“Seen in this light, Ambient Intelligence is the limit of a process which introduces the technology into people’s lives in such a way that the introduction never feels like a conscious learning curve: no special interface is needed because human experience is already a rich ‘Manual’ of ways of interfacing to changing systems and services. Somehow, we need to create technology that leverages this powerful human resource rather than trying to suppress it by requiring humans to participate in inflexible interaction protocols of the sort supported by current call centre technology.”

The aim of the research is to study how technologies like augmented reality combined with user centered design will guide the users to experience flow.

Theory

Flow

According to Csíkszentmihályi, flow is completely focused motivation. It is a single-minded immersion and represents perhaps the ultimate in harnessing the emotions in the service of performing and learning.

As the challenges we face increase, we become more anxious and lose flow. Re-entering flow involves increasing our skills to match these challenges and reduce anxiety. As we increase our skill level, we become bored unless we increase the challenge to match our greater abilities.

User centered design

Design solutions achieved in a tight cooperation with the service end-users (tests, interviews etc). The research is about design patterns and finding which designs tend to create flow.

Experience design

User experience design is a subset of the broader field of experience design; the latter being defined as an approach to the design of products, services and environments based on a holistic consideration of the users’ experience. Experience design is therefore driven by consideration of the ‘moments’ of engagement between people and brands, and the memories these moments create.

Based on a single or series of interactions and first-hand impressions with a product, or system, users create a rich experience that can be satisfactory, engaging, enjoyable, etc.

Augmented reality

Current augmented reality experiences put who you are, where you are, what you are doing, and what is around you at center stage. But we can already look beyond the first stage of interactions assuming a single user seeing simple arrows and tags indicating POIs, and begin to explore shared (multiuser/multisource) augmented realities.

These social augmented experiences will allow not only mashups, & multisource data flows, but dynamic overlays (not limited to 3d), created by distributed groups of users, linked to location/place/time, and syndicated to people who wish to engage with the experience by viewing and co-creating elements for their own goals and benefit.

Augmented reality we can see as a technology for creating flow.

Location based media

Geotagged content: narratives and media that we consume while exploring augmented reality enabled applications.

Research questions

1. How does experiencing flow influence us in exploring some location based media?
2. Do technologies like augmented reality tend to take us into the flow?
3. How does augmented reality support exploring location based media?
4. Does user centered design support experiencing flow?
5. What are the design elements needed to experience flow?

Experiment

Experiment to evaluate if people participating will reach flow.

For example, create a custom Wikitude layer about some places in old town and let people to find information about these places. There are 2 options to compare: 1) people finding this information via augmented reality (the Wikitude layer), 2) people finding the information using their phones browser (using twitter client, flickr, wikipedia etc). The information may vary: tweets around this location, reviews, useful information, photos etc.

Experience sampling method could be used to evaluate if people have experienced flow and then compare the results.

Literature

1. Online articles: Delicious list (tagged “thesis”)
2. Google Books to-read list
3. Articles

Choonsung Shin, Wonwoo Lee, Youngjung Suh, Hyoseok Yoon, Youngho Lee, Woontack Woo, 2009 ”CAMAR 2.0: Future Direction of Context-Aware Mobile Augmented Reality”

Sejin Oh and Woontack Woo, 2009 ”CAMAR: Context-aware Mobile Augmented Reality in Smart Space”

Donna L. Hoffman, Thomas P. Novak, 2007 “Flow Online: Lessons Learned and Future Prospects”

Gerhard Reitmayr, Dieter Schmalstieg ”A Platform for location based Augmented Reality Applications”

Andrew Polaine, ”The Flow Principle in Interactivity”

Joel E. Fischer, 2009 “Experience-Sampling Tools: a Critical Review”

Steven Pace, 2003 “A grounded theory of the flow experiences of Web users”

Thomas P. Novak, Donna L. Hoffman, Yiu-Fai Yung 1999 “Measuring the Customer Experience in Online Environments: A Structural Modeling Approach”

…

Overall, the project was very interesting. We were using some social tools like Brightkite, Twitter and Flickr to cover the topics most interesting and emotional to us. We used mobile photos to illustrate our stories (Flickr map of photos tagged “narrativeecology” ). It’s a pity that we could not share videos and audio recordings as easily as photos. If we could tag places not only with photos, but also with videos and audio files, we could come up with something more experimental.

Well, collaborative storytelling was expected, but as far as it concerns me, it didn’t work out very well. Maybe there were too few people in the same neighbourhood (in Brightkite for example). I was wondering if the stories will “grow” automatically, that people will take part in the discussions, create new content, tag similarly. For such stories a critical mass of people is needed.

Stories and clusters

While browsing popular tags on Flickr, I started following some clusters. Some tags create clusters – a set of photos tagged similarly. For example the tag “happy” may create the following clusters (sets of photos describing):

• smiling
• happy people
• events that make us happy – weddings, birthdays etc
• parties, cakes

These are the most common elements in Flickr people associate with tag “happy”.  If we explore the tag cluster for “China“, we see that people associate China with the Great Wall, Beijing, Shanghai, travelling, city-life.

