HOIT2005

source:hoit2005.org

The (provisional) program for the full papers session from the Home-Oriented Informatics and Telematics Conference is available.


http://www.ics.uci.edu/~vmgyg/hoit2005/HOITFullPapersInSessions1.pdf

Location Aware Computing using PlaceLab

PlaceLab is now in Version 2.0 and there is a paper submitted to the Pervasive’05 conference where the system is described. Potentially, PlaceLab allows the creation of Location Based Services and Context Aware Applications for people by people. What is PlaceLab? The abstract of the paper says it all:

“Location awareness is an important capability for mobile computing. Yet inexpensive, pervasive positioning -- a requirement for wide-scale adoption of location-aware computing -- has been elusive. We demonstrate a radio beacon-based approach to location, called Place Lab, that can overcome the lack of ubiquity and high-cost found in existing location sensing approaches. Using Place Lab, commodity laptops, PDAs and cell phones estimate their position by listening for the cell IDs of fixed radio beacons, such as wireless access points, and referencing the beacons’ positions in a cached database. We present experimental results showing that 802.11 and GSM beacons are sufficiently pervasive in the greater Seattle area to achieve 20-30 meter median accuracy with nearly 100% coverage measured by availability in people’s daily lives. “

Folksonomy Futures

At the Semantic Blogging Demonstrator of HP Labs in Bristol, there is one more article about "Folksonomies", one of the latest internet buzz words.

This time, folksonomies are analysed from the semantic web perspective and how they are related to more formal forms of classification such as ontologies.

Read the full article here

Piero: Better Insight Into the Game of Rugby

(Source bbc.co.uk)

The BBC Broadcast Corporation has developed Piero, a system that allows to generate a 3D Virtual Environments (VE) from a live sports event and mix it with the live video feeds, turning the live images into a virtual stadium. Similar technology was used before during footbal events.

The system captures the movements of the players and the ball in real time and once the data is in the VE, it is possible to review the action from different camera viewpoints and at different speeds, allowing the producers to replay the game in previously impossible camera angles, and to the viewers to gain new insights of what happened.

The key aspects of the system is to use the TV cameras as tracking devices (recording the camera position/tilt/pan/lenses), generating the 3D data, and mixing it with the video feed.

Other system that is used for sports such as Car Rallies or Sailing is VirtualSpectator.

Symbian v9.0 Released

(Source: symbian.com)

Symbian, the operating system that powers many Mobile and Smart Phones, has reached version 9.0. See the press release for the new features and improvements. The tool chain has been also updated.

More Pervasive Games: GPS::Tron

(Source: datenmafia.org)

GPS::TRON is a Location Based game that uses the "Tron Bike Chase" concept and implements it in the real world. Players are equipped with a GPS receiver that tracks the users position, a mobile phone (Siemens SX1 in this case) that draws a line on the screen as they move and an internet connection to keep both phones in sync have to avoid to meet each others lines.

There are many research project that pursue the “Pervasive Game” concept. An interesting project to follow is the IPerG:

“IPerG will produce entirely new game experiences, that are tightly inter-woven with our everyday lives through the items, devices and people that surround us and the places we inhabit.”.

In this years Pervasive Computing conference, there will be a workshop exclusively dedicated to the Pervasive Games Concept:

http://www.ipsi.fraunhofer.de/ambiente/pergames2005/