(via)Read in Information Week:

“At an 11-store chain of Papa John’s restaurants in north Alabama, location data is being pushed directly to customers. Using an online-tracking system developed by startup TrackMyPizza, customers can watch online as their deliveries move street by street toward their doors. Drivers carry GPS-enabled handsets that feed location data to a TrackMyPizza server. There, the data is coupled with the customer’s phone number, providing location updates every 15 seconds.
(…)
Sound like technology overkill, just to know your pizza hasn’t gone astray? Rival Domino’s thinks consumers want more such information about their orders, and it’s doing a national rollout of a Web system that shows buyers when their pizzas have been prepared, cooked, then sent out the door. But it doesn’t offer location once the pizza leaves the store.
(…)
At Papa John’s, pizza tracking is delivering business benefits in its first two months by getting more people ordering online–a 100% jump in online ordering since the rollout, says Tom Van Landingham, the franchise operating partner. Online orders save phone-answering time, and Web customers spend about $2 more per order, since they can see the whole menu. About 18% of all delivery customers in the last 60 days have gone on the Web site to track their pizza. Van Landingham expects to begin using the tracking system to improve productivity behind the scenes, by plotting more efficient delivery routes, for instance. The service is only 2 months old, so it still needs to prove it’s more than a novelty. But the chain proved it can be done.“

Why do I blog this? The perspective of having people at home riveted to their computers, following the movement of their pizza mapped digitally makes me giggle. It looks like a weird version of Pacman where you don’t have any control on your little character. Perhaps there is something cultural that I am missing or maybe it’s the novelty who made people following their pizza on-line.

So, at first glance, this looks awkward and I am really curious to see if there are some user experience researcher already doing work on this kind of service. Beyond people’s motivation to track an artifact that may be in their stomach one hour later, it would be interesting to understand more what are the expectations towards the pizza’s location, the sort of happenstance people fear about this or even the reactions they would have if the pizza wandered around instead of taking a straight line to the consumer’s house. To some extent, this is a PERFECT tool to conduct psychological experiments!

Wired reports on this intriguing modified Nintendo DS called “Disney Magic Connection” that offers location-based services (navigation, where to find what…). But it seems that it was not so much of a success.

Interestingly, Jim Hill describes what went wrong:

“The problem wasn’t with the technology. From what I hear, aside from a few minor GPS & battery-related issues, the “Disney Magic Connection” units worked great.
(…)
the Imagineers had originally hoped that they’d be able to recruit upwards of 60 families to take part in each day’s field test. But on most days, WDI had to settle for less than half that number. Mostly because cast members had such a tough time convincing families to come try “Disney Magic Connection.” (…) ost people have already invested an hour of their precious vacation time just in getting to the entrance of the Magic Kingdom. And to finally make it through the turnstiles and really be looking forward to that first ride … And then have some clown with a clipboard accost you, asking you if you’d be interested in taking part in some pilot program, was more than most parents with small children could bear at that moment.
(…)
Another aspect of the “Disney Magic Connection” field test that allegedly turned off a lot of would-be participants was the security deposit. You see, before these folks could actually get their hands on that DS, they were asked for a credit card. Which Mickey then took an imprint of. So that — in the event that these Magic Kingdom visitors accidentally left the theme park without first returning their test unit — Mouse House officials could then charge them $300 for the missing device.
(…)
Another cost-effective aspect of the “Disney Magic Connection” project is that these handheld units actually make use of the 400+ sensors that were put in place in this theme park back in 2004 for the “Pal Mickey” project. Of course, because there were areas in the Magic Kingdom where WDI deliberately didn’t put sensors (So that this interactive plush then wouldn’t speak up and ruin the show for all of the other guests) … The Imagineers had to install hundreds of additional sensors so that these Nintendo DS units would then tell the guests where they were.
(…)
And — yes — I did say “rent.” As of right now, the Walt Disney Company has no plans to sell these handheld units. Nor will you be able to bring your own Nintendo DS into the park from home and then tap into Disney’s wireless network.“

Why do I blog this? because it’s a marvellous story of a technological failure. The service looks okay, the technology’s there but there are lots of user and contextual issues that lead to this situation. Even the platform (Nintendo DS) is interesting but there’s always more hidden below the technological/interface’s structure.

