Author: admin

Satellite Television –Challenges

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My first day of the holidays I got myself into an interesting project – setting up a satellite dish that receives Astra 19.2 (German TV) and Astra 28.2 (major UK TV stations). Going back between my roof and living room I finally got it to work – thanks to many posts on the Internet. That brings me back to a question I ask myself more and more (not just for setting up TVs): how did people share technical and practical information before the Internet? It seems that the Internet really is a catalyst for implementation.

After having the hardware in place (which is more difficult than the theory of pointing it at a certain angle – especially without the right tools) I was surprised by the number of channels and the user interfaces of the digital sat receivers. It seems that much of the usage and interaction concept is still from a time where there were 3 channels – youtube is much easier to use… Perhaps satellite television could provide a much more exciting experience with new means for interaction (perhaps those devices are out there an I just got the poor ones).

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.

Visit to the Wearable Computing Lab at ETH Zurich

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I was at ETH Zurich for the PhD defence of Nagendra Bhargava Bharatula. His thesis is on context-aware wearable nodes and in particular on the trade-offs in design and the design space of these devices.

The tour in Prof. Tröster’s lab was very impressive. It is a very active and probably one of the largest groups world wide doing research in wearable computing. It seams that wearable computing is getting more real, many scenarios and demonstrators are much more realistic and useful than several years ago.

In the backmanager project Corinne Mattmann works on a shirt that measures body posture. Using stretch sensors made of elastic threads, which are fixed with silicon to the fabric they can measure several different body postures. The material is really interesting (probably done by http://www.empa.ch/) and I think such technologies will open up many new opportunities. (further reading: Design Concept of Clothing Recognizing Back Postures; C. Mattmann, G. Tröster; Proc. 3rd IEEE-EMBS International Summer School and Symposium on Medical Devices and Biosensors (ISSS-MDBS 2006), Boston, September 4-6, 2006)

The SEAT project (Smart tEchnologies for stress free Air Travel) looks into integration of sensing into a airplane seat set-up. Having seats is a real set-up allows easy testing of ideas and realistic testing in early phases of the project. This setup made me think again more about an automotive setup in my next lab.

What is the Digital Equivalent of a Park in a City?

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The visit to the eCulture Factory showed me again that bringing new media into the real public space creates new and very valuable insights, even though it is difficult and costly. Such installations can give a glimpse of what future public space will be. When thinking of the design space for media in public spaces one can image to create completely different and new experiences. Contextuality and awareness seem key design criteria.

Transforming public space using digital technology offers a lot of chances. However it seems that currently a lot of people think about this mainly with regard to new forms of advertising (obviously us included). But after seeing the installations in Bremen I think there is a great chance to improve the quality of life in a place with digital technologies. We probably should think more along the non-short-term-business-lines in this domain.

Thinking of quality of life… who wants to live in a city without a park or at least some green patches? No one – really. Perhaps it is time to invent the digital equivalent of a park for public spaces of the future. I think I have to do some reading to understand the traditional motivation behind parks…

Visit at Fraunhofer IAIS in Bremen, eCultury Factory

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After talking sometime ago to Monika Fleischmann I was curious about the eCultury Factory in Bremen, which is a part of Fraunhofer IAIS. Today I had the chance to visit them and see several installations, including a news browser for the public space (ENERGIE_PASSAGEN). It is a pity that I missed to see the large scale installation in Munich.

We discussed the current developments of the point screen and realized that there is an interesting link to a thesis that was done last year at my group in Munich. Raphael Wimmer looked systematically at options for capacitive sensing and created a toolkit for capacitive sensing (http://www.capsense.org/).

