Supporting the Mobile In-situ Authoring of Locative Media in Rural Places: Design and Expert Evaluation of the SMAT app

Providing users with carefully authored Locative media experiences (which can be consumed via their GPS equipped smartphones or tablets) has significant potential for fostering a strong engagement with their current surroundings. However, the availability of mobile tools to support the authoring of locative media experiences in-situ, and by non-technical users, remains scarce. In this article we present the design and field-trial expert evaluation of a mobile app developed under the SHARC project (Investigating Technology Support for the Shared Curation of Local History in a Rural Community). The app is named SMAT (SHARC Mobile Authoring Tool) and supports the authoring of Locative Media experiences with a focus on the creation of POIs (Points of Interest) and associated geo-fences which trigger the pushed delivery of media items such as photos, audio clips, etc. One important requirement of SMAT is the ability to support authoring in places where connectivity is intermittent or unavailable, e.g. many rural areas

Towards a user-centric and multidisciplinary framework for designing context-aware applications

Research into context-aware computing has not sufficiently addressed human and social aspects of design. Existing design frameworks are predominantly software orientated, make little use of cross-disciplinary work, and do not provide an easily transferable structure for cross-application of design principles. To address these problems, this paper proposes a multidisciplinary and user-centred design framework, and two models of context, which derive from conceptualisations within Psychology, Linguistics, and Computer Science. In a study, our framework was found to significantly improve the performance of postgraduate students at identifying the context of the user and application, and the usability issues that arise

AirTransit Trip Planner Application

The number of flight on transit passenger in Kuala Lumpur International Airport (KLIA) had been recorded almost 35 million of people in 2010. This passenger on transit will spend their time at the airport while waiting for the next flight without any planning to visit tourism places nearby due to short period of time and much information needed to plan a short trip. This is such a waste because they actually can boost countries’ economy in the tourism sector if they spend their time to visit some tourism places nearby the airport. Because of that, AirTransit Trip Planner aims to help these passenger on transit by planning a short trip to the nearby tourism places within the transition hour they have. AirTransit Trip Planner is using a mathematical algorithm in order to calculate and suggest how many nearby tourism places a user can visit based on their flight transition time. The algorithm also need to consider the distance of the tourism places from user’s current location and also time taken to go there. Besides the mathematical algorithm used for sorting, AirTransit Trip Planner also using Google Map API as a map to guide user and Google Places API as a data center to grab all the tourism places and its details. The output of this calculation is a suggestion of short trip planner for the user (passenger on transit). The trip planner will list down the tourism places user can visit within their flight transition hour, the distance to go there and also time taken to go there. Indirectly, this AirTransit Trip Planner application also helps to boost economy in the tourism sector of a countr

Towards a Tool-based Development Methodology for Pervasive Computing Applications

Despite much progress, developing a pervasive computing application remains a challenge because of a lack of conceptual frameworks and supporting tools. This challenge involves coping with heterogeneous devices, overcoming the intricacies of distributed systems technologies, working out an architecture for the application, encoding it in a program, writing specific code to test the application, and finally deploying it. This paper presents a design language and a tool suite covering the development life-cycle of a pervasive computing application. The design language allows to define a taxonomy of area-specific building-blocks, abstracting over their heterogeneity. This language also includes a layer to define the architecture of an application, following an architectural pattern commonly used in the pervasive computing domain. Our underlying methodology assigns roles to the stakeholders, providing separation of concerns. Our tool suite includes a compiler that takes design artifacts written in our language as input and generates a programming framework that supports the subsequent development stages, namely implementation, testing, and deployment. Our methodology has been applied on a wide spectrum of areas. Based on these experiments, we assess our approach through three criteria: expressiveness, usability, and productivity

Interacting with digital media at home via a second screen

In recent years Interactive Television (iTV) has become a household technology on a global scale. However, iTV is still a new technology in the early stages of its evolution. Our previous research looked at how everyday users of iTV feel about the interactive part of iTV. In a series of studies we investigated how people use iTV services; their likes, dislikes, preferences and opinions. We then developed a second screen-based prototype device in response to these findings and tested it with iTV users in their own homes. This is a work in progress paper that outlines the work carried previously in the area of controlling interactive Television via a second screen. The positive user responses led us to extend the scope of our previous research to look into other related areas such as barriers to digital interactive media and personalisation of digital interactive media at home

Cloud based testing of business applications and web services

This paper deals with testing of applications based on the principles of cloud computing. It is aimed to describe options of testing business software in clouds (cloud testing). It identifies the needs for cloud testing tools including multi-layer testing; service level agreement (SLA) based testing, large scale simulation, and on-demand test environment. In a cloud-based model, ICT services are distributed and accessed over networks such as intranet or internet, which offer large data centers deliver on demand, resources as a service, eliminating the need for investments in specific hardware, software, or on data center infrastructure. Businesses can apply those new technologies in the contest of intellectual capital management to lower the cost and increase competitiveness and also earnings. Based on comparison of the testing tools and techniques, the paper further investigates future trend of cloud based testing tools research and development. It is also important to say that this comparison and classification of testing tools describes a new area and it has not yet been done

