Towards Open Pervasive Displays!Adrian Friday, Lancaster University, UK! Thanks to: Nigel Davies, Sarah Clinch, Oliver Storz, Christos Efstratiou and the eCampus and PD-NET teams.

I’m from Lancaster in UK!

About 1 hour from Liverpool and Manchester (United)!

About 250 miles from London!

Experimental systems focused department!

!

My background!

1990! 1995! 2000! 2005! 2010!

Mobile"Collaboration!

Mountain"rescue!

Context-aware"GUIDE!

Equator: Physical - "Digital!

Open Interactive "Public Displays!

Why real world systems?!To probe – beyond participatory design!

Ultimate ‘acid test’ of acceptability!

Teaches you about Ubicomp ‘for real’!

Naturalistic evaluation (you say ‘it’s good for doing X for community Y’, is it?)!

Increasingly the ‘gold standard’ in major conferences!!

Championed in Oulu!!

Why not real"world systems?!

Uncontrolled environment!

Effort (initial, ongoing support and in generating high quality content and applications)!

Remote: “out of sight, out of mind”!

Unsupervised!

Often built out of COTS hardware not designed for the domain!

The unexpected happens!!

The only future for displays?!

Minority Report, 20th Century Fox, 2002 http://bit.ly/cKSOop

Is Pervasive Advertising the only future for ubicomp displays?!

Overview!Experiences of opening up our network of displays on campus!

Particularly a user and display owner facing interface!

Postulate how we might move beyond this for applications!

Some early ideas about challenges and avenues to explore!

FLUMP Adaptive Signage, 1996!

J. Finney, N. Davies, FLUMP - The FLexible Ubiquitous Monitor Project, Proceedings of the 3rd Cabernet Radicals Workshop, Connemara, May 1996

And then we had to take it down for fire safety reasons!!

Badges triggered personal pages

embedding the output of crude ‘apps’!

e-Campus, 2005-!

Large-scale deployment of networked displays across the campus (approx £0.5 million budget)!

•  To create a large scale experimental testbed in public displays and ubiquitous computing across campus!

•  To act as a catalyst for world class research in ubiquitous computing!

•  To enhance the image of Lancaster University for staff, students and visitors!

Specific focus on creating an open research infrastructure – but that only paid for the kit and running real world systems is hard!!

Requirements for standard content and proprietary applications."

Content from a range of different sources: arbitration, priorities and

preemption, wide range of scheduling criteria (interaction, time, …), dynamic

length!

O. Storz, A. Friday, N. Davies, J. Finney, C. Sas, and J. Sheridan. Public ubiquitous computing systems: Lessons from the e-campus display deployments.

IEEE Pervasive Computing, 05(3):40–47, 2006.

The e-Campus platform for display networks!

Flexible distributed infrastructure!

•  Small set of management processes on each display machine communicate over Elvin pub-sub event broker!

•  Low level API for building range of schedulers and presentation tools!

•  Abstractions hide specialised hardware, AV switching and distribution!

•  Provide support for transactions on displays (Control, Atomicity and Isolation) – can use them in concert!

•  HTTP based high-level API supporting the display of sets of content subject to a set of constraints!

Status: 70 displays: 40 door displays, 25 Large LCD panels in colleges and foyers, and 5 projected displays "(e.g. theatre)!

Ref: Keith Cheverst!

Applications!

N. Davies, A. Friday, P. Newman, S. Rutlidge and O. Storz Using Bluetooth Device Names to Support Interaction in Smart Environments MobiSys 2009

•  Bluetooth Friendly Name (Map, Google, Flickr, YouTube, TinyURL…)!

•  Follow me Content (LitFest)!

•  ‘Capture the Campus’ MR game!

•  Main ‘app’ is digital signage!!

Applications!But, these are all ‘insider’

apps – by us, trusted, using our internal framework. More complex apps require

manual deployment.!

OPENING UP CONTENT AND DEVOLVING CONTROL!

Letting go of top down control of content!

The Channel System!Initially – production and experimental systems co-existed - users sent us their content!!

The Channel systems allowed trusted user groups to schedule content on their own and others displays – it’s deliberately simple!

Separates content provision and display ownership!

The primary method for control of the e-Campus displays (for approaching 3 years)!

Channel!Users create private or

public channels ‘shared folders’ for content.

Channels may have time constraints. Stimulate a

(content) ‘network effect’.!