“Message in a Bottle” is an intriguing locative media art project by Layla Curtis:

“Fifty bottles containing messages were released into the sea off the south-east coast of England near Ramsgate Maritime Museum, Kent. The intended destination of the bottles is The Chatham Islands in the South Pacific Ocean. The islands, which are 800km east of mainland New Zealand, are the nearest inhabited land to the precise location on the opposite side of the world to Ramsgate Maritime Museum. It is anticipated that the bottles may be found several times before reaching the Chatham Islands. (…) Several of the bottles are being tracked using GPS technology and are programmed to send
their longitude and latitude coordinates back to Ramsgate every hour. The information they transmit is used to create a real time drawing of their progress.“

People who found a message could report it (and then replace the bottle’s contents, reseal the bottle and release it back into the sea to continue its journey to The Chatham Islands).

Why do I blog this? Beyond the poetic/aesthetic aspects of the lost bottles, I find this project interesting as it explores other use of GPS, related to the movement of objects in space.

Furtermore, an interview of Layla Curtis by Peter Hall in the Else/Where mapping book interestingly address some topics that are close to my research interests. Hall highlight the fact that “there’s a nice juxtaposition here between the precision of the GPS mapping system and the relative imprecisions of people reporting findings by email“. Of course, this is partly caused by the interface Curtis provided to report bottle’s findings; as people had to fill a form with “Place bottle found”. It can be very relevant to dig more into the naming of these places; I can imagine a sort of typology of mismatch that would be very informative for location-based services designers.

Morning read in the train this morning was “A Framework of Place as a Tool for Designing Location-Based Applications” by Anna Vallgarda. The paper is about a “framework of place” defined through interviews with architects, that aims at informing the development of location-based applications. The author describes what are the structure and properties of place that are important for architects as potentially influencing the conception of “how human beings perceive their presence in place”.

The point is that developing applications based on context require the knowledge and meaning of the significant parameters of the place where it should work. That’s why she reviews different “location models” (aura model, nexus model, etc). TRying to summarize the framework she describes lead me to:

“To recapitulate, the concept of place refers to the physical order of objects; it is the physical boundaries within which we act. This framework is an account of what such boundaries contain (and their potential attributes).

Atmosphere:
Light: northern, southern, artificial or strong/weak or direct/indirect
Color: cold/warm or strong/pale or red, yellow, blue
Materials: concrete, tree, glass, stone, clay, tile or rough/soft
Proportions: human scale or large industry building
Shape: circular, square, blurred
Vertical position: floor or altitude
Temperature: Celsius or Fahrenheit
Air/wind: clean air or wind speed
Sound: machine, animal, human or high/low

Activities:
Entrances: bodily, visual, audible or mediated/direct or easy/difficult
Functionality: bathroom, kitchen, playground
Resources: power, water, gas, WiFi

Hierarchies:
Social: home – community garden – town-hall square (enables social navigation)
Proportion: house – apartment building – industrial area (enables physical/social navigation)
Indoor/Outdoor; bed room – balcony – plaza (enables physical/social navigation)

Infrastructures:
Type Modalities Measures Enables
Bodily: foot, car etc. (measure: meters, miles) (enables movement, overview, social interactions)
Visual: direct, mediated (measure: clarity) (enables: visual contact, overview, social interactions)
Audible: direct, mediated (measure: decibel) (enables: audible contact, social interactions)
Material: water, power etc. (measure: liters, voltage) (enables: various activities)“

Why do I blog this? as I am interested in the UX of location-based application, this sort of framework is interesting as it aims at “establishing a more nuanced notion of location”, which is often a problem (as location is often limited to a dot on a map without any thoughts about granularity or contextual problems). As the author mentions,it would be good to complement it with environmental psychology, cultural geography, and anthropology.

It’s also limited to indoor locations, I may find interesting to repeat this work and complement the model at the city level, with urban planners or transport/infrastructure practitioners for example.

