Talking-Points@expoSItion

Posted on March 18, 2008 by escobarm

Talking-Points presented at the School of Information expoSItion on Monday, March 17th. The exposition occurred immediately after the SI Job Fair, so employers at the Fair came by to check out all the projects being displayed. We received a flood of positive response on our demonstration at the exposition from employers, students, faculty and the public.

Jakob setting up the technical demonstration
The expoSItion allowed us to feature our concept of a community driven orientation system through our display board filled with information about our goals for the project, wireframes of the device’s navigation, and photos showing our progress. Additionally, a monitor was mounted in our display board, projecting further information about the project and playing videos from our WOz (Wizard of Oz) exercises. Furthermore, we were able to have a clickable dummy of the Talking-Points system available to individuals, giving them the ability to gain an interactive sample of the Talking-Points experience.
The Talking-Points poster wall created by Michelle and Kumud
Overall, the expoSItion was a success for Talking-Points. It allowed us to further expose the project to the community.

Michelle in front of our poster

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Announcement: Talking-Points will present at expoSItion

Posted on March 13, 2008 by jk

Hello everybody,

we will be presenting our Talking-Points project at the School of Informatio’s expoSItion next Monday (March 17) from 12:00-2:00pm. The expoSItion is an annual event where Master students from the School of Information can present the projects that they are working on. There will faculty and potential employers present and projects can win cash prizes. We will present a prototype version of our client software on our mobile device the OQO, and we will show the whole concept behind our project and what kind of research we have done so far.

We would be delighted if you would come by and take a look at our presentation and also the other interesting project by other SI students.

what: SI expoSItion
when: Monday 17, 12:00-2:00pm
where: Michigan League (2nd floor) map

See you there!

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The Wrap – Or what we will have done by the end of the semester

Posted on March 13, 2008 by jk

This is a short post about what we expect the results of our project are going to be after the end of the semester. This final deliverable is called “the Wrap” within the GROCS community. We can’t really say for sure what exactly is going to be in it, but it is definitely going to be comprised of multiple things:

First of all we plan to write a research paper at the end of the semester that we plan to submit to an Human-Computer Interaction related conference. The paper will describe the research that we did about how blind and sighted user’s walk through urban environments and how a system like Talking-Points could augment there experience with information about the locations that they pass. It will also describe our design for Talking-Points and how our research informed our design decisions.

The second more tangible part of our wrap will be a proof-of-concept prototype of our mobile device. It will be some software written Java that can detect location tagged with bluetooth beacons, make a request to the Talking-Points internet database and present the location information to the user. There will be two presentation options: either through a graphical user interface or through a speech interface. We don’t know how far we will get in terms of functionality to navigate through the location information, but that will be the next step after the things described above are working.

The third part of the Talking-Points project is the internet database that will contain all the location information. It will have an interface for user to create new locations and contribute to existing locations and an API so the mobile device can access its information. We will start with a basic interface to create and edit the core information of locations and see how many types of additional information (hours, history, comments) we can integrate.

A long-run goal that we will most definitely not reach, but for which we should be able to present a detailed plan is to make the whole system customizable and social. This should allow users to customize the system to their particular needs and profit from each others use.

Finally this very Blog could also be considered as part of the results of our project. By the end of the semester this should be a fair documentation of the process that our project went through.

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Client Architecture

Posted on March 4, 2008 by jk

After all our initial research we finally started working on the implementation of the Talking-Points client. We got three motivated developers (Josh Rychlinski, Travis Donggun Yoo and Peter Kretschman) working on it and hop to be able to present first results very soon. The plan for our project prototype is to develop the client software in Java and run it on an OQO model 02, an “Ultra Mobile PC” (UMPC) running Windows XP. Using Java the software should be fairly easily portable to mobile platforms like Java ME (Java Mobile Edition) or Google’s Android plattform. The initial release is planned to be composed of 5 components:

  • TagReader – detects nearby tagged locations.
  • ClientMessageHandler – manages the communication with the server
  • ClientDataModel – interprets the location information from the server
  • GUI (Graphical User Interface) & SUI (Speech User Interface) - present the location information to user and allow him to navigate through it

