The application of mobile computing is currently altering patterns of our behavior to a greater degree than perhaps any other invention. In combination with the introduction of power efficient wireless communication technologies, such as Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), designers are today increasingly empowered to shape the way we interact with our physical surroundings and thus build entirely new experiences. However, our evaluations of BLE and its abilities to facilitate mobile location-based experiences in public environments revealed a number of potential problems. Most notably, the position and orientation of the user in combination with various environmental factors, such as crowds of people traversing the space, were found to cause major fluctuations of the received BLE signal strength. These issues are rendering a seamless functioning of any location-based application practically impossible. Instead of achieving seamlessness by eliminating these technical issues, we thus choose to advocate the use of a seamful approach, i.e. to reveal and exploit these problems and turn them into a part of the actual experience. In order to demonstrate the viability of this approach, we designed, implemented and evaluated the Ghost Detector - an educational location-based museum game for children. By presenting a qualitative evaluation of this game and by motivating our design decisions, this paper provides insight into some of the challenges and possible solutions connected to the process of developing location-based BLE-enabled experiences for public cultural spaces.
In search of a more time and cost effective solution, Broll and Benford @cite_17 refer to Mark Weiser, who endorsed as the main design goal of ubiquitous computing. @cite_11 In Weiser’s view, designers should hide the complexity and infrastructure of tools to prevent them from intruding on user's consciousness. This will in turn allow users to focus on their tasks and not on the tool itself. As an example of such invisible technology, Weiser names electricity, which we use, yet do not have to attend to. Interestingly, according to him, such invisibility should not automatically be seen as an equivalent to seamlessness. He warns that making things seamless amounts to reducing all system components to their lowest common denominator and making everything the same. In his view, such approach would sacrifice the richness of every tool just to achieve a bland compatibility. Instead, he suggests an alternative approach in the form of as the goal designers should strive for. In other words, if properly designed, seamfully integrated parts of a system could still provide a seamless interaction.
@cite_11 @cite_17
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In this paper, we question the assumption that seamless integration of computer system components is necessarily a design requirement for wearable computing and for ubiquitous computing. We explore Mark Weiser's notions of seamlessness and seamfulness', and use them in discussing the design and use of wearable and ubicomp systems. The physical nature of the systems we design reveals itself in, for example, uncertainty in sensing, limited coverage of communications infrastructure and the transformations needed to share data between heterogeneous tools and media. When such seams show through, as they inevitably do, users perceive and appropriate them for their own uses. We suggest that new opportunities for system design arise if we take fuller account of this process, and consider making it a deliberate policy to reveal and use seams. We offer examples of seams and some suggestions for seamful design, drawing from the Equator interdisciplinary research collaboration's work on ubiquitous computing and mixed reality systems. More particularly, we focus on our work in Equator's City project, on a system that lets a visitor using a PDA in a museum exhibition or cultural institution co-visit with people using virtual reality and Web versions of the same institution. Our work is strongly influenced by the vision of ubiquitous computing presented by Mark Weiser. A key feature of ubiquitous computing is service continuity which allows a user to transparently continue his task regardless of his movement. For service continuity, the underlying system needs to not only discover a service satisfying a user's request, but also provide an interface differences resolution scheme if the interface of the service found is not the same as that of the service requested. For resolving interface mismatches, one of solutions is to use an interface adapter. The most serious problem in the interface adapter-based approach is the overhead of adapter generation. There are many research efforts about adapter generation load reduction and this paper focuses on an adapter chaining scheme to reduce the number of necessary adapters among different service interfaces. We propose a construction-time adaptation loss evaluation scheme and an adapter chain construction algorithm, which finds an adapter chain with minimal adaptation loss. System designers typically use well-studied benchmarks to evaluate and improve new architectures and compilers. We design tomorrow's systems based on yesterday's applications. In this paper we investigate an emerging application, 3D scene understanding, likely to be significant in the mobile space in the near future. Until now, this application could only run in real-time on desktop GPUs. In this work, we examine how it can be mapped to power constrained embedded systems. Key to our approach is the idea of incremental co-design exploration, where optimization choices that concern the domain layer are incrementally explored together with low-level compiler and architecture choices. The goal of this exploration is to reduce execution time while minimizing power and meeting our quality of result objective. As the design space is too large to exhaustively evaluate, we use active learning based on a random forest predictor to find good designs. We show that our approach can, for the first time, achieve dense 3D mapping and tracking in the real-time range within a 1W power budget on a popular embedded device. This is a 4.8× execution time improvement and a 2.8× power reduction compared to the state-of-the-art. Ubicomp researchers have long argued that privacy is a design issue, and it goes without saying that successful design requires that we understand the desires, concerns, and awareness of the technology's users. Yet, because ubicomp systems are relatively unusual, too little empirical research exists to inform designers about potential users. Complicating design further is the fact that ubicomp systems are typically embedded or invisible, making it difficult for users to know when invisible devices are present and functioning. As early as 1993, ubicomp researchers recognized that embedded technology's unobtrusiveness both belies and contributes to its potential for supporting potentially invasive applications. Not surprisingly, users' inability to see a technology makes it difficult for them to understand how it might affect their privacy. Unobtrusiveness, nevertheless, is a reasonable goal because such systems must minimize the demands on users. To investigate these issues further, I conducted an ethnographic study of what I believe is the first US eldercare facility to use a sensor-rich environment. Our subjects were normal civilians (rather than ubicomp researchers) who lived or worked in a ubiquitous computing environment. We interviewed residents, their family members, and the facility's caregivers and managers. Our questions focused on how people understood both the ubiquitous technology and its effect on their privacy. Although the embedded technology played a central role in how people viewed the environment, they had a limited understanding of the technology, thus raising several privacy, design, and safety issues.