Mixed Reality Laboratory

Diplom-Medieninformatiker, FH.

Research Fellow and PhD candidate (write-up).

phd research

My dissertation focusses on visualising the inherent uncertainties of ubiquitous wireless infrastructures to facilitate the authoring of location-based experiences. When building such applications, one usually relies on the availability and reliability of wireless infrastructures like Wi-Fi, mobile phone networks or GPS - but these technologies are not available everywhere and anytime. Due to physical and economical restrictions any such technology can only ever have partial coverage in space and time and this will affect the performance of every application that relies on this technology.

It is in the interest of the person that designs location-based applications to be aware of the restrictions of the underlying technology. Knowing about possible technological shortcomings will allow the designer to design with them in mind and come up with a work-around, if needed, rather than running into problems when it might be too late. This technological awareness might also enable the creative person to imagine new designs which might have previously been unthinkable. In any case, it is believed to improve the quality of a location-based application if its designer has been aware of potential technological limitations during the authoring phase and not just assumed that the technology would work as he or she expected.

To support my thesis I analyse the experiences gained from working with two artists groups on the production of two location-based experiences that implemented their location mechanisms in ways other than just relying on GPS:

Love City, a pervasive game for mobile phones utilised cellular positioning. The game was developed in collaboration with the artist group Active Ingredient and went live on Valentine’s Day 2007. It was played by 100 players over the period of a month.

Rider Spoke, a pervasive game for cyclists utilised Wi-Fi fingerprinting. The game was developed in collaboration with the artist group Blast Theory. It premiered at the Barbican in London on 11.10.2007 and subsequently attracted over 1000 players in several outings across Europe, including Athens, Brighton and Budapest.

 

publications, conference papers

Peer-reviewed full papers that are directly related to my thesis have so far been disseminated at:

Ubicomp 2006, "Extending Authoring Tools for Location-Aware Applications with an Infrastructure Visualization Layer" introduces my overall approach (get the PDF)

ACE 2008, "Fighting with Jelly: User-Centered Development of Wireless Infrastructure Visualization Tools for Authoring Location-Based Experiences" analyzes the Love City development process (get the PDF).

My complete list of publications is kept up-to-date on the department's website.

other research and development

I have been involved in the making of Heartlands (a.k.a. 'Ere be Dragons), a pervasive game which combines the players' positions with their heart-rates. Heartlands went to the Game Developers Conference 2007 in San Francisco (see artists' blog for pictures and trivia) as a demonstrator for HP Mediascapes. Later that year Heartlands was awarded the Nokia Ubimedia MindTrek Award 2007.

Past (2004/2005) research included MR-based interaction, MR with programmable pan-tilt-zoom-cameras using desktop PCs and pervasive games (MR-interaction, Flypad, Tycoon, Epidemic Menace).

Previously worked on ARGUI, an Augmented Reality Graphical User Interface that sits on top of ARToolKit. I also released a couple of Assembler-programmed demos on the Commodore Amiga series of homecomputers in the late nineties, e.g. Mnemonics and Back 2 the Roots.

other activities

Reviewing for IEEE and ACM International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality, ISMAR (2005, 2006, 2007) and Pervasive Computing 2007.

Panelist for “Hand-Held Augmented Reality” at ISMAR 2005.

project links

Heartlands (a.k.a. 'Ere Be Dragons), Love City, Love City Blog, Rider Spoke,

IPerG (IST FP6), INSCAPE (IST FP6), Equator (EPSRC)

contact details

Email:	lxo -at- cs.nott.ac.uk
Web:	www.mrl.nott.ac.uk/~lxo
Tel:	+44 (0)115 846 6523