Client architecture diagram

So using the client in practice would result in the following interaction between the components:

  1. User comes near a tagged location
  2. TagReader detects the presence of the location and gets its identification information (in our case the MAC address of the Bluetooth beacon)
  3. TagReader invocates a HTTP request for location information to the server (TP2s) through the ClientMessageHandler
  4. Server responds with location information in XML format
  5. ClientMessageHandler passes response to ClientDataModel
  6. ClientDataModel parses the XML and create a Location object
  7. Location object is presented by one of the two user interface modules (either read to the user of displayed on the screen of the mobile device)
  8. User can navigate through the location information (either by voice commands like “menu”, “more”, “skip” or by user controls like buttons and forms)

So much for the broad plan. We started working on the individual modules and hope to be able to piece them together to a working prototype that will be a realistic visualization of the idea behind Talking-Points. As always feedback about the client architecture is very welcome.

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What would you like to get from Talking-Points …

Posted on February 9, 2008 by jk

We had a very productive GROCS design review yesterday. We got a ton of very valuable feedback what people (in this case only sighted people) would like to get from the Talking-Points system. These are most of the things mentioned:

  • I would like the system not to be so consumer oriented. I don’t want to buy things I don’t want information about businesses. I want different types of information, for example about libraries.

  • I like the advertising part. I could imagine that businesses would notify me about special deals or maybe give out “coupons”.

  • For me it is very important to have options to opt-in or opt-out certain information. So I can control what I get to hear.

  • Even after living in a city for many years, I still pass certain locations and ask myself: “what’s that is all about?“. But I never take the time to ask or look it up at home. It would be nice if the system could tell me that.

  • I think it could be a great help if you come to a new city where it normally takes you some time to figure out the ins and outs. The system could give good insights about that.

  • I would like real-time information. For example the number of available seats or the length of the cue when I pass a restaurant.

  • I would like to get directional information and distances to places.

  • I’m a big beer drinker and I would like to be notified about beer specials and whether I’m in the happy-hour before I enter a place.

  • I would like some extended sensory information. For example, what kind of ground I’m walking on, which people have been here before, …

  • I’m interested in the evolution of publishing and this could be new and exciting format.

  • There could also be really different information like that there is a cocoon next to the path when you walk in the Arboretum.

  • I got a hot chocolate the other day at Starbucks and then found a much nicer place where I could have gotten the chocolate just a block away. I would like to get notified about those kinds of business alternatives.

  • I think the most important feature is that it is customizable for my perspective and can somehow understand my current situation. If I have coffee in my hand I don’t want to hear any information about coffee shops anymore.

  • I would like to know where the next restroom is.

  • Could the system give me information about it when I point at a location it instead of walking by it?

I hope I captured everybody’s feedback fairly well. This is going to be a major task of our project to get to know what kind of different information different people want to hear in different situations. So please, tell us what kind of information you would like to get!

Summarizing this we concluded that by far the most important part of Talking-Points is going to be customization! In this one meeting alone there were so many different people with very different needs, that could hardly be satisfied with a “default” system.

So our approach is going to be to collect as much different information about each location as we can get and try to store and organize it so that it will be easy to pull customized data. The abstract approach right now is to have all kinds of small, different information pieces linked to one location and labeled with tags that represent when they might be useful. For example tags like “blind”, “tourist”, “history”, etc. Hopefully we will be able to pull relevant information for a particular person in a particular situation using these tags.

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"Wizard of Oz study"

Posted on February 8, 2008 by jk

The Talking-Points Team and the WOz participantsLast week we conducted a “Wizard of Oz study” for our Talking-Points design. This is “an experiment in which subjects interact with a computer system that subjects believe to be autonomous, but which is actually being operated or partially operated by an unseen human being.” [Wikipedia]

Method

We equipped two test participants with a cellphone with headset and let them walk down South University Street. We wrote a script with location information that we read to the participant over a second cellphone when he passed the respective locations. This information would later come from the social Talking-Points database. While the participant walked down the street we followed him with a video camera and observed how he would behave. We also recorded what the participant was saying as well as what the Talking-Points narrator was reading. After the experiment we gave the participants a short survey and interviewed them about their experience and suggestions. There were two different runs: on the first run we told the participant that he should use voice commands to control the systems on the second run he should use the keypad of his phone.

