Paul Coulton's Forum Nokia Blog

Chillrs: the mobile socially networked fridge

coultonp — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 21:47:37 +0200

This blog relates to my favorite MSc project from last year which was completed by one my favorite students Klen Copic Pucihar who was also behind the very successful 4 in a row widget game. Basically I wanted to create a social network whose principal interaction was performed via mobile and addressed the fact the most people are not in fact members of one large social homogeneous network but rather members of a complex array of smaller networks generally formed around specific relationships, activities or places. To this end we created the mobile social network Chillrs which was named after its use of small communal public displays which in this case was on a fridge as shown in the figure below.

Whilst the fridge door metaphor is not a new idea the use within Chillrs provides what effectively could be considered as equivalent to suped up Whereabouts clock used by the Weasleys’ in the Harry Potter films. The mobile widget allows users to define their current location through there personally generated location list which is updated on any of the Chillr displays they are a member off. For instance you could have a family Chillr, a work Chillr, or team Chillr, the point is that you can then filter the information you supply to the individual social networks you belong too rather than revealing the same information to all. The current version allows users to post not only their location but blogs, to do notes, shopping lists which builds upon the fridge door metaphor but we envisage other functionality could be more applicable to different group and users could customize the display to their own particular needs. The display doesn’t have to be a physical item such as the Nokia 810 (finally found a good use for mine )we embedded in this small beer fridge but could be a desktop widget and indeed all the information is available through the mobile application itself. The following video not only presents the widget but also the display (if you can sit through it to the end as itsone of my longer productions ). Personally I think that addressing the need for smaller more intimate social networks deserves more attention and I can envisage a Chillrs type service being incredibly popular.

Mobile to Mailbox

coultonp — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 16:08:19 +0300

As I have been quiet for a while I thought I would present and interesting student project by Russ Gardener based on an idea I had a number of years ago which seemed ripe for resurrection. The concept is very simple in that it’s a mobile application which allows you to create a digital postcard of your own design (seen it before I hear you cry) the difference is that rather than send it electronically directly to the recipient it’s sent to a service which prints it out and posts it to the recipient as an ordinary postcard. This has a number of benefits; it saves the hassle of buying and sending postcards (and the usual result) of getting home before the postcard), it allows you to send cards to anybody not just the technically literate, it’s actually nice to have a physical object (to display in your home) which is probably electronic greetings haven’t really made an impact, if we place a printer service in lots of countries you could save on airmail by printing the card in the country to be delivered (I obviously held back on calling it green ).

The application is written for WidSets which includes a nice back end and synchronisation facility for addresses and for me is a good example of ideas some colleagues are working on here at Lancaster which is Mundane Technologies in other words ones which become woven into the fabric of our lives and cease to be perceived as a technology.

The only thing missing from this project to go live to the world is a neat payment solution but otherwise it could go out now. This would be interesting not just commercially (although it would be nice if I actually made some money ) but also to see if it really did become mundane.

BTW I would just like to welcome my friend and colleague Will Bamford as a Forum Nokia Champion and as the Mobile Radicals have now produced four I’m thinking of changing our site to ‘Home of Champions’

Black Swans and Silly Glasses

coultonp — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 11:59:44 +0200

For the last few years I have been recommending Nassim Nicholas Taleb's book Black Swans to my students. A Black Swan is an unpredictable event that carries massive impact which after it has happened we generally try to explain it away with some explanation that makes it appear less random, and more predictable, than it was. The reason I recommend to students, besides being an interesting read, is brings home to us the fact that we generally know a lot less about the world than we may think we do and not to be afraid of trying an idea that defies conventional wisdom. I believe that rich diversity affordable in all types of mobile development is particularly well placed to see the emergence of Black Swans as many of the ideas of the long tail or niche markets in mobile web 2.0 are advocating that we can have unconventional ideas but for large groups of people.

And why Silly Glasses? Last June Will and I created m3dcam to look at emergence in the long tail mobile applications by allowing people to create 3-D anaglyph photographs using their mobile phones. The only publicity we gave it was a blog here and MOSH with the result is that yesterday we passed the 4000 photographs up-loaded mark! Whilst this may not seem significant to some you have to appreciate to use the application users need a pair of need 3D and the users bares the cost of the up-load which is two pictures (therefore actually 8000 up-loads).

