Tag: wild

Wall-Sized Printed Adverts with Integrated Screen

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At Zurich Airport Orange and Nokia are running a large printed advert. At a first glance it looks just as a printed large scale poster. The TV screen in one poster and the projected writing on top of another poster are seamlessly integrated. The media design of the overall installation is appealing.

The active screen (could be a 50 inch plasma TV) is the screen of the mobile phone and shows the navigation application. In contrast to most other installations, where screens and printed posters are used, this appears right and it catches people’s attention.

There is work from Scott Klemmer’s group at Stanford that looks the relationship between the printed displays and projection/displays for various applications. The Gigaprints project was shown as a video at Ubicomp 2006.

Large scale sensor network connected to public displays

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The airport Köln-Bonn (CGN) has all the parking spaces monitored with a simple sensor (detects if there is a car or not) and provides displays at the entrance showing the number of open spaces and has active signage in the parking garage leading to the free spaces – additionally it is visualized above each space – probably more a maintenance functions to see if the sensor works.

(looking at the pictures I have probably parked on women-only parking spots…)

How will wasting energy be judged in the future?

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Back in Bonn after my holidays I had to catch up on a few things. When I left the B-IT after midnight I was stunned by the sight of the post tower (http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post_Tower) – as it is all lit up. Another example of a interesting and large scale public display.

However I wonder if behavior where energy is used to quite some extend (or wasted) will be judged in 20 years similar to the way we see nowadays the pollution of rivers and air that was common in the first half of the last century.

Public Displays and Responsibility for Content

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Antonio Krüger at the University of Münster is running an infrastructure of public displays that show various kinds of information. Using a web editor a select set of people (mainly staff at the department) can input and manage the information chunks that are presented.

In our discussion it became obvious that running such public displays comes with a lot of responsibilities and that people are very quick at complaining about content (may it be censorship or offending content). This leads then to more or less closed and controlled system – but I wonder if we are not overcautious or the expectations around us are too high.

I took a picture of one door in a restroom in the University. It is converted in a public display by people (anonymously) using a pen – and its content is neither politically correct nor suitable for children. However this is rightly blamed on the people who do the damage and not on the administration or designer that decided that the doors are white and made of a material one can write on.

On the Mobile Phone While Working?

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It seems that recently I come across many people that speak on the phone while they do their work. In Toronto on the bus to the airport the driver spoke on the phone (telling someone how to find and edit a file in Windows) while driving. Here in Bonn I saw it in shops and on the ferry – it felt really awkward to interrupt people in their phone conversation just to pay my ticket or bread.

At the moment most people speak while holding a handset – but given they use BT-headsets one could image new working practice 😉 e.g. driving a bus and doing a call center job on the side. I would expect there will be some regulation soon…

Public Displays – Making Life More Predictable

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On my way home from Toronto it was surprising how many public displays I saw that provided me with ”information about the future”, e.g. telling me when I will be out of time to cross the road, when the next train is due or when my luggage will arrive. These kinds of predictions or contexts are simple to gather and easy to present and best of all: the human is in control and can act on the information. Overall it is reassuring even if the context information is wrong (this is another story about my luggage ;-).

Pervasive Computing and Ethics

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Together with Boriana Koleva I organized the doctoral colloquium at Pervasive 2007 in Toronto. We had 9 students presenting and discussing their PhD work with us.

One central observation was that we come to a point where we have to make more and more ethical decisions. Many things that are technical feasible and harmless within the lab may have sincere implications in the real world. If technologies for tracking, tracing and mining (e.g. social network analysis, location based services, context-aware systems) are deployed beyond the lab the question of choice becomes a real issue – are users aware of it and can they opt-out?

In the area of context-awareness technology has moved on since I started my PhD on the topic nearly 10 years ago – but amazingly scenarios did change little. Automatically detecting a meeting is still on the students slides. The more I learn and understand about context-awareness the more it becomes apparent that this apparently simple use case is amazingly hard!

Public Displays in Restaurant Bathroom

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After the Ubicomp PC meeting we went to a nice restaurant in Toronto for dinner. In the bathroom they had mounted TFT-screens above the urinals showing a TV program or adverts (was hard to tell in the short time I was there). It found it was quite distracting. The displays reminded me of a poster I saw at CHI 2003: You’re In Control: A Urinary User Interface by Maynes-Aminzade and Raffle (http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/765891.766108). Given the distraction experienced, I wonder if a design where visualization and control is spatially separated and hence control is indirect make sense for such applications.

In summer during the soccer world championship in Germany I saw a low-tech version of a bathroom game: a ball on a string in a goal. Here control and visualization is in the same place and it felt more natural to use. (sorry for the low quality pics – they are done with my old phone).

Observation at FRA, Terminal 1 B

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The number of power plugs available to the public seems to be very close to zero at Frankfurt airport. If a persons sits somewhere on the floor in an odd corner it is likely that there is energy for the laptop or phone.

The number of Bluetooth IDs visible when scanning is amazing. It seems that many people have it switched on continuously now (quite different from 2 years ago). The friendly name used by people seems fairly boring, mainly the preset model name of the phone, combination of first name an phone model, initials, full name and the occasional “hi there”. These observations are quite encouraging for one of our projects.