Been at Google Office in Zürich this afternoon for a Tech Talk about “location awareness and mobile social computing”. Google’s R&D office in Zürich is actually very well into maps and spatial applications, which is why I wanted to confront my ideas to them. Although this is my usual talk about barriers and problems of location-aware applications, the version is evolving constantly since I started presenting it. See here for the slides. I try to take into account people’s comments and the things we discuss are a lot different depending to whom I present it to.

The discussion revolved around notions such as:

“- are there different perception of storing personal data such as location, how do people accept that? know that their location is stored?
- are there different cultural or behavioral reactions depending on countries, wrt usage of location-aware devices
- people found interesting the fact that the location-aware application which seems the most successful is not really a location-aware system as it is Jaiku. We had a discussion about how I found this platform relevant as it can allow people to disclose the information they want (and to show others how and where they want to look like).
- if the mobile phone is a bad platform, what about navigation devices such as TomTm or GPS artifact, can they be a solution to reach a critical mass (interestingly the same point that was brought forward at Cisco the other day).
- what about the ecology of interface: is-it only about mobile location-awareness? can we use other outputs? combine them? what does location-awareness mean on a mobile phone in conjunction with a web-interface?“

Thanks Giorgio and Christian for the invitation!

In the last science and technology quarterly of the E, there are two interesting articles closely related with the hybridization of the digital and the physical: “Playing tag” and “Watching as you shop“. While the former is about spatial annotation through mobile devices, the latter addresses locative technologies in shops.

Notes about “Playing tag”: the article is about the new “nirvana”: “linking virtual communities such as Facebook or MySpace with the real world“. The typical use-case they propose is the following:

“MAGINE you are a woman at a party who spots a good-looking fellow standing alone in a corner. Before working up the courage to talk to him, you whip out your mobile phone. A few clicks reveal his age and profession, links to his latest blog posts and a plethora of other personal information. To many, this sounds like a nightmare. “

. And the article goes by describing a new service called Aka-Aki which uses Bluetooth for that matter.

Notes about “Watching as you shop”: the technology they describe aims at monitoring queue lengths, adjust store layouts and staffing levels or gathering data on where customers go, where and how long they stop, and how they react to different products (so that in-store designs and marketing campaigns can be improved). Some are even jumping on richer data acquisition processes:
“These sensors recorded data on customer-traffic patterns, to which was added further information recorded by human observers. By comparing the resulting data with sales information, it was then possible to gain insight into shoppers’ behaviour.“

They obtain this sort of map, which is now common… as it is the sort of canonical representation of any spatial behavior analysis ranging from a supermarket to first person shooter games.

Why do I blog this? following the progress of this field for quite some time now and having written a PhD dissertation on the topic, I am always surprised by how locative or tagging technologies are presented. It’s always the same story of weird use-cases (targeted to a certain elite or nonsensical to 99% of the population on earth)… and finally what we end up with is to have mobile social software that are (almost) not used AND monitoring systems that are more easily deployed in shops and supermarkets.

Wrt my research on location-awareness, My Location is an interesting new google beta application that find people’s location of people using its mobile mapping service (even if the phone isn’t equipped with a GPS receiver). A feature available for most web-enabled mobile phones, including Java, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, and Nokia/Symbian devices.

What is interesting is the display of uncertainty (as a light blue circle) if you don’t have a GPS-enabled phone around the blue dot (which corresponds to your GPS location). This uncertainty is claimed to be around one-quarter to three miles of a user’s location. But advantages for this ranges from getting a location without GPS, draining less power than GPS.

