Antti Aaltonen

Context Awareness Perspectives for Mobile Personal Media

Abstract This article reviews the ongoing evolution of context awareness technologies in mobile devices using personal media as an illustrative application domain. Augmented with metadata, files containing personal media can include significant information about the contexts they describe. the article discusses personal media applications from two different perspectives:

Associating Colours with Musical Genres

Abstract To study visualizations for music, we arranged a set of online questionnaires on how people map various visual properties to certain musical attributes. This paper presents the results of a questionnaire that concentrated on how people map colours to musical genres. The participants were shown 12 colours one at a time, and asked which of listed 18 genres they associated with the given colours. The results suggest that it is not possible to design a globally accepted colour-genre mapping. Instead, the music player could be set-up with a default mapping that is most suitable for the given country or region.

Spatial interactive visualization on small screen

The amount of data stored in personal digital devices increases rapidly as their memory capacities increase. These devices are usually equipped with relatively small displays, which makes presenting the information a challenge. We set out to explore the spatial design space for small screen user interfaces by incorporating additional dimensions into the visual representation, and investigate techniques that may be used to display more information at once. We focus on interactive visualization, with a document manager as a target application. We present the design factors and a simulated application running on a desktop computer. We also report a formative usability study with promising results.

Refining visualization reference model for context information

Context-awareness can be used to decrease the need for interaction with a mobile device. This is increasingly important since the functionality of mobile devices and personal digital assistants gets more and more complex while the input and output capabilities remain restricted. An important aspect of context-awareness is to present the current context to the user. We propose a model for visualizing contextual information on the mobile terminal screen. The model is a refinement of a well-known visualization reference model; it takes into account the specific characteristics of mobile use and context information. We present the design of the model in detail, and discuss its applicability for a variety of contexts and tasks by providing a full-fledged use case.

Enhancing end-user experience in a multi-device ecosystem

A person may use many devices capable of rendering digital content on a regular basis. For instance, the user is in front of a large TV screen, and soon he or she moves away from the TV and wants to continue the media consumption. The transfer of media content across devices needs to be handled seamlessly. In this paper, we present a phone-centric approach to improve the end-user experience in multi-device ecosystem. Together with predefined parameters, we use context information to trigger content adaptation, and generate decisions relating to the transcoding operation. We have made a preliminary UI evaluation of the system, and the system was found to be useful, although requiring fine tuning and further development.

Meta-searches in peer-to-peer networks

We propose a method for carrying out enhanced collaborative searches, called meta-searches, in peer-to-peer networks. In addition to performing regular searches, our method supports searches based on other network users’ previous searches on the same or similar topic. In essence, when a user performs a search, s/he will receive not only the usual result set, but also information on other users’ previous results, as well as relevancy information (such as how many times a resource that appeared in the result set was successfully downloaded). The core components of meta-search are query relevancy calculation, query matching algorithms, and relevancy file format. In this paper we discuss the underlying concepts and principles, and describe the component design in detail. Meta-search provides a way of benefiting from other users’ successful searches without any additional effort, thus potentially improving the efficiency and experience of a search.

Associating fonts with musical genres

We arranged an online questionnaire to study the feasibility of representing musical genres with fonts. The questionnaire consisted of 17 figures and each of them contained three text strings with different fonts. In each figure, the participants were asked which musical genre comes to their mind when looking at the text strings. The results suggest that the musical genre may be presented by a font and it can be recognized quite accurately. The most successful font collections were: classical (90.9% of participants made the same association between font and genre), metal (87.3%), country (85.5%), electronica amp; dance (83.6%), and world music (58.2%). On the average, the participants made the correct association in nearly seven cases out of 17.

Exploring augmented reality visualizations

Augmented Reality (AR) enhances our perception of reality by overlaying a digital creation on real world. AR information is often considered visual and most of it is associated with real world objects. This poses several challenges in, e. g., aligning the real and virtual worlds. Another essential -- yet not widely studied -- aspect is a more theoretical treatment of AR visualization. In this paper, we take the first steps towards understanding AR visualizations in more detail. We study existing AR visualizations based on well-known visualization techniques Zoom and Pan; Overview and Detail; and Focus+Context, and use these techniques to characterize AR visualizations in general. We claim that our approach covers the majority of visualization schemes applicable to AR, and is a useful method for understanding the fundamentals of AR visualizations in general.