Anthony Steed now provides an online demonstration video of his experimental piece of software for investigating GPS satellite availability. This work on GPS satellite visualization was part of his Mobile HCI 2004 paper on Supporting Mobile Applications with Real-Time Visualisation of GPS Availability

Relation to my thesis: An example to reveal the seams of a positioning system.

Presentation of my research on “Uncertainty in Location-Aware Systems” (40MB) at today’s internal mini-workshop.

Relation to my thesis: I am now considering selecting my first sub-question “how certain (cf. taxonomy) do positional and tracking systems have to be in order to be useful and acceptable?” as my main research question. It really fits with my past experiences and with my current interest in the granularity of user experiences in ubicomp (as well as in the accuracy of geotagged images in Flickr).

I blanked on a basic question about the potential applications of my research and started talking about how garbage collectors could profit from it (referring to the Liaison project and my very own thoughts in urban computing) . I am afraid it did not match the audience on that one, but it feels good to get off the beaten tracks (e.g the usual emergency management, fleet and assets tracking) when it comes to location-aware systems.

In the workshop, a talk on the quality of service in networks, made me recall the paper User-perceived Quality of Service in Wireless Data Networks and how I could actually apply the same approach of user-perceived quality in my research.

There is a philosophical level to my research that highlights the mismatches between our needs, expectations and behaviors towards technologies. It relates to Jose Rojas‘ (University of Glasgow) questioning the techno-push in ubicomp and how cultures have a different set of beliefs, goals, aims towards technology.

In extension to my previous Heat Map of Barcelona Geotagged Images, I extracted the granularity level used on 4100 geotagged images of Barcelona. Heat maps are on way to find patterns of usage of the granularity feature. I still need to separate manual with automatic geotagging by retrieving the GPS data contained in the EXIF tags.

In a “mining urban activity” perspective I planl to use images timestamps to start to generate the “traces” left by the visitor’s eye.

Levels of granularity used on 4100 images

City view with granularity levels of 8 (region/city level), 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15 16 (street level)

Old city level, with granularities 14, 15 and 16

Wireless reliability is a still a key selling factor in the US, as highlighted by Verizon’s Can you Hear me Now? campaign.

Source: Elena777

Relation to my thesis: This ad struck me this Fall in the US. Patchy coverage and unreliable networks require attention to wireless mechanisms in their context of use.

Notes on Seams, Seamfulness and Seamlessness (How designers can help users to exploit shortcomings of technology) taken by Antti Oulasvirta (User Experience Research Group, Helsinki Institute for Information Technology) at the Seamfulness Workshop on 17th of august 2004, at TeliaSonera Haninge. Antti summurizes the Seamful Design as an endeavour not to make everything seamful, but to aim for “seamless interaction but seamful technology“. This calls for solving the following problems:

1. Understanding which seams are important. There are zillions of possible attributes of system/context/interaction/user that can potentially create a seam. We need to know which ones are important to users.
2. Presenting seams to users. Presenting seams to users is a more traditional user interface design or information visualization problem than the two other.
3. Designing interaction with seams. Especially, the question of how users are able to switch from the main task with the device to seams fluently is important.

Antti’s talk on SeamfulSystems: What are they and how can we design them? contains several very interesting thoughts and references (everyday life types of seams, Seamfulnessin 8 current approaches to ubicomp HCI, seams are part of the context, designing seamful systems is ultimately a UCD problem).

I really enjoy the physical example he uses to describe a “beautiful seam”.

A beautiful seam. Construction site at the Doge’s Palace in Venice is hidden behind a sheet that depicts how the building is going to look like after the construction is ready. With a little effort, an ugly seam (construction sites tend to be noisy, unsightly, and block pedestrians and cars) is turned into a one that can inspire passers-by to think and share opinions about how the palace is going to look like.

Relation to my thesis: My work aims at informing location-aware systems designers on ways to manage shortcomings of ubiquitous technologies. Unintentionally, my 3 sub-heuristics target the 3 points of the seamful design program in the context of location-aware systems as mentioned in my research plan:

Understanding which seams are important
the degree of positioning accuracy being appropriate to the task or activity at hand. In consequence, according to the activities supported by our location-aware system, how certain (accurate) do positional and tracking systems have to be in
order to be useful and acceptable?

Presenting seams to users
There is no comprehensive understanding of the parameters that influence successful uncertainty visualization. There is a need for a more systematic approach to understand the usability of uncertainty representation methods and interactive interfaces for using those representations. With our scope of ubiquitous computing we will investigate the visualization of spatial uncertainty in a real-time location-aware system.

