Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
As an example of where this technology might
take us, we include an illustrative mobile use-case
scenario: On the left of his garden footpath the user
has recorded the location of a number of work-re-
lated virtual objects and on the right, leisure objects.
When he leaves for work in the morning he wants
to pick up e-mail for that day and any new voicemails.
Stepping out of the house, he queries the area where
he has stored his work objects by pointing at them.
His location is detected using GPS, his bearing via
a magnetometer. He feels, via tactile feedback, that
he is pointing at the 'work' area of his garden, and
he probes around this context, finds the email and
gauges the amount of new mail by force-feedback,
and grabs them from that location with a gesture,
feeling a satisfying clunk as they transfer to his
device. He then pulls in an upbeat music recipe from
the leisure context on the right and heads for his
train. Approaching the station, he points in the direc-
tion of his train for an update on any travel delays,
with a pulsing vibration indicating the time to the
next train. At the end of the day he comes home
again and decides to leave his work behind him, so
he locates again his work context by the footpath
and drops his email there, effectively redirecting all
work-related emails until the next morning when he
can pick them up again. He then probes the leisure
area, detecting its specific haptic feedback, feels his
usual news podcast there but decides to leave it, and
instead takes a relaxing playlist for the evening
ahead, goes inside, and grabs a beer. (See Figure 4.)
How will MSI cultures evolve? Will it be a
top-down 'designed' approach, with major infra-
structure investment by content providers and
operators, or will it be a bottom-up approach where
users create local content and services which are
of value to them personally, and where they share
this with others, shaping the evolution of their
behaviours and the content they interact with in
space and time? We would, as with other mobile
technologies, expect to see variations in evolution,
given same technology but varying local cultural
and physical constraints. Will cities sponsor local
content to guide people to specific locations? This
could be the standard tourism scenario, but it might
also be used by the police, where they could try to
shape behaviour in the real world by sponsoring
content and service availability which would attract
young people away from areas where there had
been disruptive behaviour, towards areas where
the police felt things were more controllable? Will
retailers give away content with gradients designed
to attract people closer to their 'bricks and mortar'
shops? Will operators provide location-specific
functionality?
CHALLENGES
The preceding sections have outlined some of the
broad issues in the evolution of novel forms of
interaction in the world of sensor enriched mobile
Figure 4. Geosocial networking will bring embodied interaction into the world of social networks
Search WWH ::
Custom Search