http://www.movino.org/application/mobile

http://www.movino.org/application/mobile

A really cool application that captures video using your phone and sends it to your desktop computer, turns your N95 into a portable wireless video camera.

Situated <3 Nokia (AKA Unboxing Pics! w00000000)

A week late, but here they are!

Looks like we are shooting for 80 degree horizontal field of view

“http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch?hl=en&safe=off&client=firefox-a&um=1&ie=UTF-8&q=wide+angle+webcam&sa=N&start=0“

A google blog search, reveals a few companies making cameras with 80 degree optical fields of view.  Mouly’s selected camera has 200degree (range of view), and a ~78-76 degree optical field of view.

Exiting the cleanroom: on ecological validity and ubiquitous computing

Exiting the cleanroom: on ecological validity and ubiquitous computing is a paper on prototyping, observation, controlled evaluation and field experiments of Ubicomp. There are three class of ubicomp applications: peripheral displays, mobile applications, and applications that integrate physical and digital interactions. Idiosyncrasies with ubicomp applications are due to the need for applications to be in many places, do many tasks, work across many devices. The authors did fieldwork with 28 ubicomp developers to understand the problems in ubicomp.

Peripheral displays

• Developers said that determining how study participants used the information in the peripheral display is a challenge.
• Developers complained about having to decide between too many design options. (The paper does not explain why peripheral display developers specifically have too many choices)
• There is a need for tools that allow applications to multiple outputs.
• Unobtrusive evaluation is difficult if displays are deployed in real world like homes. Collecting quantitative data is difficult.
• The best way to evaluate the success of a peripheral display is by conducting situated, long-term deployment.
• Context of Use Evaluation of Peripheral Displays (CUEPD) method - captures context of use through user scenario building, enactment, and reflection.

Mobile Applications

• Evaluation is difficult. Literatures examples show the difficulty in understanding how participants use their cell phones.
• Prototypes have to developed in multiple platforms. Not all phones implement Java JSR spec completely.
• Planning field studies involving mobile phones difficult due to many mobile operators, plans, devices.
• In real world scenarios, users are constantly interrupted while using their mobile applications, this is hard to replicate in the lab.
• Researchers have used diary studies and interviews to understand picture sharing usage.

Integrating physical and digital interactions

• This subset refers to ubicomp applications that take the data from sensors like camera and process it.
• Primary challenge is abstracting physical input.
• Paper Prototyping used for exploration by developers.
• Developers expressed need for better tools

Challenges in evaluating ubicomp

• Ambiguity in sensed data and need to mitigate error
• Sparse data. There are too many unique situations which are difficult to evaluate while prototyping
• Critical mass: many applications need critical mass to be successful
• Evaluating obstructively is difficult
• Tools that can support realistic environments

Authors recommend the following techniques to overcome the problem. (I’m just listing them, the paper explains them in depth)

1. Situated techniques
2. Remote evaluators (privacy concerns??)
3. Diary study
4. Lightweight prototypes
   • Paper prototypes
   • Wizard of oz
   • Looks like

The Wide Angle Lens Cowboy

There’s this guy that’s some kind of webcam review guru. He’s also apparently a cowboy. He devotes part of his website to trying to figure out the lens angles of popular webcams. It looks like a few creative and Logitech cams offer a fairly wide angle. Check out the site to figure out which one is widest.

Wide Angle web cams

I searched for “wide angle web camera” for our display. Creative webcam ultra seems to be good. Many products do not specify the exact vertical and horizontal angels covered.

• Creative Web cam. 200° horizontal and 105° vertical view. It costs $129. Product page.

http://research.nokia.com/projects/activity_monitor

http://research.nokia.com/projects/activity_monitor

Accelerometer stuff

Semi-public displays

While I was looking for papers on collaborative  reminder systems, I found the paper titled:  Semi-Public Displays for Small, Co-located Groups. This paper discussed the applications developed by the authors for small collocated groups. The public displays in this setting are meant to be source of ambient information about the group members.

• Reminders - slide show style display of reminders, requests and frequently emailed documents like status reports. Requests were extracted from status reports using a Perl parser
• Collaboration space - allows anyone to enter test in freeform text and images. Supports asynchronous group work.
• Active Portrait - shows a group  photo. The brightness of a group member indicates his/her activity. Less active members are shown as silhouette thereby accentuating their absence.
• Attendance panel - an abstract visualization to depict attendance of upcoming events as a flower. The color of the flowers would indicate the response rate of a event.

I liked the idea of extracting reminders and help requests from the status reports. For my project I can extract requests or event reminders sent to si distribution lists and bounce it off our display.

The authors have completely dodged privacy questions, claiming that the semi-public display acts an quick and accessible source for information available within the group. The  argument doesn’t seem convincing to me. The authors tested the applications in academic labs, that can be secluded, like our SI North. But in a corporate environment small team don’t share a cozy space, hence a system without any privacy control may not be deployable.

Post your apps to the Michiposter

Hey team, we should all post our apps to the MichiPoster.  So that they will show up on the display occasionally.

-Ben

SSAPP Running on N800 Tablet

So we received some goodies from nokia, and I spent pretty much all the whole night fooling around with an n800. I now have SSAPP’s fast bluetooth scanner running on a n800. What does this mean for you? It means very little except that it’s possible to do some pretty serious python on a n800 without that much work. The next trick will be figuring out if there is a way to connect a 2nd bluetooth dongle to the n800, so we can do all the scanning on the device.

Very interesting

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