Designing interaction with seams:
What is the balance between implicit and explicit forms of human interaction with a location-aware system. Therefore, according to the activities supported by our location-aware system, we can investigate interaction dynamics to communication uncertainty, and nurture usefulness of the system.

Finally, as inprired by Antti’s presentation, I would like to find more failed prototypes that could have benefited from an appropriate management of the technological shortcomings.

At a talk given today at TECFA on Video Games meet Ubiquitous Computing: The Collective Simulation of a Human Being, Alexander Repenning shortly mentioned Mobility Agents. The Mobility Agents system provides multimodal prompts to a traveler on handheld devices helping with the recognition of the “right” bus, for instance. At the same time, it communicates to a caregiver the location of the traveler and trip status.

An article describes the findings at several levels. At a technical level, it outlines pragmatic issues including display issues, GPS reliability and networking latency arising from using handheld devices in the field. At a cognitive level, it describes the need to customize information to address different degrees and combinations of cognitive disabilities. At a user interface level, it describes the use of different mission status interface approaches ranging from 3D real-time visualizations to SMS and instant messaging-based text interfaces.

Repenning, A. and Ioannidou, A. 2006. Mobility agents: guiding and tracking public transportation users. In Proceedings of the Working Conference on Advanced Visual interfaces (Venezia, Italy, May 23 - 26, 2006). AVI ‘06. ACM Press, New York, NY, 127-134.

Relation to my thesis: Excellent reference on a urban-scale use of a location-aware system highlighting both the technical and user interface approaches and issues. In some aspects, this research project made me think of GPS System to Raise the Confidence in the Ability to Travel.

I am using Flickr to investigate the granularity of the position the users attach to their images in relation to where they have been taken. Here an example based on 5543 retrieved images with the tag “barcelona” and granularity 16 (i.e. street level. World level is 1, country is ~3, region ~6, city ~11, and street ~16).

Related to Granularities of User Experience in Ubicomp.

Relation to my thesis: Pet project in the 1-2am shift. Actually, exploring the different levels of location granularity used in the Flickr community could become an example that show where location accuracy is used in a urban space. Next steps, using the descriptions/tags of the images and exploiting GeoIQ.

I am using different positioning techniques (GPS, WiFi and GSM) to investigating the fluctuating location quality and timeliness experienced in a large-scale coverage such as the Barcelona urban area.

(from left to right) Using a homemade S60 Application to collect GSM fingerprints in specific POI such as metro stations, WiFi map (courtesy of Yuji Yoshimura, Agencia d`Ecologia Urbana de Barcelona), GPS drifts in of of the many compact low-rise buildings area of Barcelona.

Relation with my thesis: toying around to come up with design ideas and contexts for their implementations.

Intel Research Berkeley investigates user experience with the following scope:

Understanding how people, devices, and social networks behave in time and space, in homes and urban environments, and managing uncertain and probabilistic information about it all.

Relation to my thesis: people, devices, time, space, urban environment, managing uncertain information.

In Mike Kuniavsky inspires himself from PARC’s inch/foot/yard scale to come up with a user-centered hierarchy for which we can design and then assign a term to. :

If you look at the articles in the Ubicomp conference proceedings, you’ll find them dominated by location sensing and tracking. Clearly, ubicomp is still about figuring where you are in a space. But what happens when you’ve done that? What happens to designing the user experience when you know location?
[…]
My goal is to create a user-centered hierarchy (rather than hardware-centric) as a way of talking about the perceived effects of ubiquitous computing technologies. In other words, this is an attempt to talk (roughly) about end users’ radius of focus in the moment as a way to design for that moment.

In his Granularities of User Experience in Ubicomp, Mike focuses on the tangible and more physical aspect of ubicomp. My work has a similar user-centered approach on how ubiquitous technologies are perceived and how to design according to their granularity. One of my research question is “how certain do positional and tracking systems have to be in order to be useful and acceptable?”. Today, I ran a small experiment on Flickr’s map service. Each geotagged image has a related accuracy representing the level of granularity in which the user located the image on the map. Results show my and my contact’s use of the accuracy.

My use of “accuracy” in Flickr’s geotagging service

The use of “accuracy” by my contacts

Relation to my thesis: Investigating the use of granularity in spatial annotation, being inspired by Mike’s Granularities of User Experience.