Summer School on Context Awareness

Yesterday, the Summer School on Context Awareness took place here in Culture Lab. Sponsored by the EU, Matthias Kranz had come over and delivered a set of lectures covering a broad range of topics in this area, including the history of ubiquitous computing, basic concepts, design principles and location sensing. We had a good turnout of students with a quite diverse background (from Computer Science to Digital Media and Education), and they produced some really interesting ideas during the final workshop session. We also had some good discussions about the implications of the increasing proliferation of ubiquitous computing and in which cases using this technology would subvert the original purpose of an activity or an object.

Talk on Location Awareness and Intelligent Environments by Matthias Kranz

Matthias is visiting Newcastle this week (he's delivering the Summer School on Context Awareness on Wednesday) and he gave a talk on his current research yesterday. One of the topics he discussed was the use of cordless phones for indoor/outdoor localisation. It was fascinating to learn about the pervasiveness of DECT-based phones (there are many more than wireless base stations - on average 3 out 4 households in Germany have one) and their properties (long range, low power, reserved frequency band) that make them very well suited for localisation. He presented initial results indicating that the algorithms can be used that were developed for Wifi-localisation. Additionally, Matthias show initial evidence that the theoretical benefits can translate into practical advantages in terms of coverage and precision of the measured location. It will be worthwhile to keep that in mind when designing any smart objects for use in people's homes.

Driving without moving

Earlier this week, Phil and I went on a scouting mission to check out some driving simulators. We first went to visit Cruden in Amsterdam, who manufacture high-end driving simulators with very accurate motion cues. The platforms they use are very impressive pieces of engineering (see photo) and the degree of realism is astonishing. I got to drive a simulated Ferrari around a racing track, and while I haven't driven one in real life, the feeling of accelerating or hitting the break was very convincing - the clutch felt like a bull was hitting the car every time I changed gear.

Frank at Cruden was kind enough to also organise a quick meeting with Riener Haapee from Delft University. We learnt a lot about the research they are doing, which is closely related to what we want to do with the driving simulator. They have been using different types of car simulators to work on biomechanics and human-machine interaction in the car. (Another interesting bit of information was that apparently, every driving school in the Netherlands uses a (simple) simulator.) One of the projects at Delft University is DriveOps, which looks really interesting. Riener also pointed us some collaborators they are working with, including Noldus, a company creating behavioural models, and to SmartEye, a company creating eye trackers specifically for cars.

The next day, we went on to visit Kai Foerst (from Dr. Foerst GmbH) near Cologne, who make a different type of simulator, which is aimed much more at training drivers. While the motion cues are much less realistic than in the Cruden simulator, the actual software provides a great environment to quickly create and test driving scenarios in quite realistic everyday environments (see photo below).

One interesting aspect we discussed at length is the trade-off between realism of the motion cues and the risk of motion sickness, which is closely linked to the overall question of how realistic does the simulation need to be in order to be effective? Obviously, if the motion cues, the visuals and the interaction are inconsistent, then the degree of inconsistency will increase the likelihood of motion sickness. Another good predictor of motion sickness seems to be age: the older people are, the more likely they are to experience it. Younger people (e.g. those training to get a driver license) rarely suffer from it - we thought that maybe exposure to 3D video games is a factor in this case. However, an interesting question is, if this is indeed true, would that compromise the effectiveness of the simulator as people would (subconsciously) treat it more as a video game rather than as a simulation of the real world.

visit to Centre of Cognitive Science, Freiburg University

Thanks to being grounded in Germany by the ash cloud, I got a chance to visit Christoph Hoelscher and his group at the Centre of Cognitive Science in Freiburg last week. I had met him some time ago when he was paying a visit to Kenny's lab at Northumbria, and I was really pleased that he was able to make some time for me given the short notice. He has been working a lot on indoor navigation (e.g. [1]), and I did get to see a few experiments they had implemented to test various aspects relating to indoor navigation (e.g. the impact of specific architectural features, different types of landmarks, strategies when navigating different types of environments).
They are using different types of VR environments to conduct their studies, which is closely related to the immersive video/panoramic photograph approach we've been using/investigating here.

[1] Hölscher, C., Meilinger, T., Vrachliotis, G., Brösamle, M., & Knauff, M. (2006). Up the Down Staircase: Wayfinding Strategies and Multi-Level Buildings. Journal of Environmental Psychology 26(4), 284-299.

Reflections on ash clouds and transport networks

Earlier this month, I had a flight booked to Germany from Newcastle. As it so happened, the flight was on the day the infamous ash cloud started to cover Europe. I was woken at 5 a.m. in morning when my phone beeped with a text message informing me that my flight had been cancelled. As their web site still said that my connection flight from London was 'confirmed' and 'on time' (couldn't get through to their call centre), I hopped onto the next train to London.

Luckily, it had free (!) Wifi so I could chat with my wife who was following the news on TV and radio, and also keep an eye on the BA web site. Somewhere around Peterborough, my connection flight was cancelled, and I started to investigate alternative routes to my destination, which turned out to be quite tricky. There doesn't seem to be working pan-European booking/look-up service for trains - so I had to piece information together from several web sites. Once I got to London, I was at least able to buy a ticket that took me to Brussels and then on to Cologne (where I had to buy another ticket). In the end, I actually got to my destination about 30 min later than I had would have gotten there if I had taken the plane.

So, from this experience it appears to me that a) it's possible to be almost as quick using train than using a plane if you travel within Europe, b) it's not outrageously expensive (I paid less than what I would have paid for a plane ticket bought on the day of travel), and c) if there was a unified booking/lock-up service for trains (similar to those available for planes), I think more people might consider this option. After all, taking the train is so much more relaxed (bigger seats, not having to rush through ever increasing numbers of security checks), being able to walk about at any time, etc.).

A world without Google?

The introduction of the iPad made me start to think some strange thoughts. In one way, this is a brilliant device with the most intuitive UI I've seen so far, and I can see this as the perfect 'computer' for anyone who doesn't care about computers and just wants to get to some info. So, somehow this is a window into the Net but it is also its own eco-system that is tightly controlled by Apple (i.e. who gets to put apps on there and who doesn't). I guess there are good and bad side effects of that control but it sure is something worth pondering... But isn't that a bit like what the Internet has become? In a way, Google controls what a user gets to see and what not. Sure there are ways around that (using different search engines) as there will be with the iPad (jailbreaking) but in the case of the Internet that is not really satisfying (i.e. just some other company that controls what you see).

So, I'm wondering: could there be a search engine that is entirely free? Something like Wikipedia - distributed, maintained by volunteers and without a commercial drive. I think there are many parallels between a Wiki and a search engine (of course, there are also differences). You'd need some mechanism to alert the system of changes in a web page (spider or maybe proactively done by the publisher of the web page) or if a new page is added (same) but that isn't too hard to do. So, if the job of cataloguing the web is partitioned and replicated amongst loads of servers, would that be a viable alternative to Google? Given sufficient numbers of volunteers, it might even be possible to get some sort of semantic catalogue (such as what Yahoo! used to be initially but with additional information added).