Despite the proliferation of large-scale displays in the workplace, creating groupware applications that take advantage of their potential for collaboration and communication remains a challenge. Interactions with large displays yield user experiences that are quite different from interaction with conventional desktop groupware. Thus, unique hurdles exist for designing and deploying large display groupware applications (LDGAs) that are useful and adopted into actual work practice In this dissertation we uncover and address some of the primary challenges for large display groupware applications though the design, development, deployment and evaluation of LDGA systems, as well as through the analysis of existing deployed LDGA systems. We present novel LDGA designs that address the issues of information awareness and informal communication through the use of large shared displays in workplaces and describe the findings from evaluations of their deployments. We then discuss a broad study of several existing LDGAs that we conducted and a framework of adoption challenges that we subsequently derived. We describe the application of this framework to the design a large display groupware application for supporting lightweight communication among workgroup members. We also present a field study of the use of LDGAs within the context of multi-display environments, looking specifically at the display technologies used by NASA scientists and engineers for the Mars Exploration Rover (MER) missions. This work uncovers how the display environment provides flexible support for science tasks as collaboration styles and mission goals evolve. We offer suggestions for how LDGAs should be designed and evaluated in light of our findings regarding the roles of LDGAs within an ecology of displays. Finally, we use the results of this evaluation as input for further refining our framework for LDGA adoption challenges.

This thesis focuses on the technological trends in smart products, and analyzes their conformity to the user expectations. The advances in computation technologies have totally revolutionized the product concept, and with the integration of microchips, software and sensors into the classical everyday objects, smart products, able to sense the context, reason about the sensed data and act according to the situation, have emerged. This new way of computing basing on the ubiquitous and calm computing visions, has distributed the digital information into the surrounding environment, and once freed from the limited resources provided by the classical desktop based computing, attempted to enhance user product communication and collaboration in everyday environments. Via their sensing - decision making - acting process and advanced interaction capabilities, smart products have gained the ability to better interpret user needs and intuitively communicate with users through simplified interfaces involving the majority of the senses without even disturbing or overburdening their users. The study first, throughout a literature review, examines these improvements in computation technologies and determines the trends related to smart products. An empirical research is then conducted to find out to what extend user expectations from smart products overlap with the ongoing researches in this area. The findings including users&rsquo / conception about smartness and expectations from different types of smart products are analyzed regarding to the technological trends to deduce the coherence between literature&rsquo / s orientation and user preferences. The study considered the technological trends as a database and takes the user expectations as the design motivation.

A Display Computer (DC) is an everyday object: Display Computer = Display + Computer. The “Display” part is the standard viewing surface found on everyday objects that conveys information or art. The “Computer” is found on the same everyday object; but by its ubiquitous nature, it will be relatively unnoticeable by the DC user, as it is manufactured “in the margins”. A DC may be mobile, moving with us as part of the everyday object we are using. DCs will be ubiquitous: “effectively invisible”, available at a glance, and seamlessly integrated into the environment. A DC should be an example of Weiser’s calm technology: encalming to the user, providing peripheral awareness without information overload. A DC should provide unremarkable computing in support of our daily routines in life. The nbaCub (nightly bedtime ambient Cues utility buddy) prototype illustrates a sample application of how DCs can be useful in the everyday environment of the home of the future. Embedding a computer into a toy, such that the display is the only visible portion, can present many opportunities for seamless and nontraditional uses of computing technology for our youngest user community. A field study was conducted in the home environment of a five-year old child over ten consecutive weeks as an informal, proof of concept of what Display Computers for children can look like and be used for in the near future. The personalized nbaCub provided lightweight, ambient information during the necessary daily routines of preparing for bed (evening routine) and preparing to go to school (morning routine). To further understand the child’s progress towards learning abstract concepts of time passage and routines, a novel “test by design” activity was included. Here, the role of the subject changed to primary designer/director. Final post-testing showed the subject knew both morning and bedtime routines very well and correctly answered seven of eight questions based on abstract images of time passage. Thus, the subject was in the process of learning the more abstract concept of time passage, but was not totally comfortable with the idea at the end of the study.

