to be edited before it became functional with the hardware. The TouchKit Forum was very helpful in keeping me on the right track.

After the basic functionality of the system was proven, Mark Taipan, Matt Lape (receivers of the SURF award, and distinguished P54 undergrad students) and I figured out, that the temporary screen clamping setup and camera mount are not robust enough to operate the system easily: if any part of the system (screen, projector, camera) moves, it has to be recalibrated. Therefore we began brainstorming about possible mounting solutions. For starts, we came up with a horizontal table-top mount which would allow the system to be securely fastened. Here is Matt with the proposed TouchKit stand:

It would be useful if the table would be “tiltable” for different applications. We are working on modeling and designing such a solution. Further results will follow here, on eceblogger.

Thanks to Matt and Mark for their help!

Oszkar Palinko

Check out this video showing the Microsoft Surface in Sheraton hotels:

Apparently there’s one in Boston, and it looks like it’s the Sheraton next to the Prudential.

[via Interactive Multimedia Technology]

Andrew Kun

Today in my ubicomp course we’re discussing Adam Greenfield’s talk on Everyware given at Keio University in 2006. One idea that Adam presented was that of the Panopticon, a prison in which the prisoners never know if they are watched or not. Adam points out that inhabitants of a ubicomp world may feel this way unless we’re careful with how we design this world. Here’s the Panopticon from Wikipedia:

Watch the talk, or even better read the book Everyware, to find out what Adam suggests we should do to avoid a Panopticon-like world.

Andrew Kun

p.s. I had better luck with the 8-part YouTube version of the video (starting here) than with the Quicktime one.

I was just talking to Mark Taipan and Matt Lape who are working on an indoor navigation project that utilizes handheld computers. Their application allows users to see where they are on a map. Of course the small size of handheld computer displays limits the type of maps you can use. This is even more of a problem for many mobile phones (even smaller displays), which are likely to be the actual devices used in any commercially viable indoor navigation application.

One solution may come from projector phones such as this one. If you had a projector phone you could display a map on the wall and presumably get better resolution, or at least larger characters, than what you can get on a mobile phone display. It would be interesting to see if people would be willing to use such a system.

Andrew Kun