:Projects::

Spin&Swing: Spatial Interaction with Orientation Aware Devices
Spin&Swing is a spatial interaction technique that leverages user’s orientation as an active input to interact with mobile applications. With Spin&Swing, a user can trigger a variety of mobile operations by orienting her spatially-aware mobile device with in the circle around her. In the current prototype this 360° circular orientation is mapped into temporal dimensions enabling users to browse and visualize historical interaction with an application in context. The demo showcases a prototype application where we have utilized this technique using an Apple iPhone to visualize and browse the historical information recorded by a digital memory augmented shoe in a personal travel log application.

Date: 30.02.2010 - 20.05.2010.
Work at: Lancaster University, UK
Position: Interface design, iPhone development

 

Mainkofen project - Peripheral Healthcare Documentation
The Mainkofen project investigates to what degree automatic activity recognition can support the use of hand held mobile devices for nursing documentation. The core idea is that by reducing the documentation to confirming a list of automatically recognized activities the documentation process can be done during periods of ”forced low intensity activity” such as walking from patient to patient or waiting for the coffee machine. The project also studies the impact of activity recognition errors. This project was performed at Mainkofen Hospital in Germany.

Date: 15.02.2010 - 26.03.2010.
Work at: Passau University, Germany
Position: Interface design, iPhone development

 

Pictory: A table-top game based on Search Engine retrieved images

“Pictory” is a socially interactive, learning promoting, and thinking/imagination enhancing game that brings together human players, objects, physical spaces, newly developed system architectures, and existing search engines.  It is a two-team, table-top game, in which the aim of each team is to get as many castles as possible both by keeping their own castles intact and by conquering opponent’s castles.  The graphic interface consists of a beamer projection on a table surface, where four castles per team are displayed.  The teams take turns in defending and attacking.  The defense of a castle is realized by the defending team setting a keyword, which is then automatically inserted by the system in an image search engine.  The retrieved images are displayed for the attacking team to see.  If the concealed keyword is guessed within a specific time and a fixed number of guesses, the castle is considered as conquered; if not, the defending team retains the castle. 

Picture 1 : Pictory Demonstration March 7,2007
at International School of New Media, Luebeck, Germany.

Then, the teams exchange their roles and the same rules apply.  When each of the teams has defended and attacked once, a round is completed.  The game ends after four rounds.  The team that has more castles or, in the case of equal numbers, the team that has used less time and has given less wrong guesses, wins.  The main idea of the system architecture of “Pictory”, realized in C#, is to separate the visual layer from the logical/control layer, thus reducing the level of dependency between the two layers and increasing the game flexibility. 

Picture 2 : Pictory Demonstration March 7,2007
at International School of New Media, Luebeck, Germany.

The architecture functionalities are divided into two engines - Graphical engine and Game Logic and Control engine.  The latter is responsible for the control of the login and for generating a set of events. Those events are sent to the Graphical engine as updates about changes in the game setup and states. In addition, the XML description of the game is updated and sent to the Game engine in order to modify the visualization according to the current game state.

Date:15.12.2006 - 30.02.2007.
Work with: Game design class - International school of new Media, Germany.
Position: Team member, systems design, c# and actionscript porgrammer.

Campus Memories: Learning with Contextualised Blogging

The projects is a joint effort of The Internal School of New Media and the Open University of Netherlands to develop a new system based on Web Service architecture and mobile technology to combine the strengths of both mobile and context aware systems and apply them to educational systems can lead to contextualised learning support. The developed system is an extension of current systems for blogging we call contextualised blogging. The conceptual model and architecture allows users to create and manage blogs from a mobile device and combine them with identification tags and therefore leave “blog traces” in a physical environment.

So far, the research group was able to develop a general framework for the contextualized blogging which includes the mobile client subsystem and the content service. A planed evaluation for the system will take place during January 2007 at the Educational Technology Expertise Centre (OTEC) in the Netherlands. The evaluation system called “Campus Memories: Learning with Contextualised Blogging”.

