Using bluetooth device names to support interaction in smart environments

ABSTRACT

An increasing trend in mobile and pervasive computing is the augmentation of everyday public spaces with local computation - leading to so called smart environments. However, there are no well accepted techniques for supporting spontaneous interaction between mobile users and these smart environments, though a wide range of techniques have been explored ranging from gesture recognition to downloading applications to a user's phone. In this paper we explore an approach to supporting such interaction based on the use of Bluetooth Device (user-friendly) Names as a control channel between users' mobile phones and computational resources in their local environment. Such an approach has many advantages over existing techniques though it is not without limitations. Our work focuses specifically on the use of Device Names to control and customize applications on large public displays in a campus environment. This paper describes our basic approach, a number of applications that we have constructed using this technique and the results of our evaluation work which has included a range of user studies and field trials. The paper concludes with an assessment of the viability of using our approach for interaction scenarios involving mobile users and computationally rich environments.

REFERENCES

• 1: Apple Inc. Bluetooth framework reference. http://developer.apple.com/documentation/DeviceDrivers/Reference/IOBluetooth/index.html, 2008. Last accessed 03 December 2008.
• 2: Rajesh Krishna Balan , Darren Gergle , Mahadev Satyanarayanan , James Herbsleb, Simplifying cyber foraging for mobile devices, Proceedings of the 5th international conference on Mobile systems, applications and services, June 11-13, 2007, San Juan, Puerto Rico [doi>10.1145/1247660.1247692]
• 3: R. Ballagas, M. Rohs, J. Sheridan, and J. Borchers. Byod: Bring your own device. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Ubiquitous Display Environments at the Sixth International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp 2004), Nottingham, UK, Sept. 2004.
• 4: Bluetooth Special Interest Group. Bluetooth core specification v2.0. Technical report, Bluetooth SIG, November 2004.
• 5: J. Dickinson and S. Wainwright. Finding a language. http://www.litfest.org/flax, October 2008.
• 6: Facebook. Facebook. http://www.facebook.com, 2008. Last accessed 03 December 2008.
• 7: A. Fatah gen. Schieck, A. Penn, and E. O'Neill. Mapping, sensing and visualising the digital co-presence in the public arena. In 9th International Conference on Design&Decision Support Systems in Architecture and Urban Planning, pages 38--58, Leende, NL, 2008.
• 8: J. Finney, S. Wade, N. Davies, and A. Friday. Flump: The exible ubiquitous monitor project. In Cabernet Radicals Workshop, May 1996.
• 9: Shahram Izadi , Harry Brignull , Tom Rodden , Yvonne Rogers , Mia Underwood, Dynamo: a public interactive surface supporting the cooperative sharing and exchange of media, Proceedings of the 16th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology, p.159-168, November 02-05, 2003, Vancouver, Canada [doi>10.1145/964696.964714]
• 10: Rui José , Nuno Otero , Shahram Izadi , Richard Harper, Instant Places: Using Bluetooth for Situated Interaction in Public Displays, IEEE Pervasive Computing, v.7 n.4, p.52-57, October 2008 [doi>10.1109/MPRV.2008.74]
• 11: Dagmar Kern , Michael Harding , Oliver Storz , Nigel Davis , Albrecht Schmidt, Shaping how advertisers see me: user views on implicit and explicit profile capture, CHI '08 extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems, April 05-10, 2008, Florence, Italy [doi>10.1145/1358628.1358858]
• 12: T. Kindberg and T. Jones. "merolyn the phone": A study of bluetooth naming practices. In J. Krumm, Gregory D. Abowd, A. Seneviratne, and T. Strang, editors, 9th International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing (Ubicomp 2007), volume 4717 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 318--335, Innsbruck, Austria, September 2007. Springer.
• 13: Christian Kray , Gerd Kortuem , Antonio Krüger, Adaptive navigation support with public displays, Proceedings of the 10th international conference on Intelligent user interfaces, January 10-13, 2005, San Diego, California, USA [doi>10.1145/1040830.1040916]
• 14: J. McCarthy. Using public displays to create conversation opportunities. In Workshop on Public, Community, and Situated Displays at the ACM 2002 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW 2002), New Orleans, November 2002.
