Article Review - Mixed Reality Taxonomies

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Today, I looked at a research paper from 1994 entitled A Taxonomy of Mixed Reality Visual Displays. This research was one of the earliest attempts at trying to classify the newly developing (at the time) field of augmented reality. The beginning pages of this (very long) paper focus on a continuum of "virtuality", in which the researchers distinguish between a reality that is simply augmented with virtual objects (augmented reality) and a virtual world that is supplemented with the real world (augmented virtuality), with the two extremes being the physical world and a purely virtual world as outlined by the image below.

 (image from the paper)

The paper then goes on at some length about the variations of augmented reality and augmented virtuality, comparing graphics-based content and video-based content, talking about technical limitations in reproduction fidelity, and some other topics. The most interesting takeaway from all of that discussion is just seeing how far the field has come in eighteen years of research and development. One topic that is still relevant to today's AR research is the idea of EWK, or Extent of World Knowledge. Some systems will need to know exactly what the world they're working with is like, so that the virtual content can interact correctly with the real world, while some systems (such as Group Graffiti!) have no need for that information. The continuum for EWK, as decided on by the researchers, is shown below.

(image from the paper)

I feel like this paper, while not really exploring new ground as far as research and development, was an essential first step for the field of augmented reality. It's also a fitting end to my blog posts about this topic, as it looks back on two action-packed decades in a comforting and nostalgic light. The end.

Thanks and gig 'em!

Kishino, Fumio; Milgram, Paul. 1994. "A Taxonomy of Mixed Reality Visual Displays". IEICE Transactions on Information Systems. Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
URL: http://www.eecs.ucf.edu/~cwingrav/teaching/ids6713_sprg2010/assets/Milgram_IEICE_1994.pdf

Article Review - A Novel Method for QR Security

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Today, I looked at a research paper from 2010 entitled A Novel Secret Sharing Technique Using QR Code. The researchers appreciated the value of widespread bar-code usage in every industry from retail to manufacturing because of how easy it is to encode data, scan and decode data, and produce the codes themselves. The aspect they wanted to improve was security, because as it currently stands, any device with a bar-code scanner (i.e. most commercial phones nowadays) can decode a standard bar-code within seconds. Their response to this was a framework built around using multiple QR codes with a built-in security threshold, but with all the necessary data for their algorithm in the codes themselves (removing the need for an internet connection). The framework can be seen in the image below.

(image from the paper)

Essentially, the algorithm boils down to group of n QR codes all containing related data and requiring at least t of them to obtain the key, a0. Once the key is obtained, any single QR code can then be decoded. According to the research team, the big benefit of this method is the lack of a remote database connection being needed. All the data required is in the codes themselves.


This article seemed interesting to me largely because we are focusing on QR codes for context-awareness and were thinking about possibly storing other meta-data in the codes as well. Currently, we're not considering any sensitive data for this task, but it's nice to know that we could if we wanted to.
 
Thanks and gig 'em!

Chuang, Jun-Chou; Hu, Yu-Chen; Ko, Hsien-Ju . 2010. A Novel Secret Sharing Technique Using QR Code. International Journal of Image Processing.  CSC Journals, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. pp. 468-475.
URL: http://www.cscjournals.org/csc/manuscriptinfo.php?ManuscriptCode=69.70.69.76.41.46.50.47.102

Article Review - Personalized Mobile Sightseeing Tours

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Today, I looked at a research paper from 2010 entitled Personalized Sightseeing Tours SupportUsing Mobile Devices. These researchers described their plans to migrate a sightseeing desktop application to Android devices for users on the go. It is similar to some other articles I've read on these types of applications in that they want it to be a context-aware system, use some augmented reality for ease of use, and draw on the user's profile settings, location, and other filters like collaborative ratings. The basic architecture they've planned is shown below.