Whilst I wouldn’t claim it completely satisfies the criteria of Black Swan as we haven’t really made high impact it is very interesting given that the recent emergence of all these social mining tools shows that many consider value in creating a community and its always worth considering a daft idea.

On a final note and in honour of my many Finish friends here is a 3D picture I took with my shiny new N95 8G of a reindeer at the airport baggage claim in Kuusamo, Finland a couple of week ago!

First Mobile Game 2.0

coultonp — 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.

We++ Mobile Social Software

coultonp — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 12:01:10 +0300

A while ago I blogged about an application (m3Dcam) Will Bamford and I had come up with that allows users to create their own 3D photographs on their mobile and upload them to a community site. As I said at the time the project was meant to be a bit of fun and I was expecting fairly minimal interest for a number of reasons

1. You need 3D glasses to view the result (I now carry a pair with me at alltimes !)

2. The users bares the cost of the up-load

3. The cost is more than a single picture as we split the image between eyes and colour planes.

4. Its fun but not really a social activity

Despite this we have had over 650 uploads and if you Google m3dcam you get literally hundreds of hits and my first blog has be viewed over 1100 times.

I am reminded by of something Howard Rheinhold said in his book Smartmobs “The ‘Killer Apps” of tomorrows mobile infocom industry won’t be hardware devices or software programs but social practices”. Whilst I would not completely agree with the influence new hardware might play I am minded to think that given this example predicting social practices in the area of mobile social software is going to be tricky and success could come from the strangest of places

BTW the site now supports colour images as shown and there is a handy flash viewer that Will has created which allows you to practice how best to do the alignment.

Create your own 3D photos using your mobile phone

coultonp — Fri, 25 May 2007 18:15:26 +0300

This is definitely one of those ideas that I wont even pretend that we had some serious academic motive behind its development, and it definitely comes into the category of doing something ‘just because you can’ (but not necessarily should). It started as conversation between Will and I had about doing something fun for an undergraduate project but in the end we just couldn’t wait. Essentially it’s a J2ME application that allows you to create your own mobile 3D anaglyph photos using the mobile phone camera by taking two slightly offset pictures with the result separated into red and cyan colour planes as shown and in a video HERE.

The software allows you to then adjust the relationship between the red and cyan planes so you can get the best image to either view on you phone or up-loaded to the newly created site.

Of course you need to have a pair of 3D specs to view it properly but you may have some from either a trip to 3D movies or you can pick some up cheap online. We managed to get some rather natty Shark Boy and Lava Girl ones as shown. Perhaps I could persuade Anina to make them this years fashion must have J

The application is really quite fun and addictive as it takes practice to get really good.

Will has made the application available on the site in a number of different versions so download and enjoy J

Mobile Location Mashups

coultonp — Wed, 23 May 2007 15:32:20 +0300

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 ;).

Augmenting our Mobile Reality!

coultonp — 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 laser tag using S60 camera phones

coultonp — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 11:42:28 +0300

Here is a research project I have been doing with my PhD student Fadi Chehimi which attempts to take another look at using the camera on phones in games and particular harnessing some of the power of S60 (something, with a few notable exceptions, I feel hasn’t been fully explored in games). Mobilazer is a mixed-reality first person shoot-em-up game which engages two or more teams of players in an unbounded physical location. The software turns a player’s mobile phone camera into a form of ‘laser’ gun whereby he can shoot opposing players by interacting with specially designed visual tags. Once a tag is detected Mobilazer displays a targeted-sign, in the form of a circle centred at the coloured-tag, indicating the identification of the rival as shown in the figure below and our video on you tube.

When the targeted-sign is on screen, the player needs to move his phone to point the crosshair, which is always in the middle of the screen, at the tag. The player will be able to shoot his virtual laser beam to kill the opponent. The kills and points are controlled through interaction with a central game server communicating over the GPRS.

Mobilazer currently has four different playing modes available to choose from, all of which are to be initiated by a preformed social grouping these are Fortress, Last Man standing, Individual Battle Mode, and Group Battle Mode.