Why I’m telling all this, is that stories could be clustered similarly like photos for example. Let’s take our project – we saw stories about:

• buildings and architecture
• food
• emotions and colors
• different signs etc

If we take a look at the clusters, we could analyse which topics (clusters) are relevant to specific locations. In Tallinn we were covering topics mentioned above, but what kind of stories people cover in Toronto or Mexico City (via Brightkite for example)? As there is no tagging possibility in Brightkite, so it’s not that easy to find it out.

Twitter, the locative storytelling experience

I’ve been using Twitter for a couple of months now and found it as a great source for following some local news. If something happens in your neighborhood, the quickest way to share it with the rest of the world would be publishing a short notice on Twitter or Brightkite.

For example last week there was this earthquake in Italy that made thousands of people share their expressions on this accident.  It’s the most direct source of news – directly from the people from the exact location. Could you get any closer?

Also, Twitter might be great for sharing news that are really local, the news that make sense for people living in this neighborhood. We here, in Tallinn wouldn’t care if a local supermarket in Paris would be out of order for a day, but if we would happen to be in Paris this time, then most probably we would care. Tools like Twitter are great for serving local news.

Hybrid environments and collaborative editing

To sum up, the course gave us an understanding of collaborative storytelling in the hybrid environments. The coolest, with a locative twist. Not only do “tags” tie stories together, but also locations do. I look forward to continue this Brightkite experience.

The slides of my today’s talk:

Locative storytelling

TechCrunch recently covered a story about Twitter’s new idea for serving local news. People often send tweets about what’s going on in their neighbourhood and if Twitter would know your location, it could easily inform you what’s going on at your location.

“Users could be alerted to the fact a fire is burning a few streets away from where Twitter knows (or thinks) they are.”

Geosocial networking

The social networks will get a new dimension because of the mobility and local aspect. You could meet friends that are close to your location or meet new people who have same interests as you and are in your neighbourhood at the moment. For example, during the Locative Technologies course we came up with a concept of an emotional mobile application: Pada.

Another good example would be aka-aki, the mobile application for following your friends on a mobile device.

Geosocial gaming

Mobiles games that consider your location in the physical world. One example would be Parallel Kingdom, that is a World-of-Warcraft type of game, that uses GPS to place the virtual world on top of the real world.

There is much interesting going on in this field. Sharing your location online has been made accessible for everyone and following your friends on a mobile device seems to be reality and not the future anymore. Google Latitude, which was launched only a month ago, is gathering one million people every week to share his/her location online.

What could be the initiative for such massive location-sharing?

Most of the flags were Estonian flags – celebrating and being proud of the Estonian’s Independance day. That’s their day. Besides, there were at least 42 other kind of flags in different colours. Do the flags communicate with each other? Do they understand each other? How they see the people passing by?

Geroli covered similar topic by describing the language of the buildings. We could also mix the two narratives. I mean adding  flags to the buildings might change the way buildings “talk” to each other. For example, if two different kind of buildings standing close to each other do not “talk” (just because they are different), then would it be possible that they’ll start communicating if they were carrying the same flag? I believe so.

I looked for geotagged photos that were tagged with “happy” and randomly picked some photos from different countries in the world: Estonia, Germany, India and Brazil.

	1. Estonia Why would this photo be tagged “happy”? Does it make you happy or does the old man on the photo feel happy? He doesn’t seem to.
	2. Brazil At first it won’t reflect happiness, but it certainly does have harmony inside.
	3. India Wow. I do like the shot. Why is the kid painted with red? Playing, having fun?
	4. Germany Freedom and happiness?

How would you describe happiness?

The course lead by Jürgen Scheible gave us the basic understandig of creating mobile apps on Python. Programming for a mobile device, which seemed to be very complicated in the beginning, turned out to be very cool.

By the end of the week we had to come up with a new mobile application. At first we had an idea to create a program for uploading your mobile videos directly to YouTube, but finally we created something really practical: ChoiceShaker. If you have difficulties making some choices (what to wear in the evening etc), just take photos with your phone form every single choice and the program will tell you then what’s best for you ;-P

Take a look at the demo:

Ready now to create your (first) mobile app? Go and take a look at Jürgen’s Python for Series 60 tutorial.

You can use your Google account to sign in and easily invite friends to Latitude from your existing list of contacts or by entering their email addresses. Google Talk is integrated with Latitude, so you and your friends can update your status messages and profile photos on the go and see what everyone is up to. You can also call, SMS, IM, or email each other within the app. Check out the video below to see Latitude in action.

The difference with Yahoo’s Fire Eagle is the fact that Google Latitude is for sharing your location only among your Google contacts, while Fire Eagle allows to share your location with public at large.

Would you share your location with your friends?

• GPS. Major new phones and cameras have a built-in GPS, that automatically geotags your photos.
• Software. There are programs that could be used for geotagging your photos from your PC or MAC.
• Online. For example you could geotag photos directly in Flickr – drag on drop your photos on the map.

Read more about geotagging techniques from Wired.

I was wondering about the ways for adding my geotagged photos to the Google Maps and then read about GeoRSS. In GeoRSS, location content consists of geographical points, lines, and polygons of interest and related feature descriptions. GeoRSS feeds are designed to be consumed by geographic software such as map generators.

Flickr also supports geofeed and it could be used for showing the geotagged photos on the Google Maps for example. Just copy the geofeed URL into the Google Maps search box and the photos will be shown on the map.

Here are my geotagged photos from Flickr: