Paul Coulton's Forum Nokia Blog

A mobile 'Magic Monstervision Machine'

2009-06-01T16:22:33+03:00

I have been working on an interesting take on a location based game recently which incorporates user generated content in the form of sketches of monsters. It’s in collaboration with my friend and artist Andrew Wilson who ran a workshop at Institute of Contemporary Arts in London where people could sketch there idea of what the London’s monsters might look like. I met up with Andrew a few of weeks ago at Futuresonic and we hatched a plan to turn the sketches into a mobile location based game called Free London's Monsters to be played around the actual locations where the monsters were envisaged. I had a small team of students (Frank, Laura, Richard, Rebecca, and Tabona) put together a first prototype using some bits of code I had lying around which uses the phone camera as the Magic Monstervision Machine (that’s an S60 phone to the uninitiated) to capture monsters when the players enter their lair. It’s worth noting this was done in less than two weeks with no previous experience of PyS60. Here’s a short video by the students of the prototype in action.

Iam am currently extending the application to include a map, game-time, and capture lists and a few other fun features but the basic functionality will be as shown. We are planning to test the first prototype at the Sandpit event at the end of June (ehich are free and if you in London around RCA pop along) before we hopefully present the more elaborate version at this year’s Hide and Seek festival which introduces social games and playful experiences from 31st July to 2nd August at the Southbank Centre, London.

I think the idea of incorporating the user generated content within the game is very interesting and is likely to greatly enhance the user experience. This concept also forms the basis of another location based game I am working on as I think UGC can be used to great effect in location based games

Understanding the Magnetometer (Digital compass) Sensor

2009-03-17T11:46:39+02:00

It seems a long time ago since I blogged about the operation of the accelerometer sensors and made a plea for their inclusion as a standard feature (I am of course assuming the positive outcome was because people actually listened to me rather than me being just prophetic ). Anyway I have already discussed in previous blogs about Streetview and other aspects of Point ‘N’ Seek utilising the magnetometer sensor (generally described as the digital compass) so here are some practical details of how it works in practice (I always feel a visualisation helps). As with the accelerometer in its raw form you have three outputs x,y,z which means that you can find directional information ,were your phone is pointing, whatever its orientation. For example the Figure below shows the outputs on the three axis for the phone held with the screen parallel to the users face (i.e. upright) and in the normal portrait orientation and when the phone is held so that the screen is parallel with the ground as you would use a normal compass. The plots start with the phone facing North then rotated through East, South and West and pausing at each alignment for around 5 seconds and you can clearly see the four compass points.

The illustrate the actual rotational change the following figure illustrates the three outputs for a continuous clockwise rotation with the phone held upright going clockwise from North.

The second graph of the figure is after applying some simple signal processing whereby we can combine these outputs along phone orientation from the accelerometer to produce an output that could easily be turned into an angle from North. Indeed the sensor API does provide a range of options one being for an angle from North as shown.

The problem but we have found this appears to be slightly sluggish (as illustrated) and my feeling is that a low pass filter has been applied to give a smooth scrolling of Maps when used for navigation. However, I have other plans for the sensor so will likely create my own algorithms using the raw outputs previously illustrated. Hopefully people will find this blog as useful as the one on accelerometers but judging by the time lag from last time you might want to return to this in about 12 months .

BTW should have said the data is from a S60 application running on the Nokia 6210 Navigator

Widget Maps

2008-07-04T16:51:29+03:00

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

Heart Controlled Mobile Interaction

2008-05-12T10:53:43+03:00

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 .

NFC is good for you

2007-11-20T15:33:57+02:00

As I have just had the paper Using NFC to Support and Encourage Green Exercise accepted for next year’s Pervasive Heath conference in Tampere Finland I thought I would give an insight into the project.

It is well accepted that the increasingly sedentary lifestyle of the British population is helping fuel the dramatic rises in type 2 diabetes, chronic heart disease and obesity. It has been widely reported across the various News media that recent estimates suggest that over 40% of school age children are overweight or obese, and by 2010 more than half of children may be obese. In addition to this, depression and mental ill health is set to be one of the fastest growing conditions in UK with 1 in 6 of the population suffering from a neurotic disorder. Whilst the overall reasons for this are complex there are simple things we can all do to improve this situation. For instance a report by the UK CMO concluded that:

“The minimum amount of regular physical activity needed to improve peoples’ health and reduce disease risk is 30 minutes of moderate intensity physical activity on at least 5 days a week.”

An important element of encouraging activity is the need to provide feedback as it is known to aid both the level and continued engagement in activity. In this project we created a system, which combines elements from a number of technologies and services to support and encourage walking as part of daily activity. These are; Mobile phones; Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) in the form of Near Field Communications (NFC); A redeemable points accumulation scheme.

The system developed and field tested around one of the Royal Parks in London works by implying the location of a user at a given time which is triggered when a user scans an NFC tag with their phone. The different locations with distance between each location are known and this is linked to known calorie data for healthy adults undertaking various physical activities such as walking, running and cycling. This information is made available through a website so that users can gauge their level of activity and thus get direct feedback on their activities. Further, extra incentive is provided by the users accumulating Health points which could be redeemed against purchases.