This “My location” feature map the coordinates of the cell tower the cell phone is registered with. This way, Google taps in the large number of its mobile maps users who have GPS phones (not locked by the carriers) and it’s a work-in progress process as described here:

“the database that identifies the location of a mobile phone is still under construction, so the service still sometimes draw a blank. The company expects to fill in the holes as more people use the service, Lee said. The tracking system’s database currently spans more than 20 countries, including United States, much of Europe, Australia, New Zealand, the Russian Federation and Taiwan. It doesn’t yet work in China or Japan.“

Also have a look at NYT blog where the Google PR explains this a bit better:

“The story also talks about where “you are”. We don’t actually know who the person is or reliably where the phone is. We know that specific queries where the map is centered have come from a unique id number. Sometimes that map will be centered because that is where you are (centered yourself or by use of My Location), or it is centered because that is where you are thinking of going, or it is centered because you are curious about a location but have no intention of actually going there. From our logs, we are not able to distinguish these three very common use cases. Also, users have the ability to re-set the unique client id number as often as they would like. Finally, we do not know who “you” are and don’t have any way of finding out. There is no name, phone number, address, email or account login associated with this information.“

It’s also relevant to browse some of the blogs and the comments / reactions

Why do I blog this? interesting stuff about my research interests. That approach (although not very new) is quite interesting and it’s intriguing to see how the interface reflects the different accuracy levels.

The second issue of PEACH featured a very interesting article by Chris Hand entitled “Electronic Devices as Design Exploration”. Mr. Hand describes how design can go beyond the Engineering approach to design interactive electronic products through Art and Design methods. This is exemplified by a location-based application/project he carried out.

This GPS-based Frisson Inducer is a portable/wearable device aimed at “the dwellers of small towns who yearn for the edginess of living in a big city and is amazingly intriguing:

“a map-based software enables users to designate any arbitrary space in their town, no matter how dull or empty, as one of their “Thrill Zones”, simply by drawing its boundary. Since the device contains a GPS (Global Positioning System), it can easily determine whether or not the user is inside one of these zones, so long as they are not indoors. Employing classical Pavlovian conditioning to elicit a response, electrodes connecting the device to the user administer electric shocks whenever the location is within one of the Thrill Zones. After a short training period this results in a frisson of excitement or trepidation whenever the user is getting close to a Thrill Zone, even after the shocks have been switched off.
(…)
By uploading their own data to the device’s website users can share their Thrill Zones with their friends and
fellow thrill-seekers, making it possible for social groups to crystallise around these new places and to experience them in a way not previously possible“

This creates what Chris Hand calls “reverse psychogeography, i.e. rather than recording an emotional response to a place, the device is controlling the response.
Why do I blog this? Beyond my curiosity towards this application (that I find very interesting), what struck me here, wrt my research, is the notion of “measuring instrument”, a device that allow to detect implicit/invisible phenomenon. This certainly an important in interaction design lately; if you think about all the interactive art projects that deals with pollution/noise/electronic sensing and their representation on web maps. What does that mean? Why this notion of measuring is important? Chris Hand highlights some issues:

“Measuring instruments are a special class of device. Using measuring instruments we can interpret our environment and create meaning – it is in the act of interpreting objective data that meaning is created. Furthermore the use of instruments is open, in that their owners can create personal rituals and procedures around them, as well as developing their own methods of interpretation and beliefs about the results and data being collected and displayed. Through instruments, the objective world of cold numbers and statistics acts as a mirror, reflecting the subjective world of our emotions and irrational beliefs.”“

In “Social Practices in Location-Based Collecting“, O’Hara et al. describes an alternative approach for location-based technologies “by focussing on the collecting and keeping of location-based content as opposed to simply the in situ consumption of content”. Their point is that collecting and keeping can have important social values over and above simply consuming the content in situ.

They present here a user study of a “location-based visitor application at London Zoo where content triggers at particular animal exhibits allowed people to gather and consume location-relevant content on mobile phones“. Let me go directly to the results obtained through qualitative analysis:

“Through the fieldwork in this paper what we have demonstrated is that over and above the instrumental value of location-based content, where the right information is provided at the right place/time, there are additional non-instrumental aspects ofthese location-based experiences from which value is derived. These have to do with the social motivations bound up in the collecting and keeping of content. This is more than simply the automatic logging of content accessed that you would get from the likes of the History section in a web browser. It was about the active construction of a meaningful set of the location-based content which made the act of collecting an end itself.
(…)
the role of the collection of location-based content in identity work; in developing a sense of challenge and achievement; in defining a sense of group camaraderie; and in creating a playful sense of competition among group members. Further, we see how narratives told around the collected location-based content over time imbue it with additional value. These narratives become part of the resources through which relationship with family and friends get actively constructed.“

