TechNews digests: Jan - Mar 2010

TechNews is a technology, news and analysis service aimed at anyone in the education sector keen to stay informed about technology developments, trends and issues. TechNews focuses on emerging technologies and other technology news. TechNews service : digests september 2004 till May 2010 Analysis pieces and News combined publish every 2 to 3 month

Virtual Rendering based Second Life Mobile Application to Control Ambient Media Services

In this paper we propose the development details of a mobile client that allows virtual 3D avatar interaction and virtual 3D annotation control in Second Life. We established adaptation based virtual rendering of the Second Life client and encoded the real-time frames into video stream, which is suitable for mobile client rendering. Additionally, we re-mapped the touch-based interaction of the user and feed that to the Second Life client in a form of keyboard and mouse interactions. As a proof of concept, we annotated a virtual environment object in Second Life and linked that with a media service by UPnP [5]. Further, we captured the mobile interaction of the user and provided controller interface to change states of the media object through the virtual object interaction. We argue that by using the mobile Second Life virtual interface the user has a better look to monitor and control the home appliances. We present illustration of the prototype system and show its application in a smart environment setup

User Interface Abstraction for enabling TV set based Inclusive Access to the Information Society

199 p.The television (TV) set is present in most homes worldwide, and is the most used Information and Communication Technology (ICT). Despite its large implantation in the market, the interactive services consumption on TV set is limited. This thesis focuses on overcoming the following limiting factors: (i) limited Human Computer Interaction and (ii) lack of considering user’s real life context in the digital television (dTV) service integration strategy. Making interactive services accessible to TV set’s large user base, and especially to the most vulnerable ones, is understood as the path to integrate the mankind with the information society. This thesis explores the use of user interface abstraction technologies to reach the introduced goals. The main contributions of this thesis are: (i) an approach to enable the universally accessible remote control of the TV set, (ii) an approach for the provision of universally accessible interactive services through TV sets, and (iii) an approach for the provision of universally accessible services in the TV user’s real life context. We have implemented the contributing approaches for different use cases, and we have evaluated them with real users, achieving good results

A study of smart device-based mobile imaging and implementation for engineering applications

Title from PDF of title page, viewed on June 12, 2013Thesis advisor: ZhiQiang ChenVitaIncludes bibliographic references (pages 76-82)Thesis (M.S.)--School of Computing and Engineering. University of Missouri--Kansas City, 2013Mobile imaging has become a very active research topic in recent years thanks to the rapid development of computing and sensing capabilities of mobile devices. This area features multi-disciplinary studies of mobile hardware, imaging sensors, imaging and vision algorithms, wireless network and human-machine interface problems. Due to the limitation of computing capacity that early mobile devices have, researchers proposed client-server module, which push the data to more powerful computing platforms through wireless network, and let the cloud or standalone servers carry out all the computing and processing work. This thesis reviewed the development of mobile hardware and software platform, and the related research done on mobile imaging for the past 20 years. There are several researches on mobile imaging, but few people aim at building a framework which helps engineers solving problems by using mobile imaging. With higher-resolution imaging and high-performance computing power built into smart mobile devices, more and more imaging processing tasks can be achieved on the device rather than the client-server module. Based on this fact, a framework of collaborative mobile imaging is introduced for civil infrastructure condition assessment to help engineers solving technical challenges. Another contribution in this thesis is applying mobile imaging application into home automation. E-SAVE is a research project focusing on extensive use of automation in conserving and using energy wisely in home automation. Mobile users can view critical information such as energy data of the appliances with the help of mobile imaging. OpenCV is an image processing and computer vision library. The applications in this thesis use functions in OpenCV including camera calibration, template matching, image stitching and Canny edge detection. The application aims to help field engineers is interactive crack detection. The other one uses template matching to recognize appliances in the home automation system.Introduction -- Background and related work -- Basic imaging processing methods for mobile applications -- Collaborative and interactive mobile imaging -- Mobile imaging for smart energy -- Conclusion and recommendation

Mobile KNX: Design, development and analysis of a mobile network bridge for Domotic systems

In the last few years, the need to easily control the electrical devices has been manifested with more persistence. This is due to the increasing of energy consumption and the introduction of new concepts, such as green homes and building automation systems. To find a solution to this demand, several companies have focused on the development of infrastructure for remote management system of automation building applications. Based on well-defined protocols and systems for automation building structures, in the current market there are several applications that permit to clients to meet this request. However, it is still possible to improve their quality pushing on automation. Therefore, a central system for automatically processing and sharing the configuration data has been developed, leaving to mobile devices only the task to render it, in order to allow a client to control all the “smart” devices in an automation building system. This project has focused on developing an application that would provide a system of transaction between mobile and automation building world. In addition, a mobile application has been developed for several mobile operating systems and architectures. The work was completed with a testing phase, without the use of simulators, focused on ease of use and speed of access to its devices, which has shown the validity of this idea. The results obtained have given a new set of real data on which basing future developments and also a basis for a different approach to the proble