Paul Coulton's Forum Nokia Blog

A mobile user generated street view

Wed, 28 Jan 2009 21:05:09 +0200

In my last post I introduced the project Point’N’Seek and in this post I present the latest added functionality which I hinted at in my last blog of allowing users to augment the POI of interest with their own location and direction aware photographs. The following video shows this in operation and what is particularly novel comes at the end when user can spatially search the photographs of a particular POI to obtain one from a specific direction. The idea is that this could be used to make POI easier to find by pedestrians as the photograph they see would be from the direction the will be approaching it from. The example in the video is a photo of Infolab21 taken from a position NW of the buildingAn added bonus is that a database of such photographs could perhaps be stitched together to create a king of user generated Streetview perhaps using something like the Microsofts Photosyth image processing.

In the next stage of development we are planning to switch to Navteq Maps to allow us to fully explore orientation. Any other suggestions gratefully received.

First Mobile Game 2.0

Mon, 21 Jan 2008 15:01:39 +0200

In a previous blog I talked about the presentation Will and I are going to do at this year’s Game Developers Conference (GDC08) around the paradigms of Web 2.0 as applied to mobile games using widgets. In that Blog I talked about a new game which built upon our previous experience of the WidSets game Bombus. We believe the features of WidSets enable game designers to explore such concepts as perpetual beta and collective intelligence without having to create a large supporting infrastructure and in our follow up study we wanted to explore this further and include ideas of user generated content.

The new game is called BOOM!, a scrolling platform arcade style game:

The interesting part of game is that it’s designed to allow users to upload new maps, tilesets and game attributes to change the game. The idea being that we could create a level editor on the game site so user could create their own content which the community could rank and rate.

Download BOOM! to your WidSets Dashboard:

It will be nice to see if we can also address some of these ideas through WRT but for the moment we will have to wait to see how.

NFC at CES

Wed, 09 Jan 2008 14:14:59 +0200

I know my fellow champion Gabor was sceptical about my prediction for a growth in NFC this year so I was very interested to see this announcement from the Consumer Electronics Show relating to a bunch of NFC enabled products which are all compatible with the Nokia 6131 NFC. Of course this is way too early to say my prediction will come true but ever the optomist Im taking this as a positive sign

Designing for the Emergent Markets

Tue, 08 May 2007 20:57:55 +0300

I came across this post at Mobhappy by Carlo Longino which highlights two new Nokia phones (1200 and 1208), which have probably generated little interest amongst developers in the West as they are entry level phone, but are particularly interesting (at least to me ) from a socio-techinal standpoint in that Nokia has introduced a couple of features which are aimed for users in the emergent markets. In particular as Carlo notes:

“they support multiple phonebooks — a nod to the fact that in many developing nations, a single handset is shared among several family members or friends”

“they have a call-tracking feature, which lets users set the maximum cost of a call before dialing. This lets users control their spending, but it also helps empower the entrepreneurs in these markets that buy a phone and airtime credit, then resell calls.”

This is great users centric design from Nokia.

BTW if you are interested in the practices highlighted above I recommend this great paper by Jan Chipchase of Nokia.

Camera phones fuel data usage

Thu, 19 Apr 2007 12:29:03 +0300

An interesting article on the BBC caught my eye yesterday highlighting new research by m-metrics linking increased used of camera phones and sites such a Flikr to rise in demand of data services.

According to the article “research found that 20% of Europeans, and 14% of Americans now pay for data services and photo messaging bundles”. Perhaps I should have got people to subscribe to LocoBlog :).

Augmenting our Mobile Reality!

Tue, 17 Apr 2007 15:36:45 +0300

Once again its been too long since I had time to blog. Recently my student Fadi Chehimi and I have been working on the revisions of our paper “Augmented Reality 3D Interactive Advertisements on Smartphones” that was accepted for ICMB 07 and I thought its now a good time to share details of the project.