Monika Fleischmann, Wolfgang Strauss and their team run the digital sparks competition. The collection of projects is amazing. One can really envy Monika and Wolfgang – by running the competition they have a complete overview of the digital media scene. They also run a web page with a lot of interesting information on media art and electronic culture: http://netzspannung.org/

When looking at the projects we saw that the CabBoots by Martin Frey had featured in the digital sparks competitions and at the TEI-07 conference I chaired with Brygg Ullmer in February this year. The Paper is available in the ACM DL: Frey, M. 2007. CabBoots: shoes with integrated guidance system. In Proceedings of the 1st international Conference on Tangible and Embedded interaction (Baton Rouge, Louisiana, February 15 – 17, 2007). TEI ’07, pp 245-246. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1226969.1227019 (Foto by Matthias Kranz)

Deadline for Summer@IAIS soon

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Not much time left to apply for the student research project. From 20.8. to 30.9.2007 we plan to design and implement a new specific search engine. The program is open to all computer science and media informatics students, primarily in Germany. We assume it will be very competitive. For accepted students we provide a HIWI-job at Fraunhofer IAIS for the 5 weeks. It will be possible to get credits for the course (IPEC lab course at the University of Bonn).

For more information please see: www.iais.fraunhofer.de/summer2007.html

bi-t Student demo lab results at Fraunhofer IAIS

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This morning we presented selected demos of the lab on location and context awareness to people at the Fraunhofer IAIS. Besides the fact that our main infrastructure component (the Ubisense indoor system) did not work the demos went well. It was very strange – the infrastructure worked for the last 6 weeks (including several reboots) and this morning after rebooting the server it did not find the sensors anymore for several hours.

The majority of demos were based on the second assignment which was to create a novel application that makes use of an indoor location system. The applications implemented by the students included a heat-map (showing where a room is mainly used), co-location depended displays (enabling minimal setup effort and admin effort), museum information system (time and location depend display of different levels of information), and a security system (allowing a functionality only inside a perimeter dynamically defined by tags). Overall it was very interesting what the students created in 4 weeks of hard work.

We also briefly showed the location post its which were based on GPS and were done for the first group assignment, the CardioViz prototype (from the lab in the winter term), and the Web annotation tool that is now nearly ready.

Even though there were some difficulties in running some of the demos I am still convinced in a research environment we need to show live demos and not just ppt-slide-ware 😉 We probably have to demo more to get more professional with non-working components.

More pictures are online at http://foto.ubisys.org/iais_presentation/

Interaction Ivrea

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Pascal Bihler send me today a link to an interesting teaching/research project at Ivrea (http://courses.interaction-ivrea.it/strangely/). The assignment is to think how a common artefact can be enhanced with digital technology. The results of the exercise are quite impressive. It seems that Interaction Ivrea is now somehow integrated into the Domus Academy in Milan.

When I was at Ivrea in November 2003 for the Jamboree of the disappearing computer initiative it was amazing to see the level of creativity – from the Ivrea design institute as well as from the various European projects in the disappearing computer program.

There at Ivrea I also met a really amazing person who has greatly influenced interaction design in the last 20 year: Gillian Crampton Smith. She was the founding director of the institute in Ivrea and has moved on to Venice (IUAV).

Visiting the pervasive computing labs @ Johannes Kepler University in Linz

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It is always great to visit the pervasive computing labs in Linz – always new and cool research to see. Looking at my my Google News-Alert it seems that the term “pervasive” is dominate by Alois 🙂

Alois Ferscha showed me their interaction cube. It is a really interesting piece of research and the background and argument of the cinematic of the hand shows a deep insight. There are some slides on the Telekom Austria Cube that are worthwhile to look at. It is interesting that he has gone successfully the full cycle from concept to product (image is taken from the slide show).

We talked about location systems and what options are available on the market. In Linz they have one room where they have high accuracy tracking based on an array of InterSense systems. Our experience in Bonn with the ubisense system has been mixed so far. Perhaps there are different technologies to come (or we have to develop them).

PhD defence of Mario Pichler in Linz

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This Morning Mario Pichler defended his PhD dissertation at the Johannes Kepler University in Linz. One central theme he investigated in his research was how innovation happens between technology push and application/market pull. It is scientifically a very interesting argument when looking at applied research. However considering successful products, especially products from Asia and in particular Korea, it appears that focusing on technology innovation can be a strong and successful strategy.

