Month: July 2003

Bookmarklets | MOVABLE TYPE

I tried to paint a global picture of my literature review on this slide. It’s quite messy and overloaded but it is a good overview of my stuff !

About my literature review : I have to make a taxonomy. Three objects : Person/Artefact/Location (a fourth : activity ?). Distance/Spatial relation between those three objects : between persons (proxemics), artefacts/persons, location/artefacts, person/location (absolute or relative distance), between locations. Relation between location and activity : places/location “afford” (affordance) a certain type of activity (notion of place according to Dourish) in the same way artefacts afford an activity.
Relation between objects : distance, properties (belongs to…), activity (what do we do in this place ?).

I will present those three obejcts and their relation in three settings : real, virtual and mixed.

I will introduce the different dimensions and explain the relations. For each relation, I will present the major results in the three stettigns (if available). For instance, about person/artefacts : in the real world, artecfacts that we can take/point/use… and in the virtual world : David Ott’s masters thesis and then… the others stdies presented in the article for JoCSCW. Person/person relation : physical world (proxemics, personal space) virtual world (proxemics ? trouver etude la dessus; il ya personal space : cf murray)

Literature review for the JoCSCW : 3-4 pages.

If students at University are given mobile devices (augmented with location-awareness stuff), do Schelling Points will be modified or not ? A semi-controlled experiment on a group could be conducted. We can show students social maps (with different range/radius)… or a variable radius (30m for buddies and 10m for unknown people).

I have to list tasks that are : MOBILE and/or JOINTLY CARRIED OUT. [Par exemple : quand quelqu’un commande un plat à la caféteria, il recoit un SMS pour l’avertir que c’est prêt]

Nowaday, attaching information to real world’s stuff and gear is a trend. Projects like Aula or HP Cooltown (“everything has a web page!”) are a step toward this direction. Applications like tourist navigation, collaborative work or games.

Geocoding is about embedding the location of an object in… the artifact itself. At the moment, geocoding an object in the physical world is possible but difficult. Indeed, one could use RFID tag and a tag reader but there is no universal protocol to sort out the artifacts or to search them. On the contrary, web pages (kind of artifacts) could be easily geocoded thanks to tag or RDF structure format (META tags, meta stands for metadata).

For instance, tags are used on geourl. This website maps documents in cyberspace to real-world locations. You add this code in the of your html document :

<meta name="geo.position" content="41.8833; 12.500" / >
<meta name="DC.title" content="Jackson’s blog" /  >

The first line contains the Latitude and Longitude, and the second line contains the site’s name. Once the site is added to GeoURL’s database, you can immediately see who else has registered Web pages in (or about) your neighborhood. These coordinates are called an “ICBM Address.” (Like, Inter-Continental Ballistic Missile – old hacker slang). geourl is a search engine that can help you to search website and locations with map and vizualisations. The problem is that using latitudes and longitudes is not that trivial. GPS coordinates or those indication are not human readable as well as location names.

Another more complete format (source : igargoyle) for holding geospatial data is proposed by Dublin Core (beware xml syntax):

<dcterms:spatial&#62 Elements:
<dcterms:description> (#PCDATA) : The description of your location.
<dcterms:projection> (#PCDATA) : The geospatial projection used.
<dcterms:north> (#PCDATA) : Distance north or south of the equator, measured on a meridian. Same as Latitude. This number is expressed in degrees.
<dcterms:east> (#PCDATA) : Longitude in degrees east of the Greenwich Meridian, with any number of decimal places. This number is expressed in degrees.
<dcterms:elevation> (#PCDATA) : The distance from sea level. This number is expressed in meters.
<dcterms:accuracy> (#PCDATA) : The geospatial accuracy of your coordinates. If you are purposely being fuzzy about your location, pick a point near your location and under accuracy, put an approximate distance to your real location. This number is expressed in meters.
<dcterms:speed> (#PCDATA) : The temporal speed, usually obtained from a GPS unit. This number is expressed in meters.

On the one hand, we have those metadata presented above. On the other hand we need software in order to search, sort, parse and transform into graphical maps those data. At the moment, those applications are yet to be developed… Use a searchbot to find your keys, your skateboard or your hipster trucker hat !!!

And what about privacy in such context ?!

Bookmarklets | MOVABLE TYPE

I found a very nice text of Michel Foucault about spatiality : in english or in french.

He presents how our conception of spatiality evolved. He distinguished three periods :

– Medieval space: the space of emplacement (sacred places and profane plates: protected places and open, exposed places: urban places and rural places…)
– After Galileo and the seventeenth century, extension was substituted for localization.
– Today the site has been substituted for extension which itself had replaced emplacement.

According to Foucault, we are more concerned by space than by time (because of demography for instance). “This problem of the human site or living space is not simply that of knowing whether there will be enough space for men in the world -a problem that is certainly quite important – but also that of knowing what relations of propinquity, what type of storage, circulation, marking, and classification of human elements should be adopted in a given situation in order to achieve a given end. Our epoch is one in which space takes for us the form of relations among sites.”

A mobile phone is a powerful AWARENESS TOOL that can tell you the PRESENCE of somebody. Yesterday, I was wondering whether my friend Elise (who was in Italy for holidays) was back in France or not. I sent her a SMS. My Nokia Phone receives reports to tell me whether the SMS is delivered or just pending.

The meaning could be interpreted like this :

SMS delivered : she’s back in France (I know that she did not take the internation option)
Pending SMS : she is still in Italy or she is in France and her cell phone is off.