In this project we have developed a unique system that will allow complex and highly interactive visual 3-D adverts to be viewed on mobile phones equipped with a camera using a visual marker. In this system the user ‘selects’ s tag with his camera phone running the associated S60 AR software, termed ARMAD (Augmented Reality Mobile Advertisements), then download and ultimately superimpose 3-D model(s)/information on the location of the tag on screen.

In order to view and manipulate 3-D models on screen the user simply has to rotate around the tag, if it is fixed, or rotate the tag, if it is mobile. The products/info in the content of the ad will then be displayed from all angles as below.

Users can also zoom in/out of the model by moving their phone closer to or further away from the tag, but keeping it within the boundary of the screen.

Currently the tags we have designed are a bit on the large side but we are hoping we can perfect them to a smaller size and improve the flexibility of the software.

Obviously, advertisements are but one application for this type of Augmented Reality and you could imagine lots of applications for games, tourist information, etc.

Mobile video sharing could be bigger than YouTube?

Thu, 25 Jan 2007 13:12:30 +0200

The is a very interesting post by Carlo Longino at MobHappy with the suggestion that operators could pool together to create a mobile version of YouTube which would maximise potential users and avoid the situation were individual operators create individual offerings thus watering down the market. This is a very intriguing suggestion as it makes quite a bit of sense as YouTube doesn’t cater for the mobile users and as Carlo points out

“these services, on their own, aren’t going to do much as competitive advantages — that is, the number of users that decide from which operator to buy service because of them, is going to be very, very low”

For instance, while I am intrigued by the SeeMeTV on 3 it wouldn’t be a major reason for taking up a subscription.

Overall this idea got me pondering in that while operators obvioulsy collaborate to an extent on standardisation issues or roaming issues I couldn’t think of service type example such as this would represent.

An end to the dreaded roaming charges?

Wed, 17 Jan 2007 12:54:22 +0200

Yesterday one of the mobile operators in the UK announced that they have abolished roaming charges for its UK customers when travelling to overseas countries were they have networks. Having been stung by roaming charges on a number of occasions I am hoping that all UK operators will follow suit and we will no longer have to worry about such things when travelling. Given that the vision for mobile is a world network were we can connect anywhere at anytime removing a disincentive to engage in such activities seems highly desirable to me.

Nokia integrated NFC phone

Fri, 12 Jan 2007 11:27:25 +0200

While the main press furore at CES may have been around the iphone I was much more interested to see Nokia announce its first fully integrated NFC phone based on the Nokia 6131. The specification says that it supports JSR 257 but doesn’t list this of those preinstalled which may mean you need to get access through Nokia as for the previous NFC phones

The phone will allow users to have their credit card, travel card and loyalty card in on a phone plus many other activities. Much is talked about disruptive technologies, i.e technologies than produce enormous changes in society, and I believe NFC could well be such a technology particularly when coupled with a phone. As and example I blogged a while ago about the NFC poster specification being finalised and coupled with this type of device we could well be at the dawn of a whole new advertising and distribution were a poster for a band may allow you to download a ringtone or a poster for a movie may allow you to download the trailer.

So I say forget the iphone get yourself a Nokia 6131 NFC!

Mobile phones as deployable sensors

Mon, 11 Dec 2006 17:44:26 +0200

I was asked by a colleague in Environmental Science about using a mobile phone to relay pictures back of one of there remote sites every half hour for hopefully about a month. Like most engineers I can’t resist a challenge so we have created an application that provides the functionality ( I roped my student Will in as he could utilse some of the camera work from LocoBlog), taking care to power down the camera between photos, which relays the information back to a website. We have also integrated a motorbike battery and solar panel to extend the life and we are currently testing the system.

The picture below shows the basic hack set-up and the panel has been waterproofed and placed outside the window as we found the reflective window coating impeded its operation.

So far wehave added a nice feature were we can trigger it via sms but no doubt others may come to mind. Overall it will be interesting to see how effective we can make it work and given the relatively cheap nature and computational power of phones there are lots of possibilities for projects of this kind. It certainly links in with the NRC project and ideas surrounding sensor planet.

I will give an update on how its works out in a later blog