Case Study Local and Mobile
Using mobile phone for local interactions
Testing the first exhibit using the “CommPose” platform.“
The Present Future
Mobile phones have become the ubiquitous, always-connected devices we hoped they would be. Still, they have yet to fulfill the promise of being our ‘gateway’ to interacting with different services. What do I mean? Well, remember the idea that we’d be able to approach a storefront and interact with it using our mobile phone (or other ‘connected’ pocket device). It is still scarcely a reality. We call these types of interactions ‘artefacts of the present future’—things that should be happening with today’s technology, yet still seem far in the future.
Many manufacturers, many handsets, few standards.
This failure of promise is largely due to the wide variety of manufacturers, each with their own variety of handsets, each touting a variety of technologies that rarely standardize and therefore fail to find the common-ground needed for such interactions. So what can we do to bring the ‘present future’ into the present?
Bluetooth and CommPose
For several years we experimented with ways for people to get images off their mobile phones into public spaces, using every available technology. Our goal was to use the cheapest and fastest methods available, which with the state of technology today mean using Bluetooth.
Bluetooth is designed for short-range communication between devices.
Bluetooth is a short-range wireless technology created for low-weight (not so much data) communication between personal devices. It’s designed so that your mobile phone can connect to your wireless headset, which can also connect to your PC, and can even connect to other phones. However, this normally requires a password to entered by both mobile users, which makes quick transactions a bit more painful.
More user-testing with CommPose.
CommPose is written for Mac OSX.
In our initial software project, CommPose, we found a way to circumvent this restriction, allowing users to upload photos to our display without entering passwords. However, after much testing we got a real-world understanding of the state of Bluetooth technology. Only a marginal percent of phones have Bluetooth (but more and more every day), and most of those who do have it aren’t sure of how to use it.
Crippled Technology
In some countries, such as South Korea and Japan, Bluetooth is scarce amongst handsets. The large telecoms in those countries require handset manufacturers to disable or ‘cripple’ the technology to encourage transactions to take place on the cellular network, rather than in direct person-to-person communication.
CommPose installations in South Korea - Footprints and Local Channels.
We had to deal with this restriction first hand when we took CommPose to Seoul as part of a large exhibit in the ZeroOne Design Center. Upon discovering that barely 5% of the audience had Bluetooth, we had to come up with another solution—one that would allow both those with and without Bluetooth to interact with our exhibit.
It turned out that the best solution for the problem was ‘lo-fi’. Almost all Korean handsets had an MMS (media messaging) feature that allowed users to interact with the social networking site CyWorld. By entering an email address instead of cellular number when sending these messages, we could direct users to mail us photos rather than transfer via Bluetooth. Because of the speeds of Korean networks, the transaction was almost as seamless as using short-range networking.
Interaction diagram for the updated CommPose platform.
We updated CommPose to allow for submission of photos via email, using a smart filter to tell which ones originated from a mobile phone and which ones were from desktops or spam. The new system would check the email server every 10 seconds for new messages, download what it needed, strip out unnecessary data leaving only the address, subject, and a single photo—much like how we treated Bluetooth connections. This ensured that the audience only needed to wait ten seconds at most to see that their photo was uploaded. As an additional benefit of supporting email submissions, we also set up the system to reply to users saying that their photo was accepted to our exhibit and thanking them for participating.
Beyond sending photos and video, Aesthetec has worked on a wide variety of local interaction projects using mobile phones. If you have an idea, or are looking for ideas on how to use these technologies—get in touch!