One of the essential elements for successful multi-player computer games is that of differentiating players’ experiences so that the game is balanced. Balance means that all players feel they have an equal chance of competing, keeping in mind the differentiation between experienced and non-experienced ones. Interestingly, this feature has not been given much consideration in mixed-reality games although it most likely ensures that players return to the game on multiple occasions. Therefore, in Mobilazer we have introduced a system of armours and weapons which allows both new players and more expert ones the opportunity to gain experience, and rewards returning players for their repeated game play.

Mobilazer Scoring
Equipment Type	Points Scored	Points Needed	Number of Hits
None	10		1
Bronzer Armour	20	30	2
Silver Armour	40	60	5
Gold Armour	60	90	10
Sniper	90	90	1
Tracker Gun	100	200	1
Dist < 5M	2
5m<Dist<10m	4
10m<Dist<15m	8
15m<Dist<20m	12
Dist>20m	20

One of the innovative features is The Sniper which allows a player to shoot tags that are much farther than the normal camera range. The effect is applied using Symbian-specific bitmap manipulation utilities that enlarge and clip images, rather than simply depending only on the camera API zooming functions

As yet we have only done the technical testing but we are hoping to start users trials soon as the the Bristish weather does seem to be getting better!

Using gesture as an interface for mobile applications

coultonp — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 15:13:36 +0200

Last week I was at the Game Developers Conference and heard many complaints about lack of innovation. With this in mind I gave a lecture on “Using Touch, Sight, and Gesture in Mobile Games”. Whilst I covered using RFID/NFC and the Camera on the mobile phone as a novel interface, the aspect that seems that drew most interest from the audience, and later on the web, were some demonstrations (available on Youtube: here and here) for games we (myself, Tamas Vajk and Will Bamford) created using the Nokia 5500 in-built accelerometers to control games running on a PC via Bluetooth . The original game was based on the old tron classice light riders is shown below but the videos show the newer Tilt Racer.

My proposition in the whole talk was that using Nintendo and the DS and Wii as an inspiration for attracting a non-traditional gamer audience (although some comments on web relating reports of my talk wrongly assumed I was suggesting phones as a replacement). I believe that accelerometers have an enormous potential for attracting non-gamers as Andreas Jakl already indicated and indeed atracting this audience was highlighted as the inspiration for the DS and Wii by shigeru Miyamoto in his keynote.To highlight this in a none-game setting I thought I would also add some plots of the sensor outputs to illustrate my point.

In the following we see the three accelerometer outputs when the phone was simply placed upon the desk. It can be seen that outputs x and y are approximately zero although some sensor noise is and output z is showing a positive 1 g force which is the effect of gravity on the device. Note: that this noise could be reduced by the application of a digital filer on the output values but in this case we are showing the raw data. Overall this Figure illustrates that the effects gravity provide a means of deducing the orientation of the phone which can then be utilized to provide a ‘tilt’ based controller.

In following we see the accelerometer outputs resulting from a rapid sideways movement of the phone across a desk. At the start we see outputs in the same state as in first Figure and then very large acceleration forces on y produced by the rapid sideways movement. There are some smaller residual artefacts from this movement seen in both x and z but this because the test was performed by hand rather than using a fixed jig and its difficult to isolate a movement completely under such conditions. We clearly show the potential for utilizing ‘hand gestures’ for the control of events within. However, gesture recognition requires careful study as the variation in how the user holds the phone could produce anomalous outputs and there is no method of obtaining the phones physical position within actual space.

The final figure shows the output after the phone has been dropped. The trace shows that initially the phone is held upright with the screen held at the top and gravity is acting on x. When the phone is dropped the effect of gravity is overcome and all three accelerometers are zero before the phone hits the floor with a jolt. The aim of the test was to show that the phone could be used to measure activity of a player as per the snowboarder application developed by Andreas and his students.

Hopefully the games and applications already developed highlight the potential for developers but I would also urge Nokia to add these sensors to as many of there devices as possible as having a critical mass of devices in the market will be essential for getting operators to take this seriously.