At this stage it is too early to ascertain the real effects on users and therefore a long term study with an extended trial is planned for future to document experiences of users within the system and obtain feedback from the participants as to how the system fits into their daily routine.

Locomash live from Roskilde Festival

2007-07-04T13:55:48+03:00

We are currently running a Locomash event from the Roskide Rock Festival in Denmark and thus far the spatial map is building nicely and capturing a lot of interesting images including a fair bit of mud.

Unfortunately Will and I weren’t able to attend but our colleague Reuben is distributing the application there for us (and braving the weather) while we administer the system remotely.

The festival goes on until the 8^th of July so you if you want to follow the event visit the Locomash site click on the Roskilde link and then press the GO button.

Mobile Location Mashups

2007-05-23T15:32:20+03:00

Someone told me the other day that I had been suspiciously quiet of late so this post may well explain why.

We (me an Will Bamford) have been trialling a new research project called LocoMash which allows communal photo mash-ups of events to be recorded using mobile phones with either external or internal GPS (Nokia were very kind and lent me an N95 J) and then displayed on the web on Google Maps.

I video of the application in action is available on you tune HERE.

The idea sprang from Mass-Observation which was/is a social research organisation in the 1950's whose remit was to record everyday life in the UK principally through direct observation. In this project we aim to create novel tools and systems based around mobile phones to enable everday life and events to be recorded in a richer way than ever before directly by the people involved.

We used the location API to create zones which are downloaded at the start of the mash-up and displayed as part of the user information. At the website these zones can be used to filter the images spatially. If you follow the link to the site above and select a particular event then select all users and all zones, before you hit GO ,you can see the photos from the whole event.

We have also allowed the users to define their own contextual tags at the time of blogging to allow more contextual based searching.

The time space blogs can stored on the phone until the user decides to upload them via GPRS or WiFi which will hopefully make it versatile.

If anyone is interested in using the application and site to record an event, and don’t mind us using the data for research papers, I will happily discuss this especially if its in sunny climes and you want us to attend ;).

Mobile phones as data loggers and sensors

2007-05-10T13:02:01+03:00

I previously posted an outline of a project I am working on with Will and colleagues from our Geography Department (Duncan Wyatt, Colin Pooley, Marion Moser, and Gemma Davies) which uses mobile and GPS units to both track (recording at 1 second intervals) the journey to school of 30 local children. The Geoblog app alsoallow the pupils to blog their experience along their route to create a richer picture than the route alone. A couple of people have asked me have we got any results so here is a quick taster of what we are producing and likely I will do more at a later date. A mixed methodology is used which links the data from the phones with a modelled pollution surfaces using a GIS system along personal and interviews with the pupils.

The figure below produced on a GIS system shows the journey of 3 pupils (names being pseudonyms chosen by themselves) on their journey to school. Scott cycled while Ella and Louise walked. From this we can ascertain the relative exposure levels to the pupils along the journey. An interesting point to note is the journey of Louise who cuts into the park parallel to the road and when asked in the interview about this she said it was because she didn’t like the traffic noise but was only allowed to do this at certain times in the year for personal safety. This highlights the need for a mixed methodology approach to these types of study and the power of inter-disciplinary research.

Based upon 2004, OS Landline. Map produced on behalf of The Controller of Her Majesty’s Stationary Office © Crown Copyright. Lancaster University, Bailrigg, Lancaster, OS Licence No. 100028811.

The project is producing some very interesting results and shows what interesting things we can do with our increasingly powerful phones and their potential as a very effective sensor and data gathering tool.

Mobile health blogging on the journey to school

2007-02-20T11:16:12+02:00

I have been a little quiet on the blogging front lately as Will Bamford and I have been working hard to complete the first stage of project we are working on with members of our Universities Geography department.

We have created a version of Locoblog, which we have christened geoblogger, that will allow us to record the journeys to school of 30 children during the course of a week of their journeys to and from school.

No only do we record the route but we have given the children the ability to blog their health status along the journeys together with an concerns about the environment.

The application also provides a twice daily health survey which is sent back to us along with the distance travelled.

We are going correlate their children’s school journeys with local traffic pollution data in the hope that we can make recommendations on the best routes to take and whether the local council needs to consider creating green corridors for such journeys. Here is the kit we have a amalgamated for the project which looks a bit scary all in one place .

The experiment will take place in 1 week periods in each season over the next year with the first one starting next week. I will blog more details and perhaps some preliminary results during the course of the trial as it will hopefully provide some interesting insights in using mobile phones for fieldwork recording and experiences of using this technology with children

Talking to a poster with your phone

2006-10-23T21:39:29+03:00

I am teaching Symbian on our MSc course since last Monday so not had much time for blogging or unhappily the smart phone show this year. However, I came across the article discussing the recent development from the NFC forum defining a specification for smart posters which interested me. In other words a specification for posters containing passive RFID tags whereby users could download music, videos, or the like. Interestingly the article suggested that it was more of interest for driving date traffic through embedded urls but I’m not convinced by that. Another part of the article poses the question as to when we are likely to see this on a more feature rich handset which is something I would also like to know if anyone has an answer.