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.
black Previous research has however also identified a number of potential challenges associated with the use of BLE technology. Another study by Faragher and Harle @cite_9 revealed that the comparatively low bandwidth of BLE makes it more likely to fade fast, resulting in considerably more fluctuations in received signal strength (henceforth RSS) than with WiFi. They conclude that achieving accurate positioning is highly problematic unless we learn to understand and deal with these large fluctuations.
@cite_9
2101000887
What is the processing-power of an omnibus? Can a train compute a climate model? Today's smart phones are becoming more and more powerful and have a performance similar to former high-end workstations. This power can also be used in a joint and cooperative way by building local and mobile ad-hoc clusters. In this paper we will show that setting up a smart phone cluster is not only possible, but it is also a reasonable thing to do, considering the sheer amount of mobile devices and the applications that could benefit from it.