Integrating Haptic Feedback into Mobile Location Based Services

Haptics is a feedback technology that takes advantage of the human sense of touch by applying forces, vibrations, and/or motions to a haptic-enabled device such as a mobile phone. Historically, human-computer interaction has been visual - text and images on the screen. Haptic feedback can be an important additional method especially in Mobile Location Based Services such as knowledge discovery, pedestrian navigation and notification systems. A knowledge discovery system called the Haptic GeoWand is a low interaction system that allows users to query geo-tagged data around them by using a point-and-scan technique with their mobile device. Haptic Pedestrian is a navigation system for walkers. Four prototypes have been developed classified according to the user’s guidance requirements, the user type (based on spatial skills), and overall system complexity. Haptic Transit is a notification system that provides spatial information to the users of public transport. In all these systems, haptic feedback is used to convey information about location, orientation, density and distance by use of the vibration alarm with varying frequencies and patterns to help understand the physical environment. Trials elicited positive responses from the users who see benefit in being provided with a “heads up” approach to mobile navigation. Results from a memory recall test show that the users of haptic feedback for navigation had better memory recall of the region traversed than the users of landmark images. Haptics integrated into a multi-modal navigation system provides more usable, less distracting but more effective interaction than conventional systems. Enhancements to the current work could include integration of contextual information, detailed large-scale user trials and the exploration of using haptics within confined indoor spaces

Mobile Location Based Services: Non-visual Feedback Using Haptics

Haptics is a feedback technology that takes advantage of the human sense of touch by applying forces, vibrations, and/or motions to a haptic-enabled device such as a mobile phone. Historically, human-computer interaction has been visual, text and images on the screen. In this paper, we discuss our Haptic Interaction Model which describes the integration of haptic feedback into Mobile Location Based Services such as knowledge discovery, pedestrian navigation and notification systems. A knowledge discovery system called the Haptic GeoWand is a low interaction system that allows users to query geo-tagged data around them by using a point-and-scan technique with their mobile device. Haptic Pedestrian is a navigation system for walkers. Four prototypes have been developed classified according to the user‟s guidance requirements, the user type (based on spatial skills), and overall system complexity. Haptic Alert is a notification system that provides spatial information to the users of public transport. In all these systems, haptic feedback is used to convey information about location, orientation, density and distance by use of the vibration alarm with varying frequencies and patterns to help understand the physical environment. User trials have elicited positive response from the users. Haptics integrated into a multi-modal navigation system and other mobile location based services provides more usable, less distracting but more effective interaction than conventional systems

Mobile Location Based Services: Non-visual Feedback Using Haptics

Haptics is a feedback technology that takes advantage of the human sense of touch by applying forces, vibrations, and/or motions to a haptic-enabled device such as a mobile phone. Historically, human-computer interaction has been visual, text and images on the screen. In this paper, we discuss our Haptic Interaction Model which describes the integration of haptic feedback into Mobile Location Based Services such as knowledge discovery, pedestrian navigation and notification systems. A knowledge discovery system called the Haptic GeoWand is a low interaction system that allows users to query geo-tagged data around them by using a point-and-scan technique with their mobile device. Haptic Pedestrian is a navigation system for walkers. Four prototypes have been developed classified according to the user‟s guidance requirements, the user type (based on spatial skills), and overall system complexity. Haptic Alert is a notification system that provides spatial information to the users of public transport. In all these systems, haptic feedback is used to convey information about location, orientation, density and distance by use of the vibration alarm with varying frequencies and patterns to help understand the physical environment. User trials have elicited positive response from the users. Haptics integrated into a multi-modal navigation system and other mobile location based services provides more usable, less distracting but more effective interaction than conventional systems

Haptic Transit: Tactile feedback to notify public transport users

To attract people to use public transport, efficient transit information systems providing accurate, real-time, easy-tounderstand information must be provided to users. In this paper we introduce HapticTransit, a tactile feedback based alert/notification model of a system, which provides spatial information to the public transport user. The model uses real-time bus location with other spatial information to provide feedback about the user as their journey is in progress. The system allows users make better use of „in-bus‟ time. It allows the user be involved with other activities and not be anxious about the arrival at their destination bus stop. Our survey shows a majority of users have missed a bus stop/station whilst undertaking a transit journey in an unfamiliar location. The information provided by our system can be of great advantage to certain user groups. The vibration alarm is used to provide tactile feedback. Visual feedback, in the form of colour coded buttons and textual description, is also provided. This model forms the basis for further research for developing information systems for public transport users with special needs – deaf, visually impaired and those with poor spatial abilities

Modeling Passenger-Flow in Real-Time Bus Tracking System

Transit networks in the real world are similar to data transfer across a computer network. In this paper, we present the similarity and differences between computer networks and transit networks. We have developed a passenger-flow simulation model and we tested the effects of transit services provided on passengers in term of delay and passenger quality of service. We present the passenger’s behavior at bus stops, factors that affect passenger’s interactions with buses, and the performance of buses. The objective of this research is to provide operators with improved metrics and better tools to manage the public transit network. In this paper, the overall transit network performance has been evaluated and summarized