<p>Recent development in modern computing has led to a more diverse use of devices within the field of mobility. Many mobile devices of today can, for instance, surf the web and connect to wireless networks, thus gradually merging the wired Internet with the mobile Internet. As mobile devices by design usually have built-in means for creating rich media content, along with the ability to upload these to the Internet, these devices are potential contributors to the already overwhelming content collection residing on the World Wide Web. While interesting initiatives for structuring and filtering content on the World Wide Web exist – often based on various forms of metadata – a unified understanding of individual content is more or less restricted to technical metadata values, such as file size and file format. These kinds of metadata make it impossible to incorporate the purpose of the content when designing applications. Answers to questions such as "why was this content created?" or "in which context was the content created?" would allow for a more specified content filtering tailored to fit the end-users cause. In the opinion of the authors, this kind of understanding would be ideal for content created with mobile devices which purposely are brought into various environments. This is why we in this thesis have investigated in which way descriptions of contexts could be caught, structured and expressed as machine-readable semantics.</p><p>In order to limit the scope of our work we developed a system which mirrored the context of ubiquitous learning activities to a database. Whenever rich media content was created within these activities, the system associated that particular content to its context. The system was tested during live trials in order to gather reliable and “real” contextual data leading to the transition to semantics by generating Rich Document Format documents from the contents of the database. The outcome of our efforts was a fully-functional system able to capture contexts of pre-defined ubiquitous learning activities and transforming these into machine-readable semantics. We would like to believe that our contribution has some innovative aspects – one being that the system can output contexts of activities as semantics in real-time, allowing monitoring of activities as they are performed.</p>

<p>Recent developments in modern computing and wireless networks allow mobile devices to be connected to the Internet regardless of their physical location. These mobile devices, such as smart phones and PDAs, have turned into powerful multimedia units allowing users to become producers of rich media content. This latest development contributes to the ever-growing amount of digital material existing on the World Wide Web, and at the same time creates a new information landscape that combines content coming from both, the wired and mobile Internet. Thus, it is important to understand the context or settings in which mobile devices are used, and what is the digital content produced by the different users. In order to gain more knowledge about this domain, we have investigated how to extend the standard metadata related to content with a metadata domain describing the context, or settings in which the content has been created.</p><p>In order to limit the scope of our work, we have focused our efforts in a specific case taking place in a project called AMULETS. The AMULETS-project contains all of the elements we need in order to resemble the contextual setting in a metadata model. Combined with the technical metadata associated to the digital content, we try to display the benefits of capturing the different attributes of the context that were present when the content was generated. Additionally, we have created a proof-of-concept Entity Relation (ER)-diagram which proposes how the metadata models can be implemented in a relational database. As the nature of the thesis is design-oriented, a model has been developed and it will be illustrated throughout this report. The aim of the thesis is to show how it is possible to design new metadata models that combine both relevant attributes of the context and content in order to develop new educational activities supported by location-based services.</p>

The recent advancement in computer-integrated manufacturing related technologies (e.g. internet of things, information technology and service-oriented architecture) has prompted the need for a novel effective, efficient and economical automatic identification and data collection solution for manufacturing scenario. Accurate and timely manufacturing front line information is essential to guarantee the functions and performance of enterprise information systems (EISs) deployed, and is the basis of entire information flow in enterprise. Both researchers and commercial players have made great contributions to the fields of enterprise information systems and data capturing technologies. However, real-time data processing and on-line knowledge support to seamlessly link up the EISs and shop floor front-line operations are still open to discuss. This research discusses an overall solution for manufacturing real-time field data capturing, processing and disseminating strategy in ubiquitous manufacturing environment, named Ubiquitous Manufacturing Platform (UMP). This research discusses the design and development of UMP, which is an innovative framework to integrate Auto-ID hardware devices and software services for facilitating manufacturing shop floor production management. The proposed event-driven UMP aims to enable shop floor real-time visibility and traceability, and bridge the gap between frontline operations and management level activities (e.g. planning and scheduling). On one hand, production management objectives are fulfilled through defined and configured services, and eventually carried out at shop floor operating sites with managed Auto-ID devices. On the other hand, the generated shop floor real-time field data is captured as events, which are then processed and aggregated to leveled meaningful information to satisfy various information requirements for different roles in an enterprise. UMP is expected to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of production supervision and decision making, and to reduce the production disturbances. This research has made the following achievements and contributions. Firstly, a scalable and reconfigurable infrastructure for manufacturing real-time field data capturing, processing and disseminating, named UMP, is developed based on several core technologies to achieve seamless dual-way connectivity and interoperability among enterprise application systems, shop floor, production line and workstation levels. Secondly, an innovative information processing mechanism, namely critical event model, is designed to connect the real-time field data in manufacturing processes to implied business context information. Based on this model, real-time field data is able to be organized in various abstract levels, so as to be useful for making adaptive enterprise decisions. Thirdly, a lightweight devices middleware solution named Gateway Operating System (GOS), is designed and proposed to support UMP. GOS enables a unified system interface for manufacturing companies to deploy and manage their heterogeneous Auto-ID devices. Furthermore, it allows multiple back-end manufacturing applications to share the same Auto-ID infrastructure, and shields the application systems from the implementation detail of enabling hardware devices. Fourthly, the gateway event processing procedure is presented to implement the engine for shop floor real-time field data capturing, processing and disseminating. Based on the Auto-ID infrastructure, it combines the concept of event and software agents into workflow management to realize real-time reconfigurable ubiquitous manufacturing. / published_or_final_version / Industrial and Manufacturing Systems Engineering / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