A mobile tour guide app for sustainable tourism

Portugal has had a flourishing tourism sector for the past few years. In fact, Portugal’s tourism boom has made the industry one of the biggest contributors to the national economy and the largest employer. In the year 2019, Portugal had a total of 27 million tourists, surpassing once again the record established in the previous year. However, tourism also brings a series of unintended negative side effects, such as overcrowding. The Santa Maria Maior historic district in Lisbon is being particularly affected by this problem. The work undertaken in this dissertation is part of the Sustainable Tourism Crowding project, that aims to mitigate the overcrowding phenomenon in this district, by fostering a balanced distribution of visitors while promoting the visitation of sustainable points of interest. This dissertation focuses on developing a mobile app prototype targeted at tourists, through which these sustainable walking tour recommendations can be delivered. To validate the functional requirements of the prototype, more specifically the trip creation process, a series of unit tests, integration tests, and manual tests were developed. To evaluate the usability of the prototype, a user-centered approach was adopted during the design stage, in which two usability techniques were conducted with members of ISCTE’s research center ISTAR and partners from the Junta de Freguesia de Santa Maria Maior, that guided and validated the decisions made. The achieved prototype contains mechanisms for measuring tourists’ adherence to the recommended tours using the Dynamic Time Warping algorithm, which raises new research opportunities on tourists’ behaviour.O desenvolvimento próspero do setor turístico em Portugal nos últimos anos fez da indústria um dos maiores contribuintes para a economia nacional e o maior empregador do país. No ano de 2019, Portugal recebeu um total de 27 milhões de turistas, ultrapassando uma vez mais uma vez o recorde estabelecido no ano anterior. No entanto, o turismo traz também uma série de efeitos secundários negativos não intencionais, tais como overcrowding. A freguesia histórica de Santa Maria Maior em Lisboa está a ser particularmente afetada por este problema. O trabalho desenvolvido nesta dissertação faz parte do projeto de pesquisa Sustainable Tourism Crowding, que visa mitigar o fenómeno de overcrowding nesta freguesia, promovendo uma distribuição equilibrada dos visitantes e incentivando a visita de pontos de interesse sustentáveis. Esta dissertação foca-se no desenvolvimento de uma aplicação móvel protótipo destinada a turistas, através do qual recebem recomendações de visitas sustentáveis. Para validar os requisitos funcionais do protótipo, mais especificamente o processo de criação de visitas, foram desenvolvidos testes unitários, testes de integração, e testes manuais. Para avaliar a usabilidade do protótipo, foi adotada uma abordagem centrada no utilizador durante a fase de conceção, em que foram utilizadas duas técnicas de usabilidade em parceria com o ISTAR (centro de investigação do ISCTE) e com a Junta de Freguesia de Santa Maria Maior, cujos resultados guiaram e validaram as decisões tomadas. O protótipo desenvolvido contém mecanismos para medir a aderência dos turistas às recomendações sugeridas através do algoritmo Dynamic Time Warping, proporcionando novas oportunidades de pesquisa nesta área

Heuristic Evaluation for Serious Immersive Games and M-instruction

© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016. Two fast growing areas for technology-enhanced learning are serious games and mobile instruction (M-instruction or M-Learning). Serious games are ones that are meant to be more than just entertainment. They have a serious use to educate or promote other types of activity. Immersive Games frequently involve many players interacting in a shared rich and complex-perhaps web-based-mixed reality world, where their circumstances will be multi and varied. Their reality may be augmented and often self-composed, as in a user-defined avatar in a virtual world. M-instruction and M-Learning is learning on the move; much of modern computer use is via smart devices, pads, and laptops. People use these devices all over the place and thus it is a natural extension to want to use these devices where they are to learn. This presents a problem if we wish to evaluate the effectiveness of the pedagogic media they are using. We have no way of knowing their situation, circumstance, education background and motivation, or potentially of the customisation of the final software they are using. Getting to the end user itself may also be problematic; these are learning environments that people will dip into at opportune moments. If access to the end user is hard because of location and user self-personalisation, then one solution is to look at the software before it goes out. Heuristic Evaluation allows us to get User Interface (UI) and User Experience (UX) experts to reflect on the software before it is deployed. The effective use of heuristic evaluation with pedagogical software [1] is extended here, with existing Heuristics Evaluation Methods that make the technique applicable to Serious Immersive Games and mobile instruction (M-instruction). We also consider how existing Heuristic Methods may be adopted. The result represents a new way of making this methodology applicable to this new developing area of learning technology