Young-ho Rhee

Your phone automatically caches your life

i n t e r a c t i o n s / j u l y + a u g u s t 2 0 0 6 : / 42 IMAGINE THE MOMENTS you carry throughout your life, the ones you share with friends and family. Imagine having those special occasions at your fingertips without any effort. Those moments depict who you are and describe what you’ve done. The mobile handset helps log your every moment, analyzes your social network, and visualizes meaningful information in personal aspects. A mobile handset is no longer a simple communicator; rather, it serves as a mediator for close relationships between people and people or people and things. People use mobile phones to reach their buddies and connect to electronic devices located at their home network or their office network or on the move. A mobile phone is considered a gateway to new lifestyles. It is a suitable device for recording one’s personal life and communicating with people, since people always carry their mobile handset with them. There is some previous literature dealing with recording personal life by organizing casual information. Don Norman speculated about a Personal Life Recorder (PLR) device in his 1992 book Turn Signals Are the Facial Expression of Automobiles. He theorized that these PLRs would start out as a device given to young children, called the “Teddy.” The Teddy would be given to us as children and record all of our personal life moments, and as we matured, the data could be transferred to new devices that matched our maturity level. David Gelernter promotes a concept that would provide a multimedia archive of a person’s life that one could tap into just about anytime and anywhere in his Life Streams project (see his 1998 book Machine Beauty). Apple’s 20-year-old concept “piles” was an archiving-related document, which helps users organize things based on the contents. To record personal life, a mobile phone has various personal life activity logs and so is appropriate to hold fruitful contents reflecting one’s lifestyle with friendly information obtained through the life diary. Recently, the Samsung Electronics Software laboratory in Korea developed a mobile life diary application and a PC suite to enhance the mobile user’s experience. The mobile embedded software “life diary” records all of the mobile phone’s

Real-time spatial socializing through mobile device

There has been an unprecedented increase in availability of real-time streaming services on todays mobile devices, for example: Satellite/GPRS radio, Digital media broadcast (DMB TV). Yet the majority of the services available today fail to provide dynamic social experience as compared to the PC/real-world environment, especially socializing in terms of common interests such as real-time music/video/news etc. Such real-time common interest acts like a fuel for dialogue exchange & social interaction. The presence & availability of real-time mobile services gives us opportunity to realize above concept while the user is on the move. Geographica is a combination of application software & services for mobile device that stimulate users to locate other potential users who share same interests (ex: radio, DMB etc) in real-time & locate, socialize through map interface either locally or globally. We have attempted to create a new user interface & experience focusing on users unmet need of socializing through real-time content while on the move.