Paul Coulton's Forum Nokia Blog

My principal interest in mobile applications is to push the boundaries of innovation to create uniquely mobile experiences. I hope my blogs excite and challenge developers to think 'outside the box'.

Last night the BBC aired a program (can be seen here if your really interested) hosted by Physicist Brian Cox which featured some of my work (nice N95' shots) and some from my colleagues in Infolab21 and apart from elevating me to the exalted tile of ‘Boffin’ its gives me a excuse to show one of my favourite projects of 2008 I had undergraduate Drew Jackson working on. The title of the project was Lancaster Bomber (in honour of the famous WW2 aircraft named after our fair city) and it’s a game whereby we recreated the Lancaster University campus to allow me to fly around and shoot at the buildings in my very own Lancaster Bomber. Here comes the stress relief if you watch the video from the BBC you will see my workplace Infolab21 and if you then watch the game you will see me blow it up in the game (after a nice flying manoever through the underpass which is were our buses depart from )which after a hard day can be deeply satisfying.

Interestingly the models of campus were made using Google Sketch-up (didn’t quite have enough time to finish all the detail for the whole of campus but that can be done later) and transferred to Dark Basic to turn it into a game. This proved to be a remarkably flexible solution ( especially as Drew hadn’t done any 3D modelling before) and meant we could use the models in a variety of forms  on different platforms. My limited experience of flight simulator controls shows up in the video so I am planning to replace them by using an N95 instead.

This might be considered a bit lower tech than my usual fair but is a lot more accessible for the general public. As an aside from a presence based mobile social network project he is working on with me and Will (I will blog about it in future) my MSc student Klen Copic Pucihar knocked up this very neat little WidSets Widget called Widget Maps that allows you to get your location position using an address search facility  which then plots it on Google maps on your phone. The widget also allows you then to move the cursor to your exact location and get the corresponding latitude and longitude which you can share with your friends. The nice thing is that this will work on any J2ME phone supporting WidSets client Irrespective of having access to some form of positioning technology (sort of low tech my location).

BTW its currently available as a beta widget on the Widsets site so enjoy

Having created a lot of interest in the community with our first motion controlled 3D game Mirage Money ,  Fadi and I are now unveiling  its cooler big brother Mirage Space. It uses the same S60 Mirage-X API to create a motion controlled 3D space battle game in which you compete with opponents via Bluetooth to save the galaxy. As can be seen the video shows (me and Fadi playing and I win of course )players first select their space ship (in the video I am the Purple space ship and Fadi is Red space ship) and then they must engage in a space dogfight shooting their opponents as they appear on their screen.  The player movement is controlled entirely through tilt but speed and fire are controlled via the joypad using up and centre button respectively.

As we are moving around 3D space a means of ascertaining the opponent’s position is required which appears as a smaller set of gun sights indicating the direction of the opponent from your current position and changes from white to blue when the opponent is behind you as shown in video. There is also a selectable navigation map (left or right on joypad) which is shown part through the video (on Fadi’s screen which is the Red ship) to allow further navigation.  

This is part of a project looking at novel interaction possibilities through so called internet toys. The project was developed by one of my new PhD students Kate Lund as part of the learning process for Widgets and because my colleague Reuben had bought a Internet Rabbit some time ago and its been gathering dust whilst we thought of an interesting project.  Basically in its current form it provides a mobile WidSets Widget for sending messages to or controlling (flashing its lights or waggling the ears) your own, or someone else’s, Nabaztag Internet Rabbit as shown in the following video.

These internet toys are intriguing as the are purely a fun item but I know there is a huge community around these rabbits and my kids love sending messages to me through it. It also shows given the right tools and suitable APIs mobile widgets can produce new mash-ups and tap into existing communities very quickly. Finally, I know that many readers wont have a Nabaztag but for those who do I hope the widget provides a means for discovering your inner rabbit.

