Applying Seamful Design in Location-Based Mobile Museum Applications

Abstract

The application of mobile computing is currently altering patterns of our behavior to a greater degree than perhaps any other invention. In combination with the introduction of power efficient wireless communication technologies, such as Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), designers are today increasingly empowered to shape the way we interact with our physical surroundings and thus build entirely new experiences. However, our evaluations of BLE and its abilities to facilitate mobile location-based experiences in public environments revealed a number of potential problems. Most notably, the position and orientation of the user in combination with various environmental factors, such as crowds of people traversing the space, were found to cause major fluctuations of the received BLE signal strength. These issues are rendering a seamless functioning of any location-based application practically impossible. Instead of achieving seamlessness by eliminating these technical issues, we thus choose to advocate the use of a seamful approach, i.e. to reveal and exploit these problems and turn them into a part of the actual experience. In order to demonstrate the viability of this approach, we designed, implemented and evaluated the Ghost Detector -an educational location-based museum game for children. By presenting a qualitative evaluation of this game and by motivating our design decisions, this paper provides insight into some of the challenges and possible solutions connected to the process of developing location-based BLE-enabled experiences for public cultural spaces.

Fog Computing for Sustainable Smart Cities

“…Further, in contrast to Bluetooth, it does not have limitations on number of devices to be connected. BLE is widely used in developing beacons that are being used for indoor localizations and related IoT applications [Nilsson et al 2016]. The time taken to connect two blueetooth devices is less than 0.006 seconds [Mohandas et al 1060].…”

Contextual Location in the Home Using Bluetooth Beacons

“…Existing applications of Bluetooth beacons typically expect that the user is standing in close proximity facing the beacon, in order to avoid the ambiguity that results from multiple paths and body attenuation. In our previous work, we have explored seamful experiences designed around the observation that, although we might not know where the user is, we are reasonably confident that he is not near the beacon [12].…”

“…However, current commercial applications do not currently emphasise grid position, but simply trigger services based on proximity to the beacon. In a recent project, we carried out a design exercise in which the "seamful" approach was applied in a museum context to deal with the ambiguity resulting from the very large numbers of objects in a museum, that are too close together to reliably be resolved by positioning data from a Bluetooth beacon [12].…”

Broadcasting the Status of Plant Growth Chamber using Bluetooth Low Energy

“…L2CAP also provides fragmentation and reassembly for large data packets. Security Manager defines protocols and mechanisms for installation, distribution of keys, and security equipment boxes for BLE devices [1][2][3][4]6]. …”

“…For a relatively new standard (originally designed by Nokia as Wibree before being adopted by Bluetooth Special Interest Group-Bluetooth SIG, in 2010), BLE has been seen to have a very fast adoption rate, and with the number of "BLE enable" products ranked leading edge than any other wireless technology at the same time point in their release cycle [1,2].…”