Why do I blog his? after the previous blogpost in which I complain about the fact that LBS usage have trouble going beyond past examples, this paper is quite refreshing in documenting how the collecting of content (tied to a specific location) have an important social value. It definitely shows the importance of location-based content, beyond the delivery model (and shows also the importance of time, a sort of asynchronous value)

O’Hara, Kenton, Kindberg, Tim, Glancy, Maxine, Baptista, Luciana, Sukumaran, Byju, Kahana, Gil and Rowbotham, Julie (2007): Social practices in location-based collecting. In: Proceedings of ACM CHI 2007 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 2007. pp. 1225-1234.

Reading Where Are You Now? Design for the Location Revolution on UX Matter this morning makes me wondering about the advancements in the location-based services area. Although I agree on the premise (”The true power of the mobile Web lies not merely in providing remote access to data, but in letting users view contextual information relating to location and interact with that information.“), the rest is still a rehearsal of past arguments and examples:

“Mobile product innovator Apple showed in its Calamari iPhone ad how a person hungry for calamari can easily find a nearby seafood restaurant (…) Relative location data makes possible the first wave of mobile social networking applications—dodgeball,Loopt, and even the location plug-in for AOL Instant Messenger (AIM)—which inform users when friends or colleagues are in their vicinity. The value of this kind of communication is immediately apparent. I enjoy keeping up with friends and colleagues using LinkedIn or Facebook, but often wish I could have more personal interactions with people in my network rather than just relating in digital space.“

Why do I blog this? I wonder about what will be the next generation of location-based services or how to improve the problems users face when employing place-tagging systems or buddy-finder. Although things have been achieved in the academia (and start-up projects), it’s as if we had troubles going beyond the current state in gaming (it’s all about treasure hunt and object collection), social computing (buddy finder suffer from lots of problem such as market fragmentation, low number of users, privacy tuning issues, etc) or navigation (the restaurant finder example never really took off). My point here is not to criticize this blogpost but rather to show that LBS innovation is VERY slow.

Reading the newsletter of the french consulting group Chronos, I ran across a term used by Bruno Marzloff that I found intriguing: the concept of “chronotope” defined in Wikipedia as:

“The Russian philologist and literary philosopher M.M. Bakhtin used the term chronotope to designate the spatio-temporal matrix which governs the base condition of all narratives and other linguistic acts. The term itself can be literally translated as “time-space” (…) the chronotope is ‘a unit of analysis for studying language according to the ratio and characteristics of the temporal and spatial categories represented in that language’. Specific chronotopes are said to correspond to particular genres, or relatively stable ways of speaking, which themselves represent particular worldviews or ideologies. To this extent, a chronotope is both a cognitive concept and a narrative feature of language.“

It seems that this concept if more about narrative and literature analysis but I found it quite relevant when thinking about the evolution of location-based services. Five years ago, location-based services was all about “annotating places” or having “location-based buddy-finder”, a more distinctive line of research is now gaining more and more weight: the collection and representation of traces left by people in space through technologies. Will be word “chronotope” be pertinent to refer to these visualizations?

Two examples of “would-be” chronotopic visualization that I find intriguing and relevant (among others):

Sashay (by Eric Paulos et al.):

“Sashay is a mobile phone application that leverages the fact that every fixed mobile phone cell tower transmits a unique ID that can be read within the phone’s software. As a user moves throughout an urban landscape this “cell ID” changes. Sashay keeps track of the temporal patterns, history, and adjacencies of these cell encounters to help it build a visualization of connected “places”. (…) The value of Sashay is not in helping you navigate or realize that you are in downtown Austin or at a park in Boston. It is meant to explicitly remove such labeling and leave only an intentionally skeletal sketch of a person’s personal patterns across a city, leaving the individual to wonder and construct their own narrative and meaning. The temptation to build a labeled map is so compelling to many researchers that we are reiterating and advocating the extraordinary value of keeping such visualizations free from literal place labelings.“