In the ubicomp community it seems that technology driven projects are seen very critical and that there seems to be a need to justify ubicomp research with applications. The arguments for it is simple – if we let technology drive development we end up with things nobody needs. But I am less and less believing in this argument – many of the things we use daily (phone, SMS, internet, cars) are there because technology has created the need and we did not really need them. Obviously there is a need for communication, entertainment and mobility but this is abstract and the concrete technologies used are not easy to be directly deduce from them.

In Austria they have a general exam as part of the PhD viva. I learnd something about the history of the term dead reckoning (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_reckoning for a discussion on the Etymology of the term).

New German book “on everyday computing” available

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In 2005 Friedeman Mattern organized a symposium at ETH Zurich on how computing impacts everyday life (http://www.comp21.inf.ethz.ch/). He edited a book (Die Informatisierung des Alltags. Leben in smarten Umgebungen, @Amazon) which includes versions of most of the talks. The book is in German.

I contributed a chapter to the book (draft version) on the symbioses between humans and computers. In the paper the idea of novel user interfaces that augment human capabilities and improve our ability in what we can do with technology is assessed. It is mainly based on the work done in the DFG funded project Embedded Interaction.

If you can read German I highly recommend the book. It is an interesting collections on viewpoints of pervasive computing. There is also a great chapter (the last in the book) by Friedeman Mattern himself discussing old a new visions of technologies.

acatech workshop: object in context

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It was interesting to see that smart objects / smart object services, context, NFC, and RFID become very mainstream. It seems that nearly everyone buys into these ideas now.

Dr. Mohsen Darianian (from Nokia Research, same building as Paul Holleis is at the moment) showed an NFC-advert video which reminded me on the results of an exercise we did on concept videos within an HCI-class at the University of Munich 🙂

Overall it seems that acceptance and business models are of great interest and that to create them a lot of technical insight is required. The issues related to user interfaces, interaction, experience become central factors for the success of products and services.

One discussion was on the motivation for people to contribute (e.g. user generated content, write open source code, answer questions in forums, blogs). Understanding this seem crucial to the prediction whether or not a application is going to fly or not.

Besides contributing for a certain currency (e.g. fame, status, money, access to information) it seems that altruism may be an interesting factor for motivating potential users. Even if it is a low percentage within our species the absolute number on a world wide scale could be still enough to drive a certain application/service. There is interesting research on altruism in the animal world (or at the researchers page http://email.eva.mpg.de/~warneken/ ) maybe we should look more into this and re-think some basic assumptions on business models?

Our break out group was in the rooms of the Institute of Electronic Business e.V (http://www.ieb.net/). It is a very pleasant environment and their link to the art school reflects very positive on the atmosphere and projects. The hand drawn semacodes were really impressive.

Workshop dinner, illuminated faucet, smart sink

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I first saw a paper about a context-aware sink at CHI 2005 (Bonanni, L., Lee, C.H., and Selker, T. “Smart Sinks: Real World Opportunities for Context-Aware Interaction.” Short paper in proceedings of Computer Human Interfaction (CHI) 2005, Portland OR).

Yesterday I saw a illuminated faucet in the wild – one which looked in terms of design really great (in the restaurant they even had flyers advertising the product). But after using it I was really disappointed. It uses the concept of color-illumination of the water based on temperature (red hot, blue cold).

The main issue I see with the user experience is that the visualization is not based on the real temperature using sensor but on the setting of the tap. Hence at the beginning when you switch on hot the visualization is immediately red – even though it is initially cold :-(

Conclusion: nice research idea some time ago, a business person saved a few cents for the senor and wiring, created a product with great aesthetics and a poor user experience; hence I left the leaflet with the ordering address there, don’t want to have it.

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…)

3 months have passed very quickly

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Nigel, Oliver, Mike, and Andre from Lancaster University have been our colleagues at B-IT for the last 3 months. The time has passed very quickly but it was very inspiring to work together.

