Wearable and mobile devices

Information and Communication Technologies, known as ICT, have undergone dramatic changes in the last 25 years. The 1980s was the decade of the Personal Computer (PC), which brought computing into the home and, in an educational setting, into the classroom. The 1990s gave us the World Wide Web (the Web), building on the infrastructure of the Internet, which has revolutionized the availability and delivery of information. In the midst of this information revolution, we are now confronted with a third wave of novel technologies (i.e., mobile and wearable computing), where computing devices already are becoming small enough so that we can carry them around at all times, and, in addition, they have the ability to interact with devices embedded in the environment. The development of wearable technology is perhaps a logical product of the convergence between the miniaturization of microchips (nanotechnology) and an increasing interest in pervasive computing, where mobility is the main objective. The miniaturization of computers is largely due to the decreasing size of semiconductors and switches; molecular manufacturing will allow for “not only molecular-scale switches but also nanoscale motors, pumps, pipes, machinery that could mimic skin” (Page, 2003, p. 2). This shift in the size of computers has obvious implications for the human-computer interaction introducing the next generation of interfaces. Neil Gershenfeld, the director of the Media Lab’s Physics and Media Group, argues, “The world is becoming the interface. Computers as distinguishable devices will disappear as the objects themselves become the means we use to interact with both the physical and the virtual worlds” (Page, 2003, p. 3). Ultimately, this will lead to a move away from desktop user interfaces and toward mobile interfaces and pervasive computing

Portallax:bringing 3D displays capabilities to handhelds

We present Portallax, a clip-on technology to retrofit mobile devices with 3D display capabilities. Available technologies (e.g. Nintendo 3DS or LG Optimus) and clip-on solutions (e.g. 3DeeSlide and Grilli3D) force users to have a fixed head and device positions. This is contradictory to the nature of a mobile scenario, and limits the usage of interaction techniques such as tilting the device to control a game. Portallax uses an actuated parallax barrier and face tracking to realign the barrier's position to the user's position. This allows us to provide stereo, motion parallax and perspective correction cues in 60 degrees in front of the device. Our optimized design of the barrier minimizes colour distortion, maximizes resolution and produces bigger view-zones, which support ~81% of adults' interpupillary distances and allow eye tracking implemented with the front camera. We present a reference implementation, evaluate its key features and provide example applications illustrating the potential of Portallax

Building a software service for mobile devices to enhance awareness in web collaboration

(c) 2014 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other users, including reprinting/ republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted components of this work in other works.In this paper, we propose the construction of an effective event notification software service for mobile devices to provide anytime anywhere awareness to online work teams during Web collaboration. The software service is first designed to achieve the required flexibility to be used in different collaborative work situations, from professional work to informal communities of practice. Then, the building of our event-oriented service for mobile clients is reported from all the stages of our software engineering methodology and it is prototyped for evaluation purposes. We believe the outcomes of our approach will be very beneficial for achieving more productive and quality Web collaboration practices. The ultimate aim of this research is to provide software designers of Web collaboration tools and applications with general guidelines as for how to face common issues and challenges when incorporating a complete event management and notification system in their developments.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Emerging technologies for learning (volume 1)

Collection of 5 articles on emerging technologies and trend