Ubicomp Day 3 roundup

Posted by avsm Thu, 15 Sep 2005 15:01:00 GMT

Ubicomp had a pretty strong technical start in the first few days, at least compared to previous years. The last day of the conference was more HCI-centric, but here's a quick summary of what went on from a combination of notes from myself and Al. It isn't entirely complete, as we admittedly blew off the last session to go watch the September Grand Sumo Tournament (which was unbelievably fun, more on that in a later entry!)

We somehow ended up in the Sumo house during the conference...

... and found the main ring where battle commenced!

Later, we found the sumo fanbois gathered around their fave wrestlers banners

• Two guys from Nokia presented a field study they conducted on the DigiDress Nokia Sensor application (pdf, homepage) for their Symbian phones. The idea is fairly standard as these social networking applications seem to go: it Bluetooth scans for nearby devices, checks if they are running the Sensor software, and exchanges various bits of information (e.g. photograph and vital statistics).

  It does stand out for being the most slickly implemented Symbian application I've ever seen, with perfect animations and feedback during the Bluetooth work. I noticed in the paper acknowledgements that they used some Nokia middleware for the networking part of the application; something that would be great to see released publically.

  There weren't really many "take-home" points that I got out of the presentation however; they ran a closed test with Nokia employees, and the paper is full of various statistics and quotes, but nothing really jumped out at me. To summarize: 681 users, 80% were Finnish, and they were comfortable giving personal information out since all were from Nokia but probably wouldn't in the big bad world. I downloaded and ran the application during the presentation, and kept it active for the rest of the conference, but failed to find a single buddy who was also running it. Al mentioned that he had tried it a few months ago in Cambridge with similar lacking results.

• The PlaceLab presentations continued with Control, Deception and Communication: Evaluating the Deployment of a Location-enhanced Messaging Service (pdf). They evaluated a messaging system which used geocoding using GSM cell information (so you tell people where you are, and where you might be). As Al observed, iChat's away message but used for location.

  The focus of this paper was on location privacy, and they were trying to figure out what it takes for it to be useful, how to promote personal privacy, and whether or not plausible deniability was possible (an interesting question when using normal IM systems, which tend to leap online when you open your laptop, making it hard to deny that you are online, with simultaneous logins making the whole thing more complex).

  I think I'm quite sympathetic to this work (despite the rather thin slicing from the Pervasive 2005 Reno paper) as they laid out some decent design conclusions that I agree with: (i) preserve plausible deniability in the interface; (ii) lightweight messaging (e.g. predefined templates intelligently popping up, much like the predictive texting) could be a killer application; and (iii) automatic message exchange should not be a design priority, as people prefer to control the degree of privacy and precision in reporting it rather than letting an electronic agent control that for them.

• Next up came the Microsoft Research work on AURA: scanning objects in the wild (pdf) which uses a handheld scanner to read in physical hyperlinks such as UPC barcodes, and upload them electronically. The idea is that this can make applications such as shopping much easier as you simply "bookmark" the physical objects and collect them later, or even just go home and find the best price online.

  "Sounds cool!" I hear you cry, but amazingly (for me anyway), this work didn't cite, or even mention, the work HP did on Cooltown which did exactly this with handheld devices in a closed environment. This being a research conference, I would expect that people look up related work and try to build on previous work. Anyway, even after reading their conclusions, I was left fairly unimpressed (although the study itself seemed to have been done fine). For example: end-to-end support for applications says that users wanted AURA to be integrated better in "certain" applications; I assume this means that if I scan a book in, I'd like it to be uploaded to Amazon to my wishlist. Or, integration with current practices leaves me a bit bemused; isn't it obvious that a hyperlinking system needs to fit into the way users already operate? Some points are very western-specific; robust offline usage is of less relevance in Japan where a reliable 3G network exists that alleviates the need for a lot of state on the device itself.

  I think work of this nature is in real danger of just being left behind in the dust, as companies such as Delicious Monster are rapidly creating very user-friendly, popular software that just does what systems like this are trying to research. Still, the people working on it are the very smart folks at MSR, so I'll definitely be keeping an eye on it in the future.

• Some quickies: the Abaris autism system (pdf) was a very solid piece of work on integrating in computer support to therapists working with autistic kids. They had some interesting observations on the usability of alternate input methods (such as voice) when in a real environment. The (very fun) folks from Glasgow talked about Treasure: picking pockets on the lawn (pdf), which is a mobile multi-user game which uses 802.11b dead-zones as part of the game tactics. I must admit this left me a bit confused as to the point of it all; why not just simulate the dead-spots in the game, and restrict yourself to depending on the environment? Its not as if users can magically perceive the dead-spots, so they can't really build tactics based upon where they are anyway, except as a primitive memory game mechanism. IBM came along to discuss frameless displays (pdf) and presented some very early design guidelines for frameless applications (i.e. set background to transparent). In living for the global city (pdf), the People and Places Lab at Intel followed three people (from London, Los Angeles and Tokyo) and tried to work out what they carried. Pointless ethnography at its height?

• Finally, the best for last... some Danish researchers presented the ActiveTheatre, a Collaborative, Event-based Capture and Access System for the Operating Theatre (pdf). Capture and Access (C&A) is jargon for a system which tries to remember everything around you and your environment and make it available for future retrieval; an electronic indexed memory of your experiences. They observe that C&A systems are particularly useful for doctors in the operating theatre since they rely heavily on items like the patient's paper record, medical images such as X-rays, and even instruction manuals. They conducted real field testing with real doctors performing operations, and experimented with input mechanisms such as speech. Very impressive work indeed!