In Traction

The paper Making Bits and Atoms Talk Today I wrote together with Ruben Thys about his Master’s thesis featured a scenario on interaction with printed media called SemaNews (there is also some information available at Ruben’s page under the section “Results > Daily Newspaper”).

Here is a very short video of the SemaNews scenario that I used in my presentation at the DIPSO workshop:

Apparantely the more general idea of interactivity with printed media — in this case ads in printed media — seems to be breaking through. Saatchi and Saatchi together with HITLabNZ created an interactive, augmented-reality advertisement for the Wellington Zoo in a New Zealand newspaper. Users can use their mobile to see 3D images of some of the animals in the zoo. They first download an application from a URL by decoding a barcode on the ad. As they move their phone over a printed pattern on the ad, they can rotate the 3D objects accordingly. The 3D objects are placed over the image that the camera records. The ad was definitely effective since the zoo saw a 32 % increase in visitors

Here is a short movie (original source):

Get the latest Flash Player to see this player.

2D barcodes are gaining more ground. While they were already popular in Asia, Google will now also be using them in their print ads (photo by Chika Watanabe):

There is no real interactivity for the user here though. These barcodes just encode an URL and thereby offer the reader an easy way to go to the accompanying website while letting Google know that they came from a particular print ad. Nevertheless, it is interesting to see that barcodes and other auto-ID technologies such as RFID are getting more popular everyday.

The paper we submitted to DIPSO 2007 (a workshop at this year’s Ubicomp conference) has been accepted.

Title: Making Bits and Atoms Talk Today – A Practical Architecture for Smart Object Interaction

Authors: Jo Vermeulen, Ruben Thys, Kris Luyten and Karin Coninx

Abstract:
Bringing together the physical and digital worlds has been the subject of research for some time now. In particular, a number of successful prototypes that link physical objects with digital information (often called smart object systems) have already been presented. However, a generally accepted architecture to design such systems has not yet emerged. This paper presents a reusable and practical framework for developing smart object applications today. At the basis of our approach lies the use of Semantic Web technology to drive interaction between the physical and digital worlds. We used this framework
to develop SemaNews, a novel application that combines the advantages of digital news feeds with those of physical newspapers. We prove that our architecture is reusable by building a second prototype in a different application domain: STalkingObjects implements the basic components of a store of the future.

Venue and date: Innsbruck, Austria, September 16, 2007

On Monday I got the notification that our submission for WoSSIoT’07 was accepted. This means I have to travel to Lisbon and Salamanca (for EIS 2007) in the same week

The paper is titled Tangible Mashups: Exploiting Links between the Physical and Virtual World. More details on my publications page.

A preliminary program for EIS 2007 is online. I will be presenting in the session on Models for Reasoning from 09:00 to 13:00 on Saturday, March 24.

We sent in the camera-ready version of our paper yesterday, after an unpleasant experience with trying to convert our original LaTeX version to a Word document. Fortunately, it took us less time than expected thanks to Yves who wrote a few Word macros to help with the conversion.

I’m looking forward to the conference. The list of accepted papers seems interesting.

Yesterday, we were informed that the paper we submitted for Engineering Interactive Systems 2007 was accepted. It’s also my first publication where I’m the first author

The paper describes a way to augment semantic service descriptions with high-level user interface models. The resulting service description is called a service-interaction description. This approach allows a service to present a suitable user interface (for interacting with it) on a wide variety of target platforms. We also introduce a semantic network built on top of the UIML vocabulary. More on that in a later post.

More details about the paper can be found at my publications page.