• 15: K. Mitchell, N. Race, and M. Suggitt. icapture: Facilitating spontaneous user-interaction with pervasive displays using smart devices. In Workshop on Pervasive Mobile Interaction Devices - Mobile Devices as Pervasive User Interfaces and Interaction Devices (PERMID) at Pervasive 2006, Dublin, Ireland, May 2006.
• 16: J. Müller and A. Krüger. Towards situated public displays as multicast systems. In UbiqUM 2006 Workshop on Ubiquitous User Modeling, The 17th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence., 2006.
• 17: Kenton O'Hara , Matthew Lipson , Marcel Jansen , Axel Unger , Huw Jeffries , Peter Macer, Jukola: democratic music choice in a public space, Proceedings of the 5th conference on Designing interactive systems: processes, practices, methods, and techniques, August 01-04, 2004, Cambridge, MA, USA [doi>10.1145/1013115.1013136]
• 18: E. O'Neill, V. Kostakos, T. Kindberg, A. Fatah gen. Schiek, A. Penn, D. Stanton Fraser, and T. Jones. Instrumenting the city: developing methods for observing and understanding the digital cityscape. In 8th International Conference of Ubiquitous Computing (Ubicomp 2006), number 4206 in Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 315--332, 2006.
• 19: T. Prante, C. Röcker, N. Streitz, R. Stenzel, C. Magerkurth, D. van Alphen, and D. Plewe. Hello.wall ® - beyond ambient displays. In Video Track and Adjunct Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing (UBICOMP'03), pages 277--278, Seattle, WA, USA, Oct. 2003. Springer.
• 20: Ismo Rakkolainen , Stephen DiVerdi , Alex Olwal , Nicola Candussi , Tobias Hüllerer , Markku Laitinen , Mika Piirto , Karri Palovuori, The interactive FogScreen, ACM SIGGRAPH 2005 Emerging technologies, July 31-August 04, 2005, Los Angeles, California [doi>10.1145/1187297.1187306]
• 21: Nitin Sawhney , Sean Wheeler , Chris Schmandt, Aware Community Portals: Shared Information Appliances for Transitional Spaces, Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, v.5 n.1, p.66-70, February 2001 [doi>10.1007/s007790170034]
• 22: Jürgen Scheible , Timo Ojala, MobiLenin combining a multi-track music video, personal mobile phones and a public display into multi-user interactive entertainment, Proceedings of the 13th annual ACM international conference on Multimedia, November 06-11, 2005, Hilton, Singapore [doi>10.1145/1101149.1101178]
• 23: B. Segall and D. Arnold. Elvin has left the building: A publish/subscribe notification service with quenching. In Queensland AUUG Summer Technical Conference, Brisbane, Australia, 1997.
• 24: M. Sharifi, T. Payne, and E. David. Public display advertising based on bluetooth device presence. In Mobile Interaction with the Real World (MIRW 2006) in conjunction with the 8th International Conference on Human Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services, Espoo, Finland, September 2006. Available from: http://www.hcilab.org/events/mirw2006/pdf/mirw2006_sharifi.pdf.
• 25: O. Storz, A. Friday, and N. Davies. Supporting content scheduling on situated public displays. In Computers&Graphics, volume 30, pages 681--691. Elsevier, October 2006.
• 26: Oliver Storz , Adrian Friday , Nigel Davies , Joe Finney , Corina Sas , Jennifer Sheridan, Public Ubiquitous Computing Systems: Lessons from the e-Campus Display Deployments, IEEE Pervasive Computing, v.5 n.3, p.40-47, July 2006 [doi>10.1109/MPRV.2006.56]
• 27: TinyURL. Tinyurl. http://tinyurl.com, 2008. Last accessed 03 December 2008.
• 28: Daniel Vogel , Ravin Balakrishnan, Interactive public ambient displays: transitioning from implicit to explicit, public to personal, interaction with multiple users, Proceedings of the 17th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology, October 24-27, 2004, Santa Fe, NM, USA [doi>10.1145/1029632.1029656]
• 29: M. Weiser. The computer for the 21st century. Scientific American, 265(3):66--75, September 1991,
• 30: Mark Weiser , John Seely Brown, The coming age of calm technolgy, Beyond calculation: the next fifty years, Copernicus, New York, NY, 1997
• 31: Craig Wisneski , Hiroshi Ishii , Andrew Dahley , Matthew G. Gorbet , Scott Brave , Brygg Ullmer , Paul Yarin, Ambient Displays: Turning Architectural Space into an Interface between People and Digital Information, Proceedings of the First International Workshop on Cooperative Buildings, Integrating Information, Organization, and Architecture, p.22-32, February 01, 1998

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION (I.7)
      H.5.2 User Interfaces (D.2.2, H.1.2, I.3.6)

General Terms:
Experimentation, Human Factors

Keywords:
bluetooth, pervasive computing, public displays