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 another attempt to demonstrate the viability of a seamful design approach, Chalmers @cite_15 developed a mobile location-based game called , that was centered around the idea of exploring seams in wireless networking. Players were encouraged to collect virtual coins distributed on predetermined GPS coordinates. When finding areas with stronger signal coverage, or so called , players could upload their coins to the game server in exchange for credits. On the other hand by staying out of these network covered areas, players avoided pickpockets threatening to steal their coins. Due to signal strength fluctuations, positions of the access points were dynamic and keeping track of them became an important part of the game. Chalmers concluded that by exploiting seams (e.g. inconsistent network coverage and signal strength fluctuations), multiple aspects, including interaction, gameplay and usability were improved.
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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.