Real Time Rome by Senseable City

“Real Time Rome is the MIT SENSEable City Lab’s contribution to the 2006 Venice Biennale, directed by professor Richard Burdett. The project aggregated data from cell phones (obtained using Telecom Italia’s innovative Lochness platform), buses and taxis in Rome to better understand urban dynamics in real time. By revealing the pulse of the city, the project aims to show how technology can help individuals make more informed decisions about their environment. In the long run, will it be possible to reduce the inefficiencies of present day urban systems and open the way to a more sustainable urban future?“

Why do I blog this? what I find interesting here, more my researcher’s POV is the new affordance created by these type of information. It’s less about a direct use of space but rather the availability of traces that can be employed to represent city usage or life pattern at a meta level. What would be these new affordances? Of course, lots of emphasis has been put on social navigation (”navigation towards a cluster of people or navigation because other people have looked at something“) but how to go beyond that?
- make explicit phenomenon that are invisible (lots of projects are about pollution measures)
- use these data for urban planning and architecture, to understand “usage of city”. I am wondering about how this would benefit to that crowd (that’s why I am now working in an architecture lab). See for example Fabien’s project for that matter: he investigates spatio-temporal patterns of pictures uploaded on Flickr.
- give users some feedback about their activities, closing the control loop as in the Wikicity project (possibly to “empower users, make them in control of their environment”).
- create new services based on this information
- …

Reading Stamen’s work about cab spots with Eddie Elliott. They actually used the Cabspotting API to produce high-res long-term point maps of San Francisco with cab GPS lcoations. Part of the result description attracted my attention:

“downtown buildings are so high and close together that GPS signals can’t make it down to the ground with very much accuracy, bounce around off the glass and steel, and give “bad” results. Fair enough; downtown’s not so accurate. But what it means in terms of urban area chartings, where cabs tend to stay in very narrow street slots, is that you can use a visualization like this to tell immediately where the high buildings are by the degree of fuzziness in the map, and if you mapped the height of the buildings over this image, they’d probably overlap prety much one-to-one.
(…)
you and I live in a world where normal people can look at complex data visualizations of urban environments, notice anomalies in the display, go to the web to find information about where that place is, and then make pretty good guesses as to why the data is showing up the way it is. It needs smart people with some non-trivial technical knowhow to make these particular views on it possible, sure. But once that’s done, there’s a very quick path available to free information that can be used to reinforce, disprove, or generally poke at the way that the world is, and why it is that way, and it’s fluid and easy and you can start asking real questions very quickly.

I think this is a new thing.“

Why do I blog this? documenting new processes about the implications of urban visualizations when discussing in a bar with Fabien.

Last week at PicNic, during the very interesting panel that I participated in, a question from the audience sparked some discussion among us. The attendee slightly complained about the fact that Fabien or myself were a bit too pessimistic about pervasive gaming. Our two presentations, although very different posited that ubiquitous/pervasive computing was difficult to achieve for infrastructure/technical reasons… which leads to user experience issues.

The discussion then shifted to “what’s the target of pervasive gaming?”, I answered that before thinking about a target, one should find the “settings” or context in which pervasive gaming can work. I don’t know remember how I phrased the following, so let’s see what Tom Hume transcribed it: “It’s a bit like laser games, requiring a place with a specific infrastructure. My fear is that it could be turned into theme parks. It might be designed for specific targets or niches“.

I tried to elaborate more what I have in mind and think that there are indeed different models of location-based games.

The first one is a bit too utopian: it’s thinking that technologies are seamless, hardware and software robust and that no problem occur. In that case, one can envision über-cool location-based networked games running on cell phones everywhere everytime. Although this seems unlikely, one can at least think about this possibility.

At the end of the spectrum, I mention the worse-case scenario: the “laser-game” model in which the game can only be played in a specific time and place. This is what happened in planned games or exhibits (see for example what Blast Theory did with Can You See Me Now?): in this case the game was played in various cities, controlled by the game designers. One can also think about fixed places, as with laser-games, in which horde of players would come and play.