Data

So we ended up with two videos of the two runs we completed. Those videos we uploaded to Youtube for everyone to see.

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzkAkszBL9o][youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PPBsCwjSYgM]

In addition to that we have all the information we gathered from the surveys and the interviews.

Findings

We got very valuable insights on how to improve the design of our product as well as the design of this study.From the participants feedback it seemed that a voice controlled user interface would be a better than an interface through the cellphones keypad. We also got a lot of suggestions for new interactions with the system that we had not thought about in our initial design. For example, the user used the previously non existing command “repeat” because he couldn’t understand what the system was saying because of background noises. Another thing that showed to be really important would be a feature to skip ahead in the information the system is giving you.

WOz participant in front of TCF BankA problem with the methodology of the study was that the narrator was walking to close behind the test person. The test person repeatedly tried to establish eye contact with the narrator when using voice commands. The task of the study was to get to TCF Bank on the Corner of South University and Church Street and see what kind of comments users had left about this location. We realized that in the future we would have to come up with a more realistic background task for the study. But all in all we were very pleased with the results of the WOz study and are planning to repeat it with blind or other sighted participants.

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Database diagram v0.1

Posted on January 18, 2008 by jk

This is a first try of a diagram for the social database that is going to store all the location data for the Talking-Points project. The database has two main goals:
1) make it as easy, accessible and usable as possible to contribute to the database
2) provide relevant and reliable information for each location

The format of the diagram is similar to an ER diagram but at this point only intended to show the concept of the database and not yet the actual tables that it will consist of.

Database Diagram

The basic concept of the database is to differentiate between two kinds of location information. On the one hand (marked with the red ellipse) the core location information and on the other hand additional information.

The core information is supposed to include the most relevant, straightforward and reliable information about the location. This includes a meaningful title, a short description and location metadata such as coordinates, address, official URL and so on. This information is created when a location gets tagged with an RFID tag. Important about this information is that it needs to be objective and reliable. We are not 100% sure how we will ensure this, but there will be some form of checking and moderation. You can think of it a little bit as stable versions for Wikipedia.

The additional information is where the social part comes into play. Once the user has some basic information about the location he might want to know more. In this case we would like to offer different directions/types of additional information:

  • One direction is going to be opinions. Here the users can rate the location on a 5-star scale and state their opinion.
  • A second direction would be current information about the location. This could be opening times, news stories related to the location or also current special offers in case the location is a business.
  • The last direction would additional general information about the location. This information would be stored in maintained in a wiki page so that every user could add what they think is relevant concerning the location. One topic that would probably be interesting for many locations, would be something about its history.

In addition to that you will also be able to add links and tags to the locations. The tags could be used to only get notified about certain locations that are tagged with for example “blind” or “tourist”.

To see which information will actually be presented to the user of the mobile device I have marked those with the green ring. Anything else will be used only indirectly for this part.

One really major thing that we still need to address are incentives for putting information into the database. The design should already be fairly easy and usable, so that barriers to use it are low. But lack of barriers is not enough, there also need to be positive incentives. There is the incentive that you will help blind people by maintaining location information in this database, but how could user make personal use of that?

As with anything on this blog, any feedback that you have concerning our database design is very welcome and will be highly appreciated.

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Call for participants

Posted on January 13, 2008 by jk

Hello everybody,

the Talking-Points team is eagerly looking for participants with blindness to help our project. We are looking for people that can help us to identify what kind of information and features blind users would really want to use. How we could help blind people with providing you additional, interesting information about the locations that you are passing.

We would be extremely grateful for any kind of participation. This can range from giving us feedback here on the blog, to taking part in a survey, meeting with us or getting really involved with the project and participating in usability tests. In any case your help would be greatly appreciated. By participating you would not only support a good cause, but you could also help to arise more awareness for the problems that blind people are confronted with and maybe this project could actually be turned into a real product sometime in the future.

So if you are blind and want to help or if you know somebody that is, please let us know.

Your Talking-Points team.

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