The document summarizes a master's thesis that proposed an architecture called RelateGateways to enable spontaneous interactions between mobile users and nearby pervasive services. It describes a model where users can visually discover services represented as gateways on their mobile device. Users can then interact with and invoke services simply by dragging and dropping or clicking on the gateways. The thesis presented a prototype implementation and conducted a formative user study that provided feedback on the concept. The goal of the work was to make accessing nearby services and devices more natural and effortless for mobile users.

1. RelateGateways An Architecture to Enable Spontaneous Mobile Spatial Interaction with Pervasive Services Master Thesis, Dominique Guinard, Fribourg 2007 Supervisors: Hans Gellersen, Denis Lalanne, Rolf Ingold.

2. Context Lancaster, Northern UK: Pop: 30’000 (100’000 when including the sheeps). Infolab 21: 250 IT researchers. Ubicomp Group. / 35

3. Today’s Menu… Introduction, Aim E2ESD Model Spatial Discovery Video Network and Service Discovery Invocation and Interoperability Cross-device Interactions Evaluation Conclusion / 35

4. Introduction: Bob’s Adventure Bob, researcher in biology at Unifr talk at Lancs. Bob needs to print his presentation. W here is the printer? / 35 ? T - 30 minutes

5. Introduction: Bob’s Adventure Bob finds someone who knows someone who met someone who knows where the printer is located! Hem, Bob feels less cool. / 35 ? T - 10 minutes

6. Introduction: Bob’s Adventure Bob now needs: To find the printer’s drivers. Install the printer. Get the right to access it. Find out about the printer’s properties and accepted formats. Etc… … print the document! Arg, Bob doesn’t feel cool anymore! / 35 T - 30 seconds

7. Introduction: Summary Mobile users can benefit from access to pervasive services. Network and service discovery technologies facilitate spontaneous connections. However, these approaches are not user centric: Difficult for users to identify services; Lack of simple and natural interaction techniques: => Lack of spontaneity in interaction… / 35 Introduction

8. Aim Using the mobile device to: Identify services available in the user’s immediate environment. Consume the services in a natural and standard manner. Need to: Include users in the discovery process. Address identification, discovery and invocation. / 35 Introduction

9. Today’s Menu… Introduction, Aim E2ESD Model Spatial Discovery Video Network and Service Discovery Invocation and Interoperability Cross-device Interactions Evaluation Conclusion / 35

10. End-to-End Service Discovery Model (E2ESD) / 35 E2ESD Model

11. Layer 1: Spatial Discovery / 35

12. Gateways User Interface Widgets as access points to the services: Gateways. Users visually discover the services: Mapping the user’s view of his environment on the mobile desktop. UI as a compass. / 35 Spatial Discovery

13. Implementation Small Java Swing windows representing the service providers. At the screen periphery, integrated to the desktop. Two interaction modes: Drag-and-Drop. Click. / 35 Spatial Discovery

14. Spatial Context Spatial context initialy delivered to the mobile client by a Wizard of Oz interface. Introducing Relate: EU-founded project. Ad-hoc sensor network. Providing relative positioning. Achieved: first extend to provide real-time positioning data to the compass UI. / 35 Spatial Discovery

15. Spatial Context: Deployement To provide the user interface with spatial context we need: A USB Dongle/Brick on the mobile device. An autonomous Dot on each service provider. / 35 Spatial Discovery

16. Video Demonstration / 35

17. Layer 2: Network & Service Discovery / 35

18. Extending Relate: Before / 35 Network Discovery

19. Extending Relate: After / 35 Network Discovery

20. Layer 3: Invocation and Interoperability / 35 Interoperability

21. Modeling the Services A service is composed of: A ServiceProvider, enclosing the service logic. A ServiceRequester containing enough information to invoke the service. 2 types of services: Push service (can be invoked using a Universal Requester). Pull-and-Push service. / 35 Interoperability

22. « Plug and Play » Invocation The semantics of Pull-and-Push Services is unknown to the mobile client before discovery. Packets of Mobile Code (ServiceRequesters, descriptions, icon, etc.) are downloaded and dynamically loaded on the mobile device. / 35 Interoperability

23. Cross-Device Interactions Using the computing power as a service. Use-cases: Collaborative tasks Cross-device interactions for single user. Extending the EBL toolkit: Cooperation with UCL (Université Catholique de Louvain la Neuve, HCI Lab). / 35 Interoperability

24. Today’s Menu… Introduction, Aim E2ESD Model Spatial Discovery Video Network and Service Discovery Invocation and Interoperability Cross-device Interactions Evaluation Conclusion / 35

25. Settings Test run in Lancaster, formative user study in Munich. Total of 20 users. 3 “service enabled” devices within a large office. / 35 Evaluation

26. Qualitative Results Most cited benefits: No installation, no configuration: saves time. Ease of interaction with the services: drag and drop. Dynamic spatial arrangement of the gateways: making the UI more natural, especially useful in unknown places. Suggested a number of UI improvements. And services to implement. / 35 Evaluation

27. Today’s Menu… Introduction, Aim E2ESD Model Spatial Discovery Video Network and Service Discovery Invocation and Interoperability Cross-device Interactions Evaluation Conclusion / 35

28. Bootstraping Spontaneous Mobile Spatial Interactions Implementation of the E2ESD bundled into a single, runnable application offering: A spatial user interface « toolkit » (MVC based + contextual rules-engine). A Network and Service Discovery system. An Invocation and Interoperability system. An architecture for prototyping pervasive services. Various simulation and debugging tools. A framework (SOA) supporting the rapid prototyping of mobile spatial interactions. / 35 Conclusion

29. Quantitative Outputs Dissemination 3 accepted workshop papers: MSI @ CHI 07, Permid @ Pervasive 07, SensorNet 07 2 conference papers submited Ubicomp 07 (Demo Paper), LoCA 07 Prototyping Framework: ~16’000 lines of code. ~160 classes (to consolidate!). To few hours of sleep… / 35 Conclusion

30. Open Questions Scalability of the application: In terms of user interface. In terms of prototyping framework. User study is formative: Need for a comparative study as well. Need to evaluate the framework and its use for the prototyping of mobile spatial applications. Security concerns: Spontaneity is nice but it leaves a number of doors open for attackers. / 35 Conclusion

31. Questions ? Thanks for your attention…. Project’s homepage: http://ubicomp.lancs.ac.uk/relategateways Contact: [email_address] / 35 Conclusion