(image from the paper)

The unique thing about this article is the researchers' description of their system's occasionally-connected behavior. They recognized the limitations of mobile solutions: the current lack of 100% internet availability, the increased battery use of an active internet connection, and the lower (on average) speed of mobile internet. Based on the user's context variables, particularly location, the system will grab a chunk of relevant data and store it locally on the phone using SQLite. Through periodic polling, the system will grab new data as it needs, which should not be too often. Using this method, the user can change their sightseeing preferences and get results in real-time, even without an active internet connection.


For our application, we will probably be needing to store some content locally, deleting it as necessary. The approach taken by these researchers is a good stepping stone toward that.


Thanks and gig 'em!

Anacleto, Ricardo; Figueiredo, Lino; Luz, Nuno. 2010. Personalized Sightseeing Tours Support Using Mobile Devices. Human-Computer Interaction - IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology. Springer Boston, pp. 301-304.
doi: 10.1007/978-3-642-15231-3_35
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-15231-3_35

Article Review - Large-Scale Smartphone User Studies

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Today, I looked at a research paper from 2010 entitled The Challenges in Large-Scale Smartphone User Studies. These researchers recognized the pervasive presence of the smartphone in the recent decade, and they wanted to look at the use habits of Blackberry users. The application was a simple logger (pictured below) that would maintain data based off two hardware cues: the LCD screen being activated and the OS idle flag being set.

  (image from the paper)

Two main statistics were taken, with the results being shown in the below graph. The total length of interaction time per day ended up with an average of almost 1.7 hours, and the average number of sessions per day was around 87. Both values were skewed by high outliers, and (according to the researchers) also affected by malicious users and resource-hogging apps.

(image from the paper)

Thanks and gig 'em!

Earl Oliver. 2010. The challenges in large-scale smartphone user studies. In Proceedings of the 2nd ACM International Workshop on Hot Topics in Planet-scale Measurement (HotPlanet '10). ACM, New York, NY, USA, , Article 5 , 5 pages.
doi: 10.1145/1834616.1834623
URL: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1834616.1834623

Article Review - Sentient Graffiti

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Today, I looked at a research paper from 2007 entitled A context-aware mobile mash-up platform for ubiquitous web. As the title indicates, these researchers sought to create a mobile application platform that supported context-aware features in what is known as the Ubiquitous Web. Context-awareness was achieved by a combination of features, including precise location (GPS), proximity (Bluetooth), an object's physical features, and user-generated annotations (i.e. keywords/phrases). Ubiquitous Web (or UW) is an idea that enhances the context-awareness; it involves linking physical objects to a virtual resource via URIs and then providing information and services that enrich the user experience.

The specific platform they envisioned and implemented was known as Sentient Graffiti (or SG). The flow of information in this platform is described in the image below. Essentially, users can divide the functional blocks of SG into two layers. Graffiti annotation involves the placement of content using the context-aware properties mentioned previously, and graffiti discovery/consumption is the browsing of those pieces of content.

 (image from the paper)

The researchers insisted that SG is a platform and not an application because of its ability to be used to create other context-aware applications. They claim that SG addresses three critical functional requirements for these types of apps: the modeling of every physical object/region, the filtering of annotations by context, and the pool of HTTP push/pull commands for user interaction. The paper closed with a few examples of how SG could be used, one of which is pictured below.

(image from the paper) 

This paper is exciting for several reasons. First off, we're finding more and more interest in the idea of virtual graffiti, which is great. On the flip side, there are still many improvements to be made on all of these previous attempts. Additionally, this research has shown that consumer-grade mobile devices are very capable of running context-aware server/client applications.

Thanks and gig 'em!

Lopez-de-Ipia, D.; Vazquez, J.I.; Abaitua, J.; , "A context-aware mobile mash-up platform for ubiquitous web," Intelligent Environments, 2007. IE 07. 3rd IET International Conference on , vol., no., pp.116-123, 24-25 Sept. 2007
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=4449920&isnumber=4449897

Article Review - Augmented Reality 2.0

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Today, I looked at a research paper from 2011 entitled Augmented Reality 2.0. The team behind this paper took a fresh look at AR by comparing it to another popular buzz word - Web 2.0. As they described it, the move to Web 2.0 involved a shift toward massive, simultaneously connected, and user-driven content. In addition, there was a paradigm shift to mask the differences between different sets of data - that is, local data should be indistinguishable from roaming data, and different content sources should be able to be mashed together into new, dynamically generated content. In the researchers' opinions, this should be the goal of augmented reality as well (see figure).

