29,852 research outputs found
Evaluation of a Pervasive Game for Domestic Energy Engagement Among Teenagers
In this article, we present Power Agentâa pervasive game designed to encourage teenagers and
their families to reduce energy consumption in the home. The ideas behind this mobile phonebased
game are twofold; to transform the home environment and its devices into a learning arena
for hands-on experience with electricity usage and to promote engagement via a team competition
scheme. We report on the gameâs evaluation with six teenagers and their families who played the
game for ten days in two cities in Sweden. Data collection consisted of home energy measurements
before, during, and after a game trial, in addition to interviews with participants at the end of
the evaluation. The results suggest that the game concept was highly efficient in motivating and
engaging the players and their families to change their daily energy-consumption patterns during
the game trial. Although the evaluation does not permit any conclusions as to whether the game had
any postgame effects on behavior, we can conclude that the pervasive persuasive game approach
appears to be highly promising in regard to energy conservation and similar fields or issues
ENHANCING USERSâ EXPERIENCE WITH SMART MOBILE TECHNOLOGY
The aim of this thesis is to investigate mobile guides for use with smartphones. Mobile guides have been successfully used to provide information, personalisation and navigation for the user. The researcher also wanted to ascertain how and in what ways mobile guides can enhance users' experience.
This research involved designing and developing web based applications to run on smartphones. Four studies were conducted, two of which involved testing of the particular application. The applications tested were a museum mobile guide application and a university mobile guide mapping application. Initial testing examined the prototype work for the âChronology of His Majesty Sultan Haji Hassanal Bolkiahâ application. The results were used to assess the potential of using similar mobile guides in Brunei Darussalamâs museums. The second study involved testing of the âKent LiveMapâ application for use at the University of Kent. Students at the university tested this mapping application, which uses crowdsourcing of information to provide live data. The results were promising and indicate that users' experience was enhanced when using the application.
Overall results from testing and using the two applications that were developed as part of this thesis show that mobile guides have the potential to be implemented in Brunei Darussalamâs museums and on campus at the University of Kent. However, modifications to both applications are required to fulfil their potential and take them beyond the prototype stage in order to be fully functioning and commercially viable
Mobility is the Message: Experiments with Mobile Media Sharing
This thesis explores new mobile media sharing applications by building, deploying, and studying their use. While we share media in many different ways both on the web and on mobile phones, there are few ways of sharing media with people physically near us. Studied were three designed and built systems: Push!Music, Columbus, and Portrait Catalog, as well as a fourth commercially available system â Foursquare. This thesis offers four contributions: First, it explores the design space of co-present media sharing of four test systems. Second, through user studies of these systems it reports on how these come to be used. Third, it explores new ways of conducting trials as the technical mobile landscape has changed. Last, we look at how the technical solutions demonstrate different lines of thinking from how similar solutions might look today.
Through a Human-Computer Interaction methodology of design, build, and study, we look at systems through the eyes of embodied interaction and examine how the systems come to be in use. Using Goffmanâs understanding of social order, we see how these mobile media sharing systems allow people to actively present themselves through these media. In turn, using McLuhanâs way of understanding media, we reflect on how these new systems enable a new type of medium distinct from the web centric media, and how this relates directly to mobility.
While media sharing is something that takes place everywhere in western society, it is still tied to the way media is shared through computers. Although often mobile, they do not consider the mobile settings. The systems in this thesis treat mobility as an opportunity for design. It is still left to see how this mobile media sharing will come to present itself in peopleâs everyday life, and when it does, how we will come to understand it and how it will transform society as a medium distinct from those before. This thesis gives a glimpse at what this future will look like
Media Ecologies
In this chapter, we frame the media ecologies that contextualize the youth practices we describe in later chapters. By drawing from case studies that are delimited by locality, institutions, networked sites, and interest groups (see appendices), we have been able to map the contours of the varied social, technical, and cultural contexts that structure youth media engagement. This chapter introduces three genres of participation with new media that have emerged as overarching descriptive frameworks for understanding how youth new media practices are defi ned in relation and in opposition to one another. The genres of participationâhanging out, messing around, and geeking outârefl ect and are intertwined with young peopleâs practices, learning, and identity formation within these varied and dynamic media ecologies
Smartphones
Many of the research approaches to smartphones actually regard them as more or less transparent points of access to other kinds of communication experiences. That is, rather than considering the smartphone as something in itself, the researchers look at how individuals use the smartphone for their communicative purposes, whether these be talking, surfing the web, using on-line data access for off-site data sources, downloading or uploading materials, or any kind of interaction with social media. They focus not so much on the smartphone itself but on the activities that people engage in with their smartphones
Horizon Report 2009
El informe anual Horizon investiga, identifica y clasifica las tecnologĂas emergentes que los expertos que lo elaboran prevĂ©n tendrĂĄn un impacto en la enseñanza aprendizaje, la investigaciĂłn y la producciĂłn creativa en el contexto educativo de la enseñanza superior. TambiĂ©n estudia las tendencias clave que permiten prever el uso que se harĂĄ de las mismas y los retos que ellos suponen para las aulas. Cada ediciĂłn identifica seis tecnologĂas o prĂĄcticas. Dos cuyo uso se prevĂ© emergerĂĄ en un futuro inmediato (un año o menos) dos que emergerĂĄn a medio plazo (en dos o tres años) y dos previstas a mĂĄs largo plazo (5 años)
Internet Predictions
More than a dozen leading experts give their opinions on where the Internet is headed and where it will be in the next decade in terms of technology, policy, and applications. They cover topics ranging from the Internet of Things to climate change to the digital storage of the future. A summary of the articles is available in the Web extras section
Dialogue with computers: dialogue games in action
With the advent of digital personal assistants for mobile devices, systems that are marketed as engaging in (spoken) dialogue have reached a wider public than ever before. For a student of dialogue, this raises the question to what extent such systems are genuine dialogue partners. In order to address this question, this study proposes to use the concept of a dialogue game as an analytical tool. Thus, we reframe the question as asking for the dialogue games that such systems play. Our analysis, as applied to a number of landmark systems and illustrated with dialogue extracts, leads to a fine-grained classification of such systems. Drawing on this analysis, we propose that the uptake of future generations of more powerful dialogue systems will depend on whether they are self-validating. A self-validating dialogue system can not only talk and do things, but also discuss the why of what it says and does, and learn from such discussions
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