Displays!Display owners

subscribe to one or more channels!

And it works fairly well…!33 user groups (about 80 active users) - > 50% have used the system for > 1 year!

Over 1,700 unique content items (3,700 content items) since 2008!

Supports a variety of media (images, movies, urls)!

The only serious issue we have is poor handover when staff changes are made!

Some evidence of gaming the system!

Typical content!

2008-05

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> 80% of content are

images (toolchain and effort)!~40% of channel providers have used video at some point!Links to

webpages least effective!!

Looking deeper!

Surprisingly little temporal and locative coherence!

Rarely bound to location, but sometimes audience!

24% of content items had no obvious time constraints!

8% had a validity of one day (sometimes repeated)!

8% had a validity of up to week!

12% up to a month!

21% a validity of 2-3 months, and!

12% a validity of 1 year!

!

Or long (~120 days), - roughly a University Semester!

Content lifetime is short (7-10 days)!

People are much better at adding content than removing it!!

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80100 channels (64 currently marked ‘active’)!

50% are shared, 50% private!Considerable differences between users!-  to organise,

organisational change!

Channels are suspended but not often removed!

Discussion!The channel system has been very effective at devolving control of content scheduling!

The combination file system + web approach is very successful!

It’s conceptually simple and easy to learn!

User peeves: can’t order ‘slides’, can’t preview channel content!

Would this approach work for applications and more interactive content?!

No! Regular users can’t create the apps! So

who can?!

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Kids' WB, 1995-2001

An “Open” Approach!Current systems are closed – small networks under a single management domain!

Difficult to introduce new applications, new content or interaction!

A new infrastructure that supports a “global” network of displays & interaction and personalisation on that scale!!

New approach for applications that decouple display ownership from content production!

Need to tap into wide (global) community of developers, 3rd party applications!

Open is more content, developers, communities and customers!

http://econ.st/ifJr5g

So, writing apps is hard… we need app stores!!

http://read.bi/johtdH

For fun,"for profit!

CHALLENGES!But that may not be entirely straightforward…!

Scale: who controls what - Control vs.

Abuse, hierarchy, overlay, cloud, P2P?!

http://bit.ly/bcChQj

Personalisation, context-aware or privacy violation?!

http://www.cityware.org.uk/

Who pays, and who gets the revenue?!

More stakeholders, apps not entirely

personal, infrastructure not

owned by the end user!

DISPLAY APP MARKET!What might we see (as well as inevitable advertising)?!

Being Artistic!http://www.simultaniaproject.com/!

Inevitably… games, social media!

http://locamoda.com

Surprising hobbies… http://ww

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Memarovic N, Langheinrich M. “Your place or mine?” – Connecting communities and public places through networked public displays. Urban Internet of Things - Towards Programmable Real-time Cities (UrbanIOT 2010); Workshop at the 2nd Intl. Conference on the Internet of Things (IOT2010), December 2010

Airtime to Local Issues!

Sustainable local food?!

Photographer: Sarah Lee, http://bit.ly/knnKkU

Part of pan-global events?!

http://www.avert.org/

Wider: Events, Disasters, Human Rights, Climate Change!

Image of Tokyo Tsunami removed for copyright reasons.!

Support local events, "share globally…!

Communities of interest rather than geography? !

Some rights reserved, Sepultura, http://bit.ly/k6dM3j2

The Internet of displays ?!“Change spaces with public displays - from spaces where information is pushed to passers-by in the form of adverts to spaces that can be tailored to reflect the hopes, aspirations and interests of its occupants using content and applications created anywhere in a global network.”!

http://pd-net.org

http://www.facebook.com/pdnet

To conclude!The channels system lets us open up control of our network to interest groups!

We create a network of content that is shared – its been largely successful too!

The next step is moving to a pan-European testbed (3 nodes so far: Switzerland, Germany and Portugal)!

Join in helping to overcome the challenges!"http://pd-net.org!

A unique opportunity!

A globally unique infrastructure testbed of displays and wireless coverage!

A model for conducting ‘in the wild’ Ubicomp research!

An incredible pioneering achievement – and we appreciate this having tried something similar!!

A proving ground for future Ubicomp business ideas!

http://www.ubiweek.fi/

Adrian Friday!School of Computing and Communications!InfoLab21, Lancaster University!a.friday@lancaster.ac.uk!Tel: +44 (0)1524 510326!

Image: http://www.kingofboxes.co.za