(image from the paper)

The researchers then went into the components that they thought were most important when developing AR content-generators. The first, application data, would essentially be a transference of the way Web 2.0 handles its data - through the AJAX model of asynchronous, multi-threaded Javascript execution. The next component, real-world representation, is being solved right now through a variety of methods, including planar surfaces, geo-location data, and even pure camera-based data. The third (and biggest) challenge is the actual development of client-side AR applications. The team identified several authoring tools that could be used, including some for non-programmers (see figure). It's worth noting that the biggest challenge here is still the development of mobile AR applications by non-programmers, but the researchers believed that the wide array of easy-to-understand Python scripts could be combined to make it work.

(image from the paper)

After describing a few case studies that were beginning to make use of these components, the paper concluded with some brief miscellaneous thoughts. First, they recognized a need for more research in the area of outdoor localization, believing GPS to be too inaccurate to fully realize AR 2.0 and recommending computer vision techniques now that mobile phones have become much more powerful. Next, they looked at potential development areas, seeing that potential in just about every area, from personal exploration to urban planning to education. Finally, they briefly discussed the need for better user evaluation techniques, stating that current methods are too small and too qualitative.

Overall, I feel like this article gave me more confidence in the importance of what my project group is working on. Group Graffiti seeks to help answer many of the concerns of "AR 1.0", and with applications like ours continually being developed, AR 2.0 could be well on its way.

Thanks and gig 'em!

Billinghurst, Mark; Langlotz, Tobias; Schmalstieg, Dieter; "Augmented Reality 2.0," Virtual Realities, pp.13-37. 2011.
doi: 10.1007/978-3-211-99178-7_2
Url: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-211-99178-7_2

Article Review - User Studies for Touch-Screen Interfaces

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Today, I looked a research paper from 2009 entitled Evaluation of User Interface Design and Input Methods for Applications on Mobile Touch Screen Devices. In a deviation from the augmented reality studies, this paper performed a user study to try and determine the "best" interface design for mobile touch-screen devices. They commented that previous studies had given somewhat vague guidelines on what a good interface "should" be, but they wanted to compare very specific UI techniques and gain empirical data.

(image from the paper)

To do this, they looked at three different aspects of mobile application interfaces. First, they compared a scrollable layout to a tabbed layout by having users navigate to different pages. An interesting finding here was that even though the scrollable layout had faster results, a qualitative questionnaire revealed that users seemed to prefer the aesthetics of the tabbed layout. Next, they had users edit their profiles with modal dialogs (i.e. date picker) versus non-modal input methods (directly entering with the keyboard). For this task, the clear winner in both timing and preference was the non-modal form of entry, probably because users were more accustomed to the standard QWERTY keyboard; this might yield different results with today's users. Finally, they had users navigate a list and use a menu to perform various operations on each element, once with a context menu (long press) and once with the physical menu button. In this case, the physical button won out in both timing and usability simply because the users felt the context press was not very intuitive. Even by today's menu standards, I tend to agree with these results.

The biggest drawback of this usability study was the small experimental group, although it did help that the researches had a variety of ages and experience levels within that small group. Usability is something often overlooked, and so the more research efforts like these, the better.

Thanks and gig 'em!

Balagtas-Fernandez, Florence; Forrai, Jenny; Hussmann, Heinrich; "Evaluation of User Interface Design and Input Methods for Applications on Mobile Touch Screen Devices," Human-Computer Interaction – INTERACT 2009. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pp.243-246.
doi: 10.1007/978-3-642-03655-2_30
Url: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-03655-2_30