We worked together on a project using Bluetooth to enable implicit interaction in public spaces. We have created together an interesting demonstrator in the domain of advertising and in particular exploring the implications for targeting public adverts to customers.

Today was the last day for Mike and Andre in Bonn (so far) and we went for dinner together. Nigel will move on for the second half of his sabbatical to ETH Zurich.

To keep us challenged and busy Nigel’s son asked some of us to convert his transformer from robot to car, and as one can see on the picture this is even for Dagmar not a trivial task 😉

Ubisense system at IAIS used in the lab

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During our lab on context- and location-aware systems we have currently one task to create a novel application using the Ubisense indoor location system. We have set up a little server in C# that reads out the tag-ids and the current x,y,z coordinates and multi-casts it via UDP to several clients.

The students have to create an application that reads the tags and their locations from UDP and make use of it. One first interesting result was a heat-map, that would allow to map out the usage of the room. By the end of term we hope to have a nice set of applications.

For many students it was the first time at the Fraunhofer lab and hence they found interesting things to play with. E.g. Diana explored the PointScreen , a system developed in the division Virtual Environments at Fraunhofer IAIS. Further reading on the point screen:
Li et al. Gesture Frame – a Screen Navigation System for Interactive Multimedia and Strauss et al. : Information Jukebox – A semi-public device for presenting multimedia
information content (2003).

Off-Topic: How defend against Cyberwar

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During the last weeks there has been a lot of discussion about the vulnerability of infrastructures after the experience in Estonia. One interesting question to me is if a country will need in the future the power for cyber deterrence.

(Given the current discussions on computer security in Germany I have one option: a bot network that includes all computers in a country that are connected in the internet – could be added as an additional function in the planed German Bundestroianer 😉

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.

Visit at the Institute for Geoinformatics in Münster

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Yesterday we had the opportunity to see a set of research demos at the lab of Antonio Krüger at the University of Münster. We had some time to discuss research projects and in the afternoon Nigel and I gave a talk at the Geoinformatics seminar.

We saw exciting work in progress – a nearly ready large scale multi-touch display based on frustrated total internal reflection – according to Antonio the world-largest at the moment. The principle of operation of such a display is very appealing and the demo was convincing. For a comprehensive introduction on the topic see Jef Han’s UIST 2005 technote “Low-cost multi-touch sensing through frustrated total internal reflection” http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1095034.1095054) . I really think we should build one, too (obviously a bit bigger than Antonio’s 😉

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 2007 in Toronto

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The internatonal conference on pervasive computing in Toronto had an exiting program.

The keynote was by Adam Greenfield on “Everyware: Some Social and Ethical Implications of Ubiquitous Computing” – matching a number of issues we discussed the day before at the doctoral colloquium. The talk was enjoyable even though I think some of the statements made, in particular with regard to opting out and informing the users (e.g. logos) are over-simplified. Furthermore the fact that our society and its values are changing was very little reflected, e.g. privacy is not a constant.

The best paper (by Rene Mayerhofer and Hans Gellersen) “Shake well before use: Authentication based on accelerometer data” was my favourite, too. A further very interesting paper was “Inference Attacks on Location Tracks” by John Krumm. Two papers from ETH Zürich were also quite interesting: “Operating Appliances with Mobile Phones – Strengths and Limits of a Universal Interaction Device” by Christof Roduner et al. showed surprising results for the use of phones as remote control (in short – more usable than one thinks). And “Objects Calling Home: Locating Objects Using Mobile Phones” by Christian Frank et al. showed that phones have a great utility as sensors (in this case to find lost objects.)

We presented a in the video proceedings the smart transport container and a novel supply chain scenario (cutting out all intermediaries and enabling producer to customer transactions).

The tutorial day was excellent – I think the set of tutorials presented can give a good frame for preparing a course or lecture on pervasive computing.

Pervasive 2008 will be in Australia!

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).