I have been working on a project recently called Heart Angel with Carlos Garcie Wylie exploring the use of an Alive Technologies ECG Heart Rate monitor with an N95. This type of idea has been discussed before by fellow Champion Arto Holpainen but my interests have been primarily in the visualisation of the information gathered through exertion mapping. Heart Angel The application incorporates two cardio respiratory tests, an independent monitoring application "Jog-Free", as well as a simple mini-game (I couldn’t not try to make a game out of this ). The follow video shows the cardio vascular test which are the ‘Tecumseh Step-Test’ and the ‘Rockport Test’ both widely used methods for ascertain fitness levels by the medical profession.

The mini game  has a simple  "Space Invaders" theme which makes use of the players Heart Rate. At random intervals the player is prompted with a 'Bonus-Screen' at which time they should aim to raise their Heart Rate by 10beats/min. If successful the player is awarded a bonus, otherwise the game simply resumes. He following video illustrates the idea.

Finally and the main point of our interest is the so-called jog-free mode which allows us to collect heart rate along with GPS position to produce exertion maps such as the one shown.

The user here is going anti-clockwise around the course and many of the high exertion points represent hills.

I want to extend this to use terrain gradient within the maps to get a better visualisation and possibly test the application with climbers using 3-D spatial mapping. Anyway I will bring this along to the Innovation workshop before the S60 Summit in Barcelona if anyone wants to play .

In my last post I highlighted the FREE workshop I am running at Futuresonic 2008 in Manchester UK on the 30^th of April which has been kindly supported by Forum Nokia. As part of the event we are running a live visual demonstration of an mobile interactive project called Mash Reality on the big screens at the headlining music event of the festival:

The RZA as Bobby Digital (Wu-Tang Clan) + Flying Lotus - Live (Warp), Rustie

On Thurs 1 May Manchester Academy 1 Oxford Rd. 8pm – MidnightI am going to be giving away tickets at the workshop so that people can experience the possibilities of mobile development offers first hand.Who says mobile development isn’t much fun  

This blog is to let the community know about the free (but no lunch)  Mobile Experiences workshop I am running from 12pm on the 30^th of April in Contact Theatre Space 3 in Manchester as part of kick off events for Futuresonic 2008 which is a Urban Festival of Art, Music & Ideas running between the 1-5 May in Manchester in the UK . The workshop is being supported by Forum Nokia (thanks again) and its aim is to facilitate cooperation between artists, designers, and developers in the mobile space

This year we intend to focus on the three technology areas currently growing in significance in the mobile phone space that of Location Based Services, RFID and Near Field Communications, and Mobile Widgets (WRT and WidSets) and each will be presented by a Forum Nokia Champion. The workshop is intended to be accessible and open to a variety of interest and in particular we want to provide an opportunity for designers to find out what these technologies have to offer and what the limitations, what support are and development environments exist, where they can get access to examples. We will also provide an opportunity to mix and discuss design ideas with developers and experts experienced in these areas together with providing some hands on practical experience of the technology.

To finish the event we are planning a group participation of a mobile experience but i will post more information as soon as the details are finalised but it should be very cool.

Manchester is a great city with a unique atmosphere and culture and this Festival is a great experience so if you have never visited the city this may be all the excuse you need.

I recently encouraged a couple of our MSc students (Klen Copic Pucihar and Leon Laxman) to enter the Forum Nokia sponsored WidSets competition on Betavine . I suggested it would be interesting to have a go with the new 'channels' functionality (this is a very early release) which allows you to allow users to communicate with each other in real-time i.e. you can create multiplayer gaming, chat rooms, instant messaging etc.

The result is this very interesting version of the classic 4 in a row game mechanic. As the following video shows you can check who’s on line and who wants to play and then make a challenge. BTW this is in real-time across the mobile network and without a 3G connection!

Although the game is quite straight forward, and it might be nice to add an in game  chat or taunt facility , it does illustrate the interesting possibilities for WidSets Widgets as a great casual games platform which would seem complimentary to the new n-gage platform.

