Creating Experiences with Wearable Computing

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Creating Experiences with Wearable Computing

• Richard Hull, Josephine Reid, and Erik Geelhoed
• Hewlett-Packard Lab, Bristol
• 2002 IEEE , Pervasive Computing

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Outline

• Introduction
• Exploring experience
• Experiences from wearable computing application
• Three beliefs about experience
• Experimental Model
• A Walk in the Wired Woods
• User Response
• Reflections
• Conclusion

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Introduction

• Wearable Computing moves from research
  laboratories to the real world.
• Early research focused on new types of
  device-enabled utility
• We can get more experience outside its
  usefulness
• We can get direct experiences and generate
  indirect experiences from using the wearable
  computing object.

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Experience (1/2)

• Direct Experiences
• Comes from objects immediate characteristics,
  its appearance, ergonomics and user model.
• Ease-of-use has long been a guiding design
  principle.
• Indirect Experiences
• Example
• The fun of playing an instrument with friends
• The pleasure of losing yourself in a good book.

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Experience (2/2)

• Wearable computing applications that deliberately
  aim to give their users engaging experiences
  might eventually emerge as a dominant use of the
  new technology.
• Goal of project
• What makes a wearable computing experience
  engaging
• How the emerging technology might help
  systematically deliver such experience

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Three Beliefs (1/3)

• The First is that experience matters
• User might significantly value wearable
  computings experiential application
• User will encounter many wearable device while
  engaged in some ongoing experience
• The aim must naturally be to augment rather than
  diminish these active

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Three Beliefs (2/3)

• Second, we can unpack experience to understand
  why they are engaging and use that to
  systematically develop applications.
• Provisional model
• Predicting that compelling experiences will
  likely involve stimulation of the senses and
  challenge and self expression and social
  interaction

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Three Beliefs (3/3)

• Third, we believe that experiential applications
  are more likely to be engaging if creative
  practitioners (artists, games designers)
  participate.

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Simple initialization

• Situated digital experience
• We are concentrating on location sensitivity,
  where the users current position, path
  history,etc.
• We use audio as the primary method of
  communicating to the user

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A Walk in the Wired Woods (1/3)

• Worked with artist LizMilner and musician Armin
  Elsaesser to develop an art installation.
• The woods was installed in the atrium of the HP
  Lab building in Bristol, JanMay 2002

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A Walk in the Wired Woods (2/3)
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A Walk in the Wired Woods (3/3)

• The woods demonstrates a situated soundspace
• Users automatically receives audio content
  appropriate to their location
• The soundspace comprises some 30 pieces of music,
  woodland sounds, and spoken narrative

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Location Sensing (1/2)

• Based on a system developed at the Univ. of
  Bristal
• A radio frequency transmitter broadcasts a
  framing pulse and triggers subsequence bursts
  from a series of ultrasonic transmitters strung
  above the space

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Location Sensing (2/2)

• A receiver on the client device hears both the
  radio pulse and as many of the ultrasonic
  transmitters as are in range
• Compute its position by triangulation
• This system has proved to be both reliable and
  accurate, with a spatial resolution of around 15cm

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Wireless network

• The 802.11b wireless network installed throughout
  the building
• Client uses this to access the directory server
  to discovery what digital content is situated
  nearby and to stream audio content from media
  server

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XML description

• A unique identifier, a channel assignment,and a
  name
• A location and the radius of a circle of
  applicability around that location
• The URL of the audio object associated with that
  aura
• Knowing whether to loop audio on completion

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Plan View (1/2)
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Plan View (2/2)

• Different for different channels
• Red pieces of music
• Blue woodland sounds
• Black Stepping stone
• One of numerous spoken narratives
• Green wolf growls
• For alerting
• Yellow No mentioned

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Client Device (1/2)
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Client Device (2/2)

• HP Pocket PC with a compact flash wireless local
  area network card
• A small extension board to interface to the
  location sensing infrasturcture
• Headphones containing an ultrasonic receiver

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Steps

• Detect its location within the exhibition-space
  using the ultrasonic positioning system
• Interpret its location with respect to the map
  linking the physical and digital exhibition space
• Fetch audio data (and other information) on
  demand from servers over the wireless network
• Mix and play multiple stereo audio streams
  through headphones
• Log the users movements around the space and the
  auras encountered

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User response (1/2)

• We observed that visitors typically spent around
  20 minutes in this installation
• Blue line in plan view show s a path one visitor
  followed
• Users feedback was overwhelmingly positive

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User response (2/2)

• Rank 2 list of seven items using an incomplete
  block design

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Reflection

• The woods gave visitors an engaging experience
  despite its simple functionality.
• The experience model described suggest fertile
  directions along which we can orientate an
  intended experience.

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Conclusion

• Propose a model a walk in the wired wood to
  improve that wearable device creates experiences
  indirectly
• It still leave lots of work to do.