A mid-point on this spectrum would be to have an approach to combine the two. And I quite like the skateboard metaphor for that matter. You can do skateboard freely in lots of places (streets, parking, etc.) and also go to skateparks. In the former, the infrastructure of the everyday environment constrain the skateboarding tricks whereas in the latter the skatepark design is meant to allow certain tricks. What is interesting as well is that in street skating, there is a pleasure associated in finding nice and relevant spots, whereas in skateparks, things are more under controlled.

So, to get back to the topic at hands here, what would be the equivalent if the skateboard practice with regards to pervasive gaming? I think it may corresponds to designing for both targets in minds: both the daily and everyday environment (with its constraints, problems, issues) and for the “laser-park” equivalent in which the control of certain parameters would allow to go beyond the daily environment. And what would be a good candidate (as a device) for that? What corresponds to the skateboard?

Picture taken in Lyon, last month.

Why do I blog this? quick thoughts to be re-used in the future.

A quite interesting session at the Association of American Geographers Annual Conference: Situating Sat Nav: Questioning the TomTom Effect (transferred to me by Fabien). Organized by Chris Perkins and Martin Dodge, the session deals aims at questioning the social effects, cultural meanings and political economy of in-car satellite navigation:

“Comprehensive in-car satellite navigation (Sat Nav) systems have rapidly become affordable and ‘must-have’ mass-market accessories, advertised on television and the focus of ‘scare’ stories in the tabloid press. With their driver’s-eye position, dynamic maps and an authoritative voice telling you where and when to turn, these archetypal geographical gizmos depend on the ‘magic’ locational power of a cluster of unseen satellites and the global reach of corporations marketing the latest consumer fad. SatNav offers technologically sophisticated spatial data models of the world, but the technology quickly sinks into taken-for-granted everyday driving practices, such that its social and political significance is hard to assess. The gadgets themselves take
space on the dashboard and windscreens, but also make new senses of space for the driver, well beyond the car. What exactly is the nature of this TomTom effect? “

Why do I blog this? it seems it’s too late to submit something there but it connects with my interest in studying the user experience of location-aware technologies. My PhD research addressed the socio-cognitive implications of mutual-location awareness. How this connects to the present session? The results from my dissertation would be interesting to discuss in conjunction with features such as TomTom buddies that lets you track your friends on the road. A friend locator coupled to a car navigation systems? What’s new? What are the constraints? What can be the impacts? etc. Perhaps that can help “questioning the TomTom effect”.

Dearman, D., Varshavsky, A., de Lara, E., Truong, K.N. An Exploration of Location Error Estimation. To appear in the Proceedings of UBICOMP 2007: The 9th International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing (September 16-19, Innsbruck, Austria), 2007.

The paper deals with location-aware computing and how location predictions often fails to report their accuracy. The authors propose to reveal the error of location prediction (in a very “seamful design” way) and evaluate different possibilities in a field study, showing significant benefit in revealing the error of location predictions.:

“Predicted Location. In the predicted location condition, we provided participant with the predicted location of herself and the poster

95% Confidence. In the 95% confidence condition, we provided participants with a region defined by a confidence ring, in which the application is 95% confident that the actual location is contained within the ring.

Customizable Confidence. In the customizable confidence condition, we provided participants (by default) with the same visualization as the 95% confidence condition; however, they could manipulate the confidence level of the ring.

Optimal Error. In the optimal error condition, we provided participants with a ring for each location (see Figure 3(e)) where the ring’s radius is defined by the true error of the location prediction.“

What is very interesting here is the description of how users cope with the localization system and how they benefit from the presentation of the positioning error:

“Our results show that presenting an estimate of the positioning error provides a significant benefit. Fixed estimates of error (e.g., 95% confidence and customizable confidence) provided little additional benefit, but they do help confine the search area. The optimal error condition strongly and positively in-
fluenced participants’ search strategies. Participants found all posters where the true error was small. When the true error was large, participants experienced the same problems for finding the posters as the participants in the other conditions. However, participants in the optimal condition could identify that the true error was large and differentiate between high and low true error, where as participants in all other conditions could not. “

Why do I blog this? because this field study is an interesting exemplification of seamful design, i.e. revealing the limits/shortcoming of a system to the users. Results are quite interesting as they express which sort of information can be valuable to the users.