Project team

Bashar Al Takrouri                         
Tim de Jong                 
Marcus Specht                        

Date: 01.10.2006 - 01.12.2006.
Work with: Open University of the Netherlands, The Netherlands..
Position: Team member, systems design, Java webservice (JAX-RPC) developer and mobile porgrammer based on JAVA MIDlet..
More: Campus Memories Paper

eyeJOT

eyeJOT is metaphor for how we might want a birds eye view or overview of the activities on and off the university campus, it is an interactive community bulletin system based on ubiquitous computing technologies.

Picture 1 : eyeJOT Demonstration at Open house July 7,2006
at International School of New Media, Luebeck, Germany.

Picture 2 : eyeJOT Demonstration at Open house July 7,2006
at International School of New Media, Luebeck, Germany.

Users (students, faculty, campus guests and administration members) can access information about campus news, activities and a semester schedule. eyeJOT uses a combination of new technology as Bluetooth and SMS together with a new navigation metaphor combine distance and time.
date: 01.03.2006 - 20.07.2006.
Work with: International school of new Media, Germany.
Position: Team leader ,C# and flash8 programmer.
More: eyeJOT website

 

Competence Transfer
Create the research study “LEVELS”. Methods of cluster theory and network analysis is sought to be linked with the transfer of competences between entrepreneurs of various businesses and firms, all working in a so-called “entrepreneurial park”.

LEVELS combines methods from cluster theory and network analysis of the “New Growth Theory” (NGT) and evaluates the measurable degree of competence transfer taking place. The study takes “media docks” as the local cluster and sets it into comparison with “international champions”. This benchmarking derives key indicators for competence transfer in industrial clusters and provides insights into its managerial denominators.

Project GoaProject Goal

Cluster reduces transaction cost and raise communication and flexibility
Background:
_ Cluster formation is described as a self-organizing process.
_ Major control variable of all clusters is “knowledge density”.
_ Social networks enable “knowledge exchange”.
_ Our assumption:
_ “Competency” not “knowledge” is the appropriate basis for

Analysis.
_ Project goal: A method comparison of cluster and network analysis with competency transfer

date: 15.03.2006 - 01.08.2006.
Work with: International school of new Media, Germany.
Position: Spss, Visualbasic and research.
More: Levels website

 

Online Quiz Tool
An online Quiz tool, for the International Conference on Technology Supported Learning & Training.

date: 25.02.2006 - 20.04.2006.
Work with: GTZ and International school of new Media, Germany.
Position: Web programming using JAVA and MYSQL database.
More: Quiz website

 

PORTNET
Visualizing transport/supply-chains in the Baltic Sea Region

The ISNM International School of New Media has been commissioned by the Business Development Group Lubeck to research methodologies to build a system able to visualize goods flows in the Baltic Sea Region on different levels: countries, regions, cities and down to single companies.
We have been able to proof the feasibility of such a system and have built a prototype to demonstrate the research results.

The system uses as input a database of companies and their products from external media or online sources. Based on a selection of product types, a web mining module collects and semantically analyses online data and builds a database of relations between companies, based on an exchange of goods. A second module collects publicly available cargo tracking data from port authorities and organisations and builds a database of transport chains.

A visualization module combines the business relations, goods flows and geographic positions into maps. These maps can be used to investigate relations between companies in different regions and the actual routes of goods, revealing for example gaps in the logistic coverage of certain ports, thus providing support for decisions on their future development.

The research has been realized at the ISNM by an interdisciplinary team of developers, computer scientists, graphic and computational designers, a combination that led to a methodologically strong, conceptually novel and visually rich solution.

Project team

Ulrich Schmidts                         (schmidts AT isnm.de)
Wendy Ann Mansilla                  (w.mansilla AT isnm.de)
Bashar Al Takrouri                     (bashar_tak AT isnm.de)
Michal Janiszewski                    (m.janiszewski AT isnm.de)

date: 01.10.2005 - 31.03.2006.
Work with: International school of new Media, Germany.
Position: Web programming using JAVA and MYSQL database.
More: ISNM research blog