Integrating Real-time Bus-Tracking with Pedestrian Navigation in a Journey Planning System

Automated Vehicle Location (AVL) systems provide real-time location information for emergency response, delivery services and freight transport. The advent of AVL systems has meant both public and private bus operators can implement systems to provide real-time passenger information, analyse their service performance and also to evaluate the quality of their operations. Traffic congestion, intersection delays, weather and operational conditions are some of the factors that make it difficult to predict the accurate bus arrival time in a real-time environment. In a joint project between NUI Maynooth and Blackpool Transport, a dynamic web application was developed to display and update vehicle locations (bustracking.co.uk) (Winstanley et al. 2009) and to provide predictive bus arrival times at stops. A journey by bus is usually part of a longer door-to-door itinerary, usually involving walking before, after or between bus segments. The passenger is really interested in door-to-door journey times when making decisions about time of departure and which bus to catch. Therefore journey planners that combine the pedestrian and bus journeys are required and indeed several such systems exist, such as Transport Direct (2009), Traveline Midlands (2009), Google transit (2009). However these systems are mainly designed to plan journeys in advance and so base their decisions on the fixed bus timetable. For last-minute planning, and also for updating journey plans as-you-go, real-time bus locations and short-term predictions of bus arrival times at stops can be used to give more reliable journey times taking into account delays due to congestion, diversions and other factors. This paper describes an experimental system that combines bus tracking and pedestrian navigation

”Hide and Tweet”: A game to teach schoolchildren about spatial technologies

As part of the Geotechnology research team at NUI Maynooth we were involved in the preparation and running of various activities in the Summer School on Computer Science for school children aged between 12 to 18 years old. Since year 2009 we have been constantly developing, testing, and deploying some geospatial software applications which were used by the children for activities in the summer school programme. The high level goal of this development was to help school children become more familiar GPS devices and computerbased Location-based services (LBS) technologies which are now playing such a crucial role in today’s Internet connected society. The software applications were used as part of games and tasks for the children. In our paper we shall describe how these games have evolve during these years, the educational aspects and benefits of the game and how both the software components and devices were developed. Overall, children participating in the summerschool provided their comments in the form of a survey. They felt that there were now more aware about possibilities in geoinformatics available with “ordinary off the shelf devices”. Different issues related with webbased maps (Google Maps, OpenStreetMap, Bing Maps, etc) were introduced and we explained the differences between them. Most importantly in case of geo-technologies we felt that the activities helped the children become aware that that computing and positioning happens everywhere and is not tied with the desk and the desktop computer.We summarise our experiences gained in these last three years and discuss the educational gains of this type of game-based approach to location-based technologies to schoolchildren. All of our software is developed using free and open-source components meaning that it can be deployed by any school or educational facility with minimum cost. A smartphone-based version of the software has also been developed

Integrating Haptic Feedback to Pedestrian Navigation Applications

The development of a haptic-feedback enabled mobile application for pedestrian routing is described. One of the challenges presented to users of pedestrian navigation applications on mobile devices is the requirement that the user continuously interacts with the visual interface on the mobile device. Haptic feedback or haptics, is a technology that uses forced feedback, vibrations and/or motions to the user which are interpreted using our sense of touch. The haptic user interface, in our application, on a mobile device provides unobtrusive feedback in the form of vibration alarms to assist the user in navigating from one point to the other. The user can hold the mobile device discretely in their hand without the need to view the screen. For spatial data the OpenStreetMap (OSM) database is used while the Cloudmade routing API is used as the routing engine

Sketches of Generic Framework for Quality Assessment of Volunteered Geographical Data

The history of volunteered geographical information movement dosn’t have such a long tradition. As was mentioned by [1] Kounadi (2009) in her thesis, a whole movement emerged when Google map API was hacked and the first crowd sourcing services like HousingMaps.com and Adrian Holovaty’s Chicago Crime3 emerged. In general, the whole movement is based as marked by [2] Goodchild (2007) "human is able to act as an intelligent sensor, perhaps equipped with such simple aids as GPS or even the means of taking measurements of environmental variables". Amateur enthusiast start to be cartographers but the difference is that they don’t have much knowledge about the many aspects of map making. Some authors [3] Coleman et al. (2009) even argue that these contributors can be organized in groups from "Neophyte" to "Expert Authority". Everyone can contribute to the Neogeography field but not everyone contributes data of the same quality. The reason for that is a lack of practice and knowledge which can be improved by practice and experience in map making, amazing to see the citation from [4] Andrew et al. (2009) "How such technologies and tools evolve, is not only dependent on advances in technology itself but also the users of such technology". What is interesting when we look generally at an example of OpenStreetMap which is probably now the best and biggest service of volunteered geographical information system in use today but not the only one. If we talk about contributors from my own experience, I have found that knowledge about mapping practices and conventions is spread between people, from the most influential to complete beginners, by good advice and imitation. We, as researchers are interested how this evolution of quality in data my affect a final product map in a system like OpenStreetMap and we are curious if there will be some way for automatic assessment