Here is a very simple game concept my new PhD student Avi Nandwani has been playing with. The game is simple enough and based on the old parlour game pass the parcel. In this case we have replaced the parcel by a bomb which you have to defuse on your turn. You defuse the bomb by cutting one of three wires each of which has a different effect: either increasing the speed of the countdown timer, taking 10 seconds off the countdown time; or resetting the countdown timer speed to normal. 

The countdown is a random time and it’s the person holding the bomb when it reaches zero who gets blown up. To add some tension there is the ticking of the bomb on your phone during your turn. The game is very simple but surprisingly fun and serves to emphasise the beauty of the NFC interface. We are planning a few more party games to test so I will post those as they happen.

Having been inundated with requests for the Motion Controlled 3-D game Mirage Money from my last blog, Fadi and I have now made the game available absolutely free on MOSH. However, we would very much appreciate feedback from users on their experience both on suggestions for improvement and whether people find the mixed reality mode interesting, the interface intuitive, etc. You can either leave them on MOSH (dont foget to rate it if you luv it), here, or send them to me.

ENJOY!

This blog is in response to a number of requests I received after our presentation at this year's Game Developers conference (GDC 2008) for both an annotated copy of the slides (they directly printed out the slides which mostly just consisted of images and video) and to answer the basic question of why I think widgets are so important? 

I have already blogged about their link with the paradigms of Web 2.0 but it is also the very nature of widgets themselves that makes them interesting. Widgets are becoming increasingly popular in the PC/web landscape with offerings such as iGoogle Gadgets, Opera Widgets, Yahoo Widgets, Apple Dashboard Widgets and Windows Sidebar Gadgets (not to mention widgets incorporated into social networking sites (Facebook being a prime example)and blogs). In our talk Will and I gave a basic definition of a number of qualities of a widget but for me the three most important are:

• Simple. Generally does one thing but does it well. 
• Quick to develop, easy to deploy.Personalisation.
• The widget/environment adaptable to needs of the user. 

The key things here from a developer's perspective are that they are easy develop and deploy but from a users perspective it's in the simplicity and personalisation. Simple should be taken to mean targeted, and fairly easy to use rather than trivial - creating a good user experience given the constraints off many widget platforms can be quite a challenge. Given the nature of the mobile phone interface and its manner of use I believe this elegant simplicity is the essential component of any successful mobile application. Personalisation is another, although arguably secondary, key factor. As in our evolving Web 2.0 world, users increasingly expect to be able to tailor their environment to their personal needs and interests and this extends to applications too.   In terms of implementation, all widgets require a platform or engine of some sort to enable their operation. In mobile we have two general solutions: browser-based widgets and custom widget environments. Within Nokia, these are illustrated by their offerings of WidSets and the S60 Web Run-Time (WRT) respectively. Many of the standards that define a widget platform's operation either borrow from or directly adopt standard web technologies. Browser based solutions (WRT) generally stick more closly to web standards (JavaScript, XML, HTML, CSS etc.) and some people would therefore argue that they are more in keeping with established Web 2.0 paradigms (and therefore preferable in terms of attracting developers). However, in our experience custom environments can provide greater opportunity for developing richer applications and their centralised infrastructure can provide great benefits in terms of distribution, community features etc. From a independent developer's perspective it is the infrastructure of a centralised, custom widget environment, such as WidSets, that is particularly attractive. To illustrate this, consider the graph below which shows the user downloads of our simple WidSets game Bombus: 

The two notable events represent some of the power of utilising your users to rate and rank content rather than parties who may/may not have vested interests e.g. game deck administrator. The first event was the promotion of Bombus on the WidSets client (a featured widget) which provides an initial boost and then the steady download by users. The second key event is when the ratings from the users results in the widget reaching the "top 5 rated" list (after which we experienced lots of new users). Its hard to imagine such a situation without this type of users input as it is increasingly evident people are more inclined to accept the advice of other users.

