Tom’s [wearLog]

At this year’s Ubicomp, I was presenting the poster:

Tom Nicolai and Holger Kenn: Towards Detecting Social Situations with Bluetooth. Adjunct Proceedings of Ubicomp 2006, Irvine, USA. [PDF]

The PEnG project (Physical Environment Games) had its first Projektwochenende last weekend. The students already made some experience developing four separate game prototypes. On the weekend, it was a good opportunity to mix the ideas so far and develop a new idea for the second half of the project time.

Speed-Researching

The matrix of concepts with Holger

I gave a workshop, to mix up all ideas so far, extract the best ones and evaluate them. On the first day, elements from the separate games were collected on “Actions” and “Objects” card. On the second day, these became the rows and columns on a large matrix. In a speed-researching session, we were to combine all those actions and objects. Two students had 30 seconds to choose one combination and 6:30 minutes to make up a concept for that combination. After 8 turns with different pairs of students most of the matrix was filled with new and partially unexpected ideas. After a break, the students formed four expert groups to evaluate the concepts: The Tech-Group was looking at the technical feasibility, the Biz-Group was checking economic aspects. The Sci-Group was looking for scientific challenges and the Fun-Group had to judge, which kinds of people might like which concepts. In the evening, the results were presented.

The feedback of the students was very positive. Especially, the socializing aspect of the workshop as well as the development of new combinations of existing concepts were appreciated. There was also some disappointment, because the outcome was not a concrete and fixed plan of how to proceed with the project.

The Wireless Rope experiment on PerCom was quite successful. We had a hard time keeping all components running, but were rewarded with a rich set of data.

From right to left: Eiko Yoneki, Nils Behrens and me

On the Wireless Rope project page you can see the aggregated data set of the whole conference. Nodes in the graph denote Bluetooth devices, edges denote Bluetooth sightings and thus physical proximity. Use left mouse button and move to pan the view, right button and move up/down to zoom.

While most devices were mobile, phones or laptops, the five TS devices in the graphs were fixed reference points. The picture shows TS3 (the small box on the green wall).

Thanks to everybody who joined this experiment on PerCom!

The next International Forum on Applied Wearable Computing will take place in March in Bremen. Since I will be on the PerCom during this conference, my colleague Thomas Sindt will present the paper: “Wearable Computing for Aircraft Maintenance: Simplifying the User Interface” written by Tom Nicolai, Thomas Sindt, Hendrik Witt, Jörn Reimerdes and Holger Kenn.

The new year seems to give me a good start with a visit to the PerCom 2006 in Pisa! Together with Eiko Yoneki and Nils Behrens, I am presenting the demo “Wireless Rope: Experiment in Social Proximity Sensing with Bluetooth”.

And, I am also involved in the paper presentation “Designing a Wearable User Interface for Hands-free Interaction in Maintenance Applications” together with Hendrik Witt and Holger Kenn from my institute.

On the last MRC Meetingpont, there were three presentations about mobile gaming:

• Prof. Dr. Helmut Eirund, Hochschule Bremen: Mobile Entertainment mit DVB-H
• Tom Nicolai, TZI, Das Projekt PEnG - Physical Environment Games [PPT]
• Jan Andresen, Founder of elkware, Wedel: Zielgruppen und Märkte

Holger Kenn, Hendrik Witt, Tom Nicolai (2005): A Distributed Context Engine for Wearable Computing. In Otthein Herzog, Michael Lawo, Paul Lukowicz and Julian Randall (eds.), 2nd International Forum on Applied Wearable Computing (IFAWC) 2005, VDE Verlag, March 2005.

Nils Behrens, Tom Nicolai, and Michael Massoth (2005): CityPress - das mobile Stadt-Tagebuch [CityPress - the Mobile Urban Diary]. In ITG (eds.), Mobilfunk - Technologien und Anwendungen, ITG-Fachbericht Band 187, Vorträge der 10. ITG-Fachtagung, pp. 231-234, Osnabrück, June 2005.

Mario Tokoro, President of the Sony CS Lab, gave the keynote speech at Ubicomp05, which deeply impressed me. During the usual beginning with a timeline of computing history (”the computer was invented in …”), among all the usual items of hardware and operating systems I noted the small words “Blog”, “Wiki” and “SNS” and they caught my curiosity.

During his speech, he distinguished three major paradigms in computing. First, computer programs were designed as tools: spreadsheets, word processors, … The next thing was the ubiquitous computing idea. Computers in the environment, in everyday things, in clothes. The personal computer disappears.

As the third paradigm he brought up an issue that is not yet that common sense for most computer scientists. He said, that computers are used “as a means to build society.” He mentioned Blogs, Wikis and social networking services as indications. He also talked about new evolving sciences and the importance of interdisciplinary research.

I really enjoyed his keynote.