With its mixing of real and virtual, Augmented Reality (AR) is a technology that has attracted lots of attention from the science community and is seen as a perfect way to visualize context-related information. Computer generated graphics is presented to the user overlaid and registered with the real world and hence augmenting it. Promising intelligence amplification and higher productivity, AR has been intensively researched over several decades but has yet to reach a broad audience. This thesis presents efforts in bringing Augmented Reality to mobile phones and thus to the general public. Implementing technologies on limited devices, such as mobile phones, poses a number of challenges that differ from traditional research directions. These include: limited computational resources with little or no possibility to upgrade or add hardware, limited input and output capabilities for interactive 3D graphics. The research presented in this thesis addresses these challenges and makes contributions in the following areas: Mobile Phone Computer Vision-Based Tracking The first contribution of thesis has been to migrate computer vision algorithms for tracking the mobile phone camera in a real world reference frame - a key enabling technology for AR. To tackle performance issues, low-level optimized code, using fixed-point algorithms, has been developed. Mobile Phone 3D Interaction Techniques Another contribution of this thesis has been to research interaction techniques for manipulating virtual content. This is in part realized by exploiting camera tracking for position-controlled interaction where motion of the device is used as input. Gesture input, made possible by a separate front camera, is another approach that is investigated. The obtained results are not unique to AR and could also be applicable to general mobile 3D graphics. Novel Single User AR Applications With short range communication technologies, mobile phones can exchange data not only with other phones but also with an intelligent environment. Data can be obtained for tracking or visualization; displays can be used to render graphics with the tracked mobile phone acting as an interaction device. Work is presented where a mobile phone harvests a sensor-network to use AR to visualize live data in context. Novel Collaboration AR Applications One of the most promising areas for mobile phone based AR is enhancing face-to-face computer supported cooperative work. This is because the AR display permits non-verbal cues to be used to a larger extent. In this thesis, face-to-face collaboration has been researched to examine whether AR increases awareness of collaboration partners even on small devices such as mobile phones. User feedback indicates that this is the case, confirming the hypothesis that mobile phones are increasingly able to deliver an AR experience to a large audience. / On the day of the defence date the status on articles III and VIII was: Accepted.

M. Tech. Business Information Systems / Focuses on tackling the lack of access to learning content and social resources in the higher learning environment of South Africa (SA). This research is important because South African institutions of higher learning are English language environments dominated by underprepared learners and overpopulated classrooms. Moreover, the country has lately seen increased numbers of learners entering higher learning institutions demonstrating a fair rate of acceptance of social media sites (SMS).

This thesis presents Illusion SDK: a general, extensible framework for augmented reality (AR) applications. Illusion provides loosely coupled or decoupled abstractions of sensors, trackers, and compositors. Implementations are optimized for particular use cases. Illusion’s architecture depends on only an event system and a 3D scene graph, so it is highly portable. Wrapping of third-party trackers is supported. Illusion’s current implementation targets Flash 11.4 and integrates with the Alternativa3D 8 graphics engine. To our knowledge, Illusion’s support for wrapping third-party trackers is unique among toolkits targeting the GPU-accelerated Web. Illusion performs well on MacBook Pro 13" mid-2010, where an intensive camera application can exceed 45 FPS. Generally, Illusion should perform well on hardware that uses shared video memory. Optimizations are needed for hardware that uses dedicated video memory. These optimizations are problematic in Flash 11.4 but should not generally be problematic in ports to other platforms.

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