Ubicomp 2005, Days 1 and 2

Posted by avsm Tue, 13 Sep 2005 06:37:00 GMT

I'm in Japan at Ubicomp 2005 at the moment, and have been taking notes along with Al using Subethaedit over the dodgy WiFi network here. The conference has been better than the previous ones I've been, most likely since its in Japan where we can sample some of the more exotic technology in use here. Here's some of the more interesting things we've seen in the first couple of days...

In Japan one drinks...

... eats ...

.. and enjoys the view...

Ubiquitous Networking:

• Some guys from NTT presented the CarpetLAN (pdf), which is a networking system embedded in normal carpet tiles. They got 10Mb/s out of it with pretty small cells, but users need to carry a small transceiver (in their demo, it was hooked up to an iPaq). They reckon they can scale it up to 65000 tiles, so it could be a good way of tracking people in large crowded places like conference centres (since multiple user s can stand on the same tile and still get reliable connectivity). The videos were pretty cool, but don't appear to be online unfortunately.

• Next up, u-Textures (pdf, homepage) talked about creating self-organising displays by having a bunch of movable LCD touchscreens which users could detach and place in different configurations for various applications. For example, a media shelf would be arranged with one screen sticking out, and another vertical on the wall. Users can then place a CD on the shelf, which would be detected via RFID, giving users the option of playing it. An alternative application is sitting around a table and organising them in the circular fashion, letting tourists decide where to go by controlling a central map interface.

  This was a classic "Ubiwhat?" in my book; I just couldn't understand the point of it. From a user-centric point of view, I find it hard to believe that re-arranging screens physically is a practically useful interface. Also, each application requires a specific arrangement, and it wasn't clear to me how users could figure out the arrangement required to actually run the application in the first place.

• I actually missed this talk while chatting outside, but the paper looks pretty cool. They describe (pdf) a declarative language for expressing a user interface, and a compiler which applies a cost function (e.g. number of clicks to do something) to automatically generate an optimal user interface for a given device. The device could be a PC or a little embedded device with a limited set of inputs and outputs. Only downside is of course the compilation time for the interface on a small device like a PDA (they quote 40s for their example on an iPaq), but of course it only needs to be done once and then rendering it is very fast.

• The "most likely to be a joke paper", on how to analyse dietary habits using the chewing sounds that people make (pdf). The presentation was actually pretty good and fun; they motivate their work by noting that 1 billion people in the world are overweight, and that a solution to help people self-regulate is important. It could be done by keeping an eye on the type and amount of food you eat.

  They place environment audio sensors around, and depending on the number of times you chew your food, get some pretty good results for some types of food (e.g. potato crisps), and not so good for others (yoghurt!). Still, I think health and fitness is an area that could be extremely well served by Ubicomp, as its something which is easily measurable, and the results easily quantifiable (unlike the social networking stuff which seems to be so loved here).

• A super idea from Georgia Tech on designing Capture-resistant environments for camera-phones (pdf). Its obviously a hot topic, with a lot of areas such as swimming pools and gyms banning camera phones. This paper exploits an effect known retro-reflection in order to detect the thin film between the lens and CCD/CMOS on most camera-phones. They shine a cheap Sony Handycam infrared light and then detect the reflection. There is then a large projector in the environment which shines a beam of infrared light back at the camera to overload the CCD and ruin the picture being taken. More pictures and videos available on their homepage, definitely worth a look. Unfortunately, it only works on current camera-phones, and not with analogue cameras for example, but still a great bit of work.

Location Systems: This set of papers could definitely be summarised as the "Placelabathon", with Intel Research presenting loads of papers related to their PlaceLab project being run out of Seattle.

• PlaceLab works by creating a global database of GPS and WiFi location traces. So far, they've talked about how self-mapping locations using 802.11(pdf) is practical (they got people to walk around with laptops for 3 days and tracked where they were and what they could see). Also, the prolific Jeffrey Hightower talked about a system for mapping meaningful names to co-ordinates and vice-versa (pdf); a GeoDNS of sorts.

• Ali Tse and I got our turn in the spotlight to talk about the measurement work we did using the Active Bat location system to take some really accurate Bluetooth measurements (pdf). We took turns talking and I had a lot of fun, as it gave me a chance to rant about Bluetooth suckiness! Some good questions as a lot of people came up to chat afterwards to either argue or agree with our assertions that Bluetooth location is a waste of time given current hardware limitations.

• The fine folks at Bristol are trying to overcome some of the limitations of the Active Bat system by creating a self-calibrating ultrasonic location system (pdf), with relatively cheap tags that cost about $100 each. The system had pretty good results (with 2.5cm-5cm errors on the calibration), and the measurement methodology was a bit suspect, but overall I think the system has a lot of promise. I think its becoming clear that the main thing that location systems need is not superb accuracy, but rather dependability and consistency over time or it loses user confidence. The number of Bat users in our lab can be counted on the fingers of one hand now, unfortunately.

Cool Japanese Stuff: There were a bunch of demos as well as papers, and they were of really good quality this year as real companies such as NTT and KDDI showed up with their funky Japanese gadgets. There were some real stinkers as well (such as IBM's bizarre PDA remote control display), but once we battled past the language barrier, these were some good ones:

• The NTT Cmode vending machine (cmode) was awesome! Its a normal vending machine (which, in Japan, means it sells everything you need to survive), but you can pay by your mobile phone. It has infrared, RFID and a camera interface. A load of the phones around here have RFID built in, and this was the best way to use the vending machine (just press your phone against the machine and out pops your Coke). The camera interface works by your phone downloading a one-time QRCode to your phone display, which you then wave in front of the camera to get your drink. It was a bit more clumsy than the RFID one, but you could of course print out the barcode to paper (enabling special offers to be handed out nice and easily).

  The Cmode vending machine...

  ... and the actual interfaces

  Some of the autofocus Japanese phones to read QRcodes

• The slightly bizarre but very effective Suica Direction Finding Pole was another great demo. Suica is an RFID pre-paid card, similar to Octopus in Hong Kong or Oyster in London. In this demo, you wave your card on a location on a map (e.g. in the subway), and the system remembers where you want to go. Next, if you see a "direction finding pole" (believe me, you wont miss it), wave your card at the pole, and the flexible top of the pole will swing and point in the direction you should walk (it rotates around 360 degrees in a really funny way). There's also an LCD screen for more information. After experiencing the Japanese subway system without being able to read Kanji, a system like this being deployed more widely would be fantastic for tourists anywhere (consider that you could select the location you want at your hotel at a tourist guide).

• Some quickies: Fujitsu are demoing a contact-less palm/vein authentication system which worked flawlessly for us (link). IBM, as mentioned previously, had a pointless PDA demo which acts as an input for a public display. The interface sucked, the response was slow, and the demo failed. Finally, there was a cool motorcycle heads-up display designed for pit crew and spectators to see stats and track information. Although a bit pointless right now, the guy said he wanted to extend it to overlay information over the heads of motorcycles as they drove by (tracking them by GPS), which would be cool!

  The IBM pointless PDA display

  Awesome Seico direction finder

  Ali vroooms with the motorcycle headset