With the
new IT education starting in Kista soon, money will be spent on different kind
of “student spaces” to support different kinds of project oriented work. These
group rooms will eventually be equipped with technology for e.g. presentations
and videoconferences. The students will also be equipped with laptops. This
environment would then be very interesting to use for different kinds of
experiments with collaboration applications.
Visionary
document: Interactive Learning Spaces
http://www.dsv.su.se/~martinj/LearningLab/LearningSpace.pdf
The
document above is a visionary document developed while cooperating with a
research project at Stanford University. The thoughts in this document have
inspired the project proposals presented below. It is of course free to create
a project from other thoughts in this document.
Länk till Learning Space
dokumentet
If you have
questions or need clarifications about the project proposals ask
Martin
Jonsson, martinj@dsv.su.se
or
Patrik Werle, werle@dsv.su.se
When a
number of people enter a meeting room it is natural to communicate and exchange
papers or other physical objects. However, if the persons carry laptops
(connected to Internet), it is not obvious how to exchange information between
them or computers in the room. Due to the “flatness” of Internet the computers
could just as well be situated in different countries. To share information you
must either deal with floppy discs or you must know network names or IP
addresses. Even if you have the addresses it is still cumbersome to deal with
the applications to exchange the information.
The goal
with the project is to create an application that makes it almost transparent
to exchange files/links/text etc. between people that shares a physical
location. The user interface could resemble that of ICQ, showing people or
entities in the room.
Problems:
·
Decide
what people/computers are in the room?
·
How
should the data be transferred?
·
How
should the user interface be designed?
Suggestions
One way to
approach the problem is to use Java Buttons (see links blow) for location
sensing, and to build a Java interface together with a shared tuplespace like
TSpaces (see link below) for data transfer.
Deliverables:
A working
application!
Useful
links
TSpaces: http://www.almaden.ibm.com/cs/TSpaces/
, (Check out the example with cut and paste)
Java
Buttons http://www.ibutton.com , can be used like
this: http://www.cc.gatech.edu/fce/ctk/
The Locust
Swarm: http://lcs.www.media.mit.edu/projects/wearable/locust/index.html
A lot of
interesting applications could be built if it was easy to acquire your own or
other peoples (or computers) location. In the new IT University building it
would be possible to create an infrastructure that supports location awareness
for applications running on laptops or PDA’s in the environment. Example
applications could be different applications for resource allocation (e.g.
together with Jini), the application described above, a map showing where you
are, “pinging” someone’s location, etc.
Problems
Continuous
or discrete locations? In most cases you are most interested in which room you are in, or
other people that are in the room. You could be physically close to a person
but logically far away, if separated by a wall. One way to solve this problem
is to use IR or short radio beacons that don’t pass through walls [1].
Monitoring
and privacy. If a
central server stores the location of the users, some privacy issues are
raised. Another way to do this is to let the users mobile equipment know where
they are, by e.g. listening to simple location beacons in the environment that
continuously sends out a location ID [1].
Information
distribution. How
should an application get access to centralized location information in an easy
way? Preferably the information should be accessible in a programming language
independent way, e.g. by using an http server.
Suggestions:
Try and use
Maguire’s SmartBadge. Also consider the Locust Swarm Technology from MIT.
Deliverables:
A combined
hardware and software solution. A simple example application should be built
showing the features of the system, e.g. a map showing the users current
location.
Links:
[1] The
Locust Swarm: http://lcs.www.media.mit.edu/projects/wearable/locust/index.html
[2] SmartBadges: www.it.kth.se/edu/gru/Fingerinfo/telesys.finger/Mobile.VT98/badge3.html
[3] A
Context Toolkit: http://www.cc.gatech.edu/fce/ctk/