Udana Bandara

Ubira: a mobile platform for an integrated online/offline shopping experience

Recently, mobile applications focusing on barcode scanning and price comparison are gaining popularity among users. The users of these applications are drawn away from participating in the business model of the brick-and-mortar stores. Ubira is a novel mobile platform that allows the brick-and-mortar stores to compete against online stores by turning an application user into a customer while creating better value for the customers compared to typical barcode scanning applications.

Protecting against screenshots: An image processing approach

Motivated by reasons related to data security and privacy, we propose a method to limit meaningful visual contents of a display from being captured by screenshots. Traditional methods take a system architectural approach to protect against screenshots. We depart from this framework, and instead exploit image processing techniques to distort visual data of a display and present the distorted data to the viewer. Given that a screenshot captures distorted visual contents, it yields limited useful data. We exploit the human visual system to empower viewers to automatically and mentally recover the distorted contents into a meaningful form in real-time. Towards this end, we leverage on findings from psychological studies which show that blending of visual information from recent and current fixations enables human to form meaningful representation of a scene. We model this blending of information by an additive process, and exploit this to design a visual contents distortion algorithm that supports real-time contents recovery by the human visual system. Our experiments and user study demonstrate the feasibility of our method to allow viewers to readily interpret visual contents of a display, while limiting meaningful contents from being captured by screenshots.

Seamless online/offline shopping experience design for in-store customers

Over the last few years, the conventional brick and mortar business model has been challenged by the proliferation of smartphone-based shopping apps, which exploit the weaknesses of this conventional model. As an alternative to these apps, we have developed Ubira [1], a patent-pending service platform that allows healthy online/offline competition rather than merely exploiting the weaknesses. This business model provides brick and mortar shops a fair chance to compete with online stores while creating a seamless shopping experience for in-store customers based on an online/offline partnership. The main design challenge in Ubira has been to promote serendipity in shopping rather than bargain hunting, and integrate the legacy inventory systems of brick and mortar businesses into the platform. To overcome these challenges, we have made some critical design choices based on context awareness and seamful design methods.