MCEs (Mobile Collaborative Environments) are systems designed to allow users to collaborate anytime and anywhere using wireless networks and mobile devices. Collaborative environments or groupware applications typically enable a group of people to manipulate shared objects, and modify them in a coherent manner.

There are many collaborative activities that may be amenable to technological support; examples include electronic conferencing, social media sharing, and collaboration between field- and office-based colleagues. For users away from the office or home, there is an increasing demand for MCEs that offer effective collaborative facilities on the move. The mobile cellular device offers a ubiquitous platform to deliver such services, provided its many physical and technological constraints can be overcome.

In an effort to enhance the state of mobile collaborative environments we have developed an MCE that works across mobile cellular networks and through several user studies present findings on the importance of usability design in the roll-out of effective mobile collaborative solutions and a design guideline for future mobile collaborative services.

In partnership with broadcasters we have been looking at the relationship between broadcast TV and mobile video. Grab T.V allows those watching television at home to grab short segments of the shows they are watching, download them on to their mobile phone and then to share those same segments with their friends later on, perhaps at work or down the pub. This sharing often entails more than simply watching them together but the actual exchange of the files between mobile devices.

Grab and share works by linking the broadcast content to the mobile networks through a converged device, a DAB enabled phone, along with a bespoke application that allows the user to select, download and exchange the sought for segments of multimedia content.

Today, digital photos have become increasingly easy to capture, and we are no longer constrained by the 24 or 36 exposures provided by traditional film cameras. A single memory card allows a user to capture hundreds of photos. Yet this very capacity has led to a problem of users storing many images with very similar obscure names, with consequent difficulties in managing the collection. We therefore need to look beyond the capture and storage capacities offered by current digital cameras, to ways in which we can simplify the process of managing the many thousands of images that an individual may take over potentially many years.

There has been much research into the importance of location in managing photos, the addition of metadata to images, and methods to use GPS in automating the process of location tagging. Much of this research is focused on the creation of map based interfaces for photo browsing. Our research focuses on GPS tagging as an enabler to provide enhanced features in addition to building map interfaces, such as automating street level key-wording of photos, enhancing search and enabling location based photo clustering.

Sunrise is an ongoing research project into deep-tagging of digital media. Unlike existing tagging technologies Sunrise can make use of both accurate and probabilistic tagging techniques to improve image management, clustering and searchability. The technology is location agnostic and can make use of multiple tracking streams such as GPS, cellular data and optical identification.

The growing inclusion of cameras in mobile devices holds significant potential for the development of novel, context-aware pervasive computing applications. We have developed a prototype image recognition system capable of identifying landmarks (typically, city buildings and structures) from photographs captured on camera phones. The image recognition process runs server-side, as a web service accessible over GPRS from a web enabled phone or PDA. Photographs of landmarks are pre-loaded into a central database, which is then queried by users submitting images from their camera phones. The image recognition algorithm is robust to variations in both illumination and point of view.

The system is envisaged as an alternative to GPS where users may not have access to GPS equipment, a reliable GPS signal (e.g. indoors in a museum) or where resolution and orientation may be complicating factors in establishing correct context (e.g. several landmarks present at a single location). The research project is also investigating applications of the system to mobile blogging, and techniques to enhance the scalability of the system whilst retaining query-response times in the order of seconds.

Situated public displays are a common feature in public spaces where dynamic, contextualized information needs to be conveyed to members of the public. At present, however, most of these screens are passive, displaying a series of static images. Recent research has evaluated user interaction techniques with large displays in an effort to make these installations more useful to those consuming the information they display. One particularly interesting form of interaction with large public displays is that of ‘personal device based’ interactions, wherein users interact with public displays via their ubiquitous cellular handsets.

This project is investigating novel, clientless architectures for seamless interactions between mobile phones and large public displays. A clientless architecture enables solutions to work across the majority of Bluetooth supported mobile handsets, regardless of form factors, hardware specifications or underling operating systems.

The Cotswold project introduced a mobile information system for use in the Cotswold Water Park, England. The system offered a variety of means of obtaining rich multimedia content from oak waymarker posts (see picture above) using a mobile phone. Questionnaires and focus groups were employed in order to determine participants reactions to the system and their attitudes to the use of mobile and pervasive systems in nature-based environments.

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The goal of Cityware is to develop theory, principles, tools and techniques for the design, implementation and evaluation of city-scale pervasive systems as integral facets of the urban landscape. While architecture has shaped the built environment to satisfy urban dwellers aesthetically and to accommodate their functional needs such as face-to-face interactions and travel, pervasive systems shape electronically mediated interactions in urban space, including use of both fixed and mobile displays and wireless communication. A major issue is space and its relationship with behaviour: how do we design the space created by fusing electronically created interaction space with architecturally created physical space? Another major issue is infrastructure: how do we provide interaction and interoperability that scales up to city-scale pervasive systems, while ensuring that they function appropriately and merge aesthetically with urban spaces, materials, forms and uses?

Cityware is a multidisciplinary research project, integrating the disciplines of architecture and urban design, human-computer interaction and distributed systems. Cityware is funded through the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council’s WINES programme, with support from the Cityware industrial partners. Cityware began in October 2005 and runs until March 2009.

The digital toolkit was a research project developed to simplify the task of analyzing complex image data and performing real time pattern matching operations, whilst providing rich, accurate and time reliable augmented overlays for visual feedback.

Highlights: Easy hook-up to consumer and professional grade devices.  Support for multiple concurrent ‘custom’ analysis engines.  Hyper fast tracking and database lookups via smart in memory object prevalence switching functionality.  Fast Augmentation engine (0.014453ms) for rich visual feedback and precision object tracking and built in multicast packet streaming technology enabling support for distributed shared augmentations.

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