Looking at the scans I wonder if it is likely that people who travel together have similar phones (e.g. same manufacturer).

Audio Tapes Soon be History, Printed Paper Next?

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News papers in the UK have reported that sales for audio tapes at Currys were down from 83 million in 1989 to 0.1 million in 2006 and hence Currys is going to stop stocking them. We recently discussed how expensive talking toys (in particular dolls) were just twenty years ago. The were based on mini records or endless tapes. By now storage chips are so cheap that a good birthday card can sing you happy birthday.

How long will it take before electronic paper will replace printed paper in the large? At least it is close enough to seriously think about applications and business models that arise.

Ensuring Privacy – trust in the physical

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After having a really interesting discussion on privacy with a student at CDTM with regard to implicit interaction I saw the depicted privacy solution on the train back to Bonn. The woman had her notebook camera disabled – not in software – but physically with a scotch tape and a piece of paper. Such solutions are not uncommon and remind one impressively that people want tangible control over their privacy. It seems that people trust in the physical much more than the virtual – and for a good reason.

I reduced the size of the picture as she was preparing an exam paper (school, 7th grade math) and in full resolution details are readable – so much about privacy. One could make that mental note not to edit/view any private document on the train even in small print as it is very quick to talk a phone (even with a phone) and read it afterwards 😉

What happens if you ask the customer (user)?

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Dell started some time ago a web page where the public was asked for comments on improvement (http://www.ideastorm.com) – by now the list is quite impressive – at least in length. Such open community processes are really exciting to watch. I am curious which of those suggestions are implemented and how successful it is to listen to customers direct responses. If it works well others are probably trying it, too…

To make the most out of these suggestions and comments it seems essential to perform a detailed analysis (perhaps taking into account temporal dynamics of the conversation additionally to the content) – looks like another really interesting field for text-mining.

Don’t wash your dishes before loging on to the computer

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This morning I washed my dished (manually in a kitchen sink) and afterwards (with dry hands) I tried to log on to my computer using the finger print scanner. My thumb did not work anymore. Looking closer at my thumb it seemed clear that this looked temporarily different as it was in the water for 10 minutes. A few minutes later the thumb is back to normal, but I already logged using a password. What do I learn from this – If I will do a ubicomp project in the kitchen (similar to things we did in Munich) I will not use finger print scanners for authentication.

What would happen if I had to wash dishes before entering the US 😉

Why shopping is fun – thoughts on intelligent user interfaces or why n=1 is not enough

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Some weeks ago I saw for the first time one of the intelligent scales in the wild (=outside the lab). At that time I was really impressed how well it worked (sample size: n=1, product: banana, pack: no-bag, recognition performance: 100%). Last time I was too late so there was no time to play or see other people using it – but today I had some 5 minutes to invest.

The basic idea of the scale is simple and quite convincing. The customers put their purchase on the scales. A camera makes a guess what it is and the selection menu is reduced to the candidates that match the guess of the camera. Additionally, there is always a button to get all the options (as in the old version without the camera). It appears that this should make things easier.

I observed people trying to weigh different fruits and vegetables in bags and without bags (obviously I tried it myself, too). It did not work very often but interestingly people did not care much. It looked as most people did not really realise that this is meant to be an intelligent user interface. They probably just wondered why the display is showing always different things, but as they are intelligent themselves they found a way to deal with.

Overall it seems that it does really well on bananas which are not wrapped in a bag (my initial test case) and does not too well on many other things. I think the scales are an interesting example of a invisible interface.

Overall this is again a remainder that user tests that are small may be utterly wrong.

GPS statistics – or 25 hours in the car not driving?

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My navigation system records simple statistics. I was surprised to see that I have been sitting in my car for about 25 hours in the last 4 months – not driving. Overall it means that 30% of the time I am actually not driving (usually waiting at a traffic light or a railroad crossing – not sure if the 30% are a Bonn-phenomenon).

This makes me wonder if it would be useful to design technologies that provide entertainment or education during these forced waiting times. Could I have used these 25 hours to learn or improve a language? Or could I have watched some funny clips from youtube? Or is listening to the radio all we need while driving (and not driving)?

Having a digital presence after life?

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An event this week reminded me that life has an end. Getting a link to a Google Map page (satellite image) where someone found his last resting place shows how far reaching new technologies have penetrated our life. This made me think about a demo I saw at Ubicomp last year (http://mastaba.digital-shrine.com/). The digital family shrine did not really relate to my cultural experience and felt somehow strange, but still very interesting and intriguing. I wonder in what form of digital presence after life will become common in Germany…

Zweitgeist – Meeting People While Browsing

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By accident I have seen that Heiner Wolf (he was a researcher at the University of Ulm when I was a student there) has a new company – http://portal.zweitgeist.com/. Back then in 1996 he worked on a European funded project called CoBrow – Cooperative Browsing – looking how to create a system that allows you to meet other people who are on the same web page as you are.

Since then I think that is a really exiting idea. But looking at his current work it is easy to imagine that this could really take of. It is extremely easy and looks like fun. You have your avatar (which you can customize) that can meet and interact with other avatars that are at the same web page as you are. It is not a lot what you can do – but that is the beauty!