Tom Nicolai

Exploring social context with the wireless rope

The Wireless Rope is a framework to study the notion of social context and the detection of social situations by Bluetooth proximity detection with consumer devices and its effects on group dynamics Users can interact through a GUI with members of an existing group or form a new group Connection information is collected by stationary tracking devices and a connection map of all participants can be obtained via the web Besides interaction with familiar persons, the Wireless Rope also includes strange persons to provide a rich representation of the surrounding social situation This paper seeks to substantiate the notion of social context by an exploratory analysis of interpersonal proximity data collected during a computer conference Two feature functions are presented that indicate typical situations in this setting.

Designing a wearable user interface for hands-free interaction in maintenance applications

One challenge in wearable computing is the design of proper user interfaces and interaction concepts for applications. This paper discusses the design of hands-free wearable user interfaces and shows an example interface for an aircraft maintenance application. The user interface we present uses a wireless data glove for interaction

Understanding and measuring the urban pervasive infrastructure

The increasing popularity of mobile computing devices has allowed for new research and application areas. Specifically, urban areas exhibit an elevated concentration of such devices enabling potential ad-hoc co-operation and sharing of resources among citizens. Here, we argue that people, architecture and technology together provide the infrastructure for these applications and an understanding of this infrastructure is important for effective design and development. We focus on describing the metrics for describing this infrastructure and elaborate on a set of observation, analysis and simulation methods for capturing, deriving and utilising those metrics.

Winspect: a case study for wearable computing-supported inspection tasks

Introduces the Winspect project-an application of wearable computing in an industrial inspection process-with focus on its user interface. We present a case study to demonstrate the benefit of wearable input devices and the use of implicit interaction as a complementary technique. Two almost independent tasks from the application domain are addressed: the input of findings for inspected components in a harsh environment, and a technique to overcome the display resolution when browsing a hypertext-like documentation.

About the relationship between people and discoverable Bluetooth devices in urban environments

People are frequently carrying their Bluetooth enabled mobile phones in their pockets while moving through public spaces. With only a small fraction of these being set to discoverable mode, it is possible to estimate the number of persons in proximity by conducting Bluetooth device inquiries. In this paper, we present a method for the measurement of the percentage of people with discoverable devices. We did experiments using this method in Bremen, Germany and San Francisco, US, suggesting that about 2%, respectively 6%, are detectable. Further, we show that this measurement can well be implemented on common mobile phones, and that specialized scanners are not necessary.