Marek Bell

Sharing the square: collaborative leisure in the city streets

Sharing events with others is an important part of many enjoyable experiences. While most existing co-presence systems focus on work tasks, in this paper we describe a lightweight mobile system designed for sharing leisure. This system allows city visitors to share their experiences with others both far and near, through tablet computers that share photographs, voice and location. A collaborative filtering algorithm uses historical data of previous visits to recommend photos, web pages and places to visitors, bringing together online media with the citys streets. In an extensive user trial we explored how these resources were used to collaborate around physical places. The trial demonstrates the value of technological support for sociability - enjoyable shared social interaction. Lastly, the paper discusses support for collaborative photography, and the role history can play to integrate online media with physical places.

Play and Sociability in There: Some Lessons from Online Games for Collaborative Virtual Environments

While online games have become increasingly popular in recent years, there has been very little overlap between games research and virtual environments researchers. Indeed, one could argue that for a number of years, the design of video games have been ahead of virtual environment research, not only in technical aspects such as graphics or networking, but also in how game designers have managed their online worlds as social environments. Designers of online games have had to take seriously both the details of social interaction between individuals, but also how these interactions play out in the broader socio-economic balance of their online worlds [1]. In this chapter, we explore the lessons which collaborative virtual environments (CVEs) could derive from online gaming environments, focusing on mundane interaction. Our activities and experiences in the real world depend in many ways upon mundane interaction for their operation [2]. Organisations whatever their size, in meetings and elsewhere, rely on talk [3]. Even the market transactions of currency traders depend upon chat for their coherence and reproducibility [4]. In a similar way in virtual environments it is in avatar-to-avatar interaction that experiences are configured. For virtual environments to be successful, we need to be able to interact with others around objects, refer to objects in our talk and share our awareness of other players and their movements [5]. This chapter focuses on these interactions, exploring how in the seemingly simple building blocks of talk and interaction around objects, enjoyable experiences are formed. We focus on the study of one game in detail, the social environment There, examining how its flat displays of colour come to form

Domino: exploring mobile collaborative software adaptation

Social Proximity Applications (SPAs) are a promising new area for ubicomp software that exploits the everyday changes in the proximity of mobile users. While a number of applications facilitate simple file sharing between co–present users, this paper explores opportunities for recommending and sharing software between users. We describe an architecture that allows the recommendation of new system components from systems with similar histories of use. Software components and usage histories are exchanged between mobile users who are in proximity with each other. We apply this architecture in a mobile strategy game in which players adapt and upgrade their game using components from other players, progressing through the game through sharing tools and history. More broadly, we discuss the general application of this technique as well as the security and privacy challenges to such an approach.

Visualisation of Spectator Activity at Stadium Events

Recent advances in mobile device technology have opened up new possibilities in enhancing the experience of spectators at stadium-based sporting events. In creating novel applications for use in such settings, designers must be aware of the current practices of spectators and of features of the environment at such events that novel applications may seek to exploit. This work forms an early part of the Designing the Augmented Stadium project. Data sets have been collected from spectators, logging the results of Bluetooth scans alongside GPS location. This paper presents an information visualization tool that can be used in the analysis and exploration of this data, to provide insight into the activities of spectators, the relationship between an individual spectator and the crowd as a whole and the suitability of stadium environments for applications based on infrastructure such as mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) and wireless mesh networking. Various visualization tools are described and example cases are illustrated, using several real-world data sets recorded at football matches.