A student-led comparison of techniques for augmenting the field experience

We report a study in which 30 university geography students compared five techniques to enhance the experience of visiting outdoor locations. The techniques were: a pre-prepared acetate overlay of the visual scene; a custom-designed visitor guide running on a PDA; the mScape location-based software running on a GPS-enabled mobile phone; Google Earth on a tablet PC; and a head-mounted virtual reality display. The students were given the assignment as part of their assessed coursework for a field trip to the UK Lake District, where they had to evaluate the techniques and propose improvements or future designs to enable tourists or students on field trips to gain an enhanced understanding of their surroundings. The paper describes these techniques, reports the process and results of the student assignment, and concludes with a discussion of some broader issues emerging from the project

Augmenting the field experience: a student-led comparison of techniques and technologies

In this study we report on our experiences of creating and running a student fieldtrip exercise which allowed students to compare a range of approaches to the design of technologies for augmenting landscape scenes. The main study site is around Keswick in the English Lake District, Cumbria, UK, an attractive upland environment popular with tourists and walkers. The aim of the exercise for the students was to assess the effectiveness of various forms of geographic information in augmenting real landscape scenes, as mediated through a range of techniques and technologies. These techniques were: computer-generated acetate overlays showing annotated wireframe views from certain key points; a custom-designed application running on a PDA; a mediascape running on the mScape software on a GPS-enabled mobile phone; Google Earth on a tablet PC; and a head-mounted in-field Virtual Reality system. Each group of students had all five techniques available to them, and were tasked with comparing them in the context of creating a visitor guide to the area centred on the field centre. Here we summarise their findings and reflect upon some of the broader research questions emerging from the project

Introduction to location-based mobile learning

[About the book] The report follows on from a 2-day workshop funded by the STELLAR Network of Excellence as part of their 2009 Alpine Rendez-Vous workshop series and is edited by Elizabeth Brown with a foreword from Mike Sharples. Contributors have provided examples of innovative and exciting research projects and practical applications for mobile learning in a location-sensitive setting, including the sharing of good practice and the key findings that have resulted from this work. There is also a debate about whether location-based and contextual learning results in shallower learning strategies and a section detailing the future challenges for location-based learning

Smart objects as building blocks for the internet of things

The combination of the Internet and emerging technologies such as nearfield communications, real-time localization, and embedded sensors lets us transform everyday objects into smart objects that can understand and react to their environment. Such objects are building blocks for the Internet of Things and enable novel computing applications. As a step toward design and architectural principles for smart objects, the authors introduce a hierarchy of architectures with increasing levels of real-world awareness and interactivity. In particular, they describe activity-, policy-, and process-aware smart objects and demonstrate how the respective architectural abstractions support increasingly complex application

AUGMENTED TOUCH INTERACTIONS WITH FINGER CONTACT SHAPE AND ORIENTATION

Touchscreen interactions are far less expressive than the range of touch that human hands are capable of - even considering technologies such as multi-touch and force-sensitive surfaces. Recently, some touchscreens have added the capability to sense the actual contact area of a finger on the touch surface, which provides additional degrees of freedom - the size and shape of the touch, and the finger's orientation. These additional sensory capabilities hold promise for increasing the expressiveness of touch interactions - but little is known about whether users can successfully use the new degrees of freedom. To provide this baseline information, we carried out a study with a finger-contact-sensing touchscreen, and asked participants to produce a range of touches and gestures with different shapes and orientations, with both one and two fingers. We found that people are able to reliably produce two touch shapes and three orientations across a wide range of touches and gestures - a result that was confirmed in another study that used the augmented touches for a screen lock application