Kaj Grønbæk

Cooperative design: techniques and experiences from the Scandinavian scene

Publisher Summary This chapter discusses the concept of cooperative design. It what discusses system development should achieve and how it should take place. Computer applications that are created for the workplace need to be designed with full participation from the users—both from a democratic point of view and to insure that competencies central to the design are represented in the design group. Full participation requires training and active cooperation, not just token representation in meetings or on committees. The term cooperative design is used to designate such cooperation between users and designers. However, to users, designing a new computer application is a secondary activity whereas for designers it is their primary work. This means that the designers should know how to set up the process and need to make sure that everyone gets something out of the interaction. The cooperative design approach begins by creating an environment in which users and designers can actively consider the future use situation. It is a process where users and designers do not have to wait until the final act to know if the application will fit the practice of the users.

Addressing Interoperability in Open Hypermedia: the Design of the Open Hypermedia Protocol

Abstract Early hypertext systems were monolithic and closed, but newer systems tend to be open, distributed, and support collaboration. While this development has resulted in increased openness and flexibility, integration or adaptation of various different tools (such as content editors, viewers, services, or even other link servers) has remained a tedious task. Many developers were implementing essentially similar components, simply for the benefit of having their own platform on which to experiment with hypertexts. The open hypermedia community is addressing this issue of interoperability between open hypermedia systems. The goal of this effort is to provide an open framework that can be used by application developers outside the community to construct more powerful hypermedia-aware applications. The design and evolution of this framework is presented along with the requirements that drove its development. The framework has matured to the point where it has supported the creation of a number of researc...

Towards geo-spatial hypermedia: Concepts and prototype implementation

This paper combines spatial hypermedia with techniques from Geographical Information Systems and location based services. We describe the Topos 3D Spatial Hypermedia system and how it has been developed to support geo-spatial hypermedia coupling hypermedia information to model representations of real world buildings and landscapes. The prototype experiments are primarily aimed at supporting architects and landscape architects in their work on site. Here it is useful to be able to superimpose and add different layers of information to, e.g. a landscape depending on the task being worked on. We introduce a number of central concepts to understand the relation between hypermedia and spatial information management. The distinction between metaphorical (and abstract) versus literal (and concrete) spaces is introduced together with a workspace composition semantics and a distinction between direct and indirect navigation. Finally, we conclude with a number of research issues which are central to the future development of geo-spatial hypermedia, including design issues in combining metaphorical and literal hypermedia space, as well as a discussion of the role of spatial parsing in a geo-spatial context.

IGameFloor: a platform for co-located collaborative games

This paper introduces a novel interactive floor platform for social games and entertainment involving multiple co-located users in a collaborative game environment. The interactive floor used as the prototype platform, is a 12 m2 glass surface with bottom projection and camera based tracking of limb (e.g. foot, hand, and knee) contact points. The iGameFloor platform supports tracking of limb points for more than 10 users at the same time. This paper describes the technological platform and the interaction techniques used for social gaming and entertainment. Three iGameFloor applications are discussed with the purpose of displaying the potential of the physical computer game platform. Experiences and perspectives for further development of the iGameFloor platform are discussed.

Indoor positioning using GPS revisited

It has been considered a fact that GPS performs too poorly inside buildings to provide usable indoor positioning. We analyze results of a measurement campaign to improve on the understanding of indoor GPS reception characteristics. The results show that using state-of-the-art receivers GPS availability is good in many buildings with standard material walls and roofs. The measured root mean squared 2D positioning error was below five meters in wooden buildings and below ten meters in most of the investigated brick and concrete buildings. Lower accuracies, where observed, can be linked to either low signal-to-noise ratios, multipath phenomena or bad satellite constellation geometry. We have also measured the indoor performance of embedded GPS receivers in mobile phones which provided lower availability and accuracy than state-of-the-art ones. Finally, we consider how the GPS performance within a given building is dependent on local properties like close-by building elements and materials, number of walls, number of overlaying stories and surrounding buildings.

Integrating the web and the world: contextual trails on the move

This paper presents applications of HyCon, a framework for context aware hypermedia systems. The HyCon framework encompasses annotations, links, and guided tours associating locations and RFID- or Bluetooth-tagged objects with maps, Web pages, and collections of resources. The user-created annotations, links and guided tours, are represented as XLink structures, and HyCon introduces the use of XLink for the representation of recorded geographical paths with annotations and links. The HyCon architecture extends upon earlier location based hypermedia systems by supporting authoring in the field and by providing access to browsing and searching information through a novel geo-based search (GBS) interface for the Web. Interface-wise, the HyCon prototype utilizes SVG on an interface level, for graphics as well as for user interface widgets on tablet PCs and mobile phones.

Physical hypermedia: organising collections of mixed physical and digital material

This paper addresses the problem of organizing material in mixed digital and physical environments. It presents empirical examples of how people use collectional artefacts and organize physical material such as paper, samples, models, mock-ups, plans, etc. in the real world. Based on this material, we propose concepts for collectional actions and meta-data actions, and present prototypes combining principles from augmented reality and hypermedia to support organising and managing mixtures of digital and physical materials. The prototype of the tagging system is running on digital desks and walls utilizing Radio Frequency IDentifier (RFID) tags and tag-readers. It allows users to tag important physical materials, and have these tracked by antennas that may become pervasive in our work environments. We work with three categories of tags: simple object tags, collectional tags, and tooltags invoking operations such as grouping and linking of physical material. Our primary application domain is architecture and design, thus we discuss use of augmented collectional artefacts primarily for this domain.

Interoperability between hypermedia systems: the standardisation work of the OHSWG

CONTENTS OF THE TECHNICAL BRIEFING The Open Hypermedia Systems Working Group (OHSWG) was formed at the second workshop on open hypermedia systems (OHS), held in April, 1996, in Washington, DC, in conjunction with the 1996 ACM Conference on Hypertext. The original purpose of defining an open hypermedia protocol for OHS clients has evolved into an effort to standardise general hypermedia systems work. This broader effort is driven by the desire to maximise the applicability of the last decade of hypermedia systems and infrastructure research.

Ariadne: a Java-based guided tour system for the World Wide Web

Abstract This paper presents a Guided tour system for the WWW, called Ariadne, which implements the ideas of trails and guided tours, originating from the hypertext field. Ariadne appears as a Java applet to the user and it stores guided tours in a database format separated from the WWW documents included in the tour. The main advantages of the system compared to similar systems are: (1) an independent user interface which does not affect the layout of the documents being part of the tour, (2) branching tours where the user may follow alternative routes, (3) composition of existing tours into aggregate tours, (4) overview map with indication of which parts of a tour have been visited and support for getting back on track. Ariadne is available as a research prototype, and it has been tested among a group of university students as well as casual users on the Internet.

eBag: a ubiquitous Web infrastructure for nomadic learning

This paper describes the eBag infrastructure, which is a generic infrastructure inspired from work with school children who could benefit from a electronic schoolbag for collaborative handling of their digital material. The eBag infrastructure is utilizing the Context-aware HyCon framework and collaborative web services based on WebDAV. A ubiquitous login and logout mechanism has been built based on BlueTooth sensor networks. The eBag infrastructure has been tried out in field tests with school kids. In this paper we discuss experiences and design issues for ubiquitous Web integration in interactive school environments with multiple interactive whiteboards and workstations. This includes proposals for specialized and adaptive XLink structures for organizing school materials as well as issues in login/logout based on proximity of different display surfaces.