As we have won two prizes for WidSets development (Bombus and Boom!) and one for WRT (m-footy) I often get asked "which is better"? My answer is always the same they both provide different qualities and I am happy to create for both. Given the use of open standards WRT is hugely attractive to current web developers in that they can be produced very easily and integrated within existing frameworks, whilst Widsets has a good infrastructure but requires a new language be learned by the developer (Helium script) and feels less integrated with the general phone applications. The ideal for me is to combine the positive aspects of both. Perhaps the ability to launch WRT from WidSets (which I understand may be part of the intended evolution) would help in part achieve this end.

With the current beta version of the client, WidSets have introduced ad-supported content with a planned revenue sharing model between WidSets and developers. When this is released, it will provide a great end-to-end solution for developers and a truly user centred perspective? 

So while I will always be a huge advocate of the power of creating very novel native applications( although for me its not an all or nothing debate), for the many simple casual applications we can envisage for mobile why not make them widgets?

BTW Big thanks to Will for the comments and discussions surrounding this blog

As many of you will realise I have been a long term advocate of accelerometers on phones and have a number of students having worked in this area. Today I wanted to present the novel S60 API developed by my PhD student Fadi Chehimi to provide 3-D motion control for navigating with 3-D virtual and augmented environments running on mobile phones which we have called Mirage-X. To demonstrate the power of the API , Fadi and I came up with the very simple game we have called Mirage Money the aim of which is that players ‘fly’ around in the 3-D world collecting the floating silver and gold coins by colliding with them on the screen. There game has two playing modes:Real Mirage where coins are augmented on images captured by the phone camera, and Virtual Mirage where the coins are floating in a virtual, sky-bounded environment.  As these concepts are best explained with a video we have created the one below.

This game further illustrates the power of accelerometers and in particular the advantage of this interface is that it not only minimizes the use of buttons on the phone it also allows a more intuitive interface experience and allows the user to maintain the optimum viewing angle to the screen.

We are also currently investigating two further game extensions that will expand the possibilities of using the API, the first will allow two players to battle through space over a Bluetooth connection and second will utilize the N95’s GPS to create a novel augmented reality location based game.

The use of GPS with the API has then obvious uses within the fields of tourism or information services but in an ideal case we would also have access to a digital compass to provide accurate orientation. Having pleaded the case for accelerometers in the past can I now suggest a digital compass? As it has lots of possible benefits and in particular I can see it helping with pedestrian navigation.

This week I have been at my favourite event of the year the Game Developers Conference and I must say after a fairly subdued event in the previous year for mobile games this year has been much more up beat. Whilst I felt a lot of people were indicating a need for change last year, this year people have really bought into the idea and I think to their credit Nokia have embraced this most of all. There was a great keynote from Anssi Vanjoki encouraging the greater use of context and the demo of new N-Gage platform at the Expo. For me what is particularly exciting about the new N-Gage platform was not the games they had to show (although i think Yamake is a cool idea) but inclusion of all the social and presence features which will allow us to create uniquely mobile games experiences which I have long be advocating and will help us create a games industry for mobile the exists out from the shadow of the consoles. I feel this could be a good great year for mobile games and I for one am very excited by the prospect.

In terms of other happenings the new Wii fit is great and there was a cool demo of creating your own game assets by drawing on paper by Sony. Oh yes and our Widget talk seemed to go down very well despite having the graveyard shift slot.

recently...

• As seen on TV and stress relief
• Widget Maps
• Motion Controlled 3D Multi-player Space Game
• Mobile Control of Your Inner Rabbit
• 3D Game Widget!
• Heart Controlled Mobile Interaction
• Workshop with added Concert!
• Futuresonic Mobile Experiences Workshop
• WidSets the new multiplayer casual games platform
• NFC Group Game: Tick! Tick! Boom!

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