WE ARE CURRENTLY MAKING CHANGES TO THE M3DCAM WEBSITE, IN THE MEANTIME KEEP UPLOADING YOUR 3D PHOTOS AND WE WILL BRING BACK THE PHOTO INTERFACE

Mystic Paul sporting a natty pair of Lava Girl glasses

m3Dcam is an application that allows you to use your mobile phone camera to create 3-D anaglyph images.The 3D images can then be either viewed on phone screen (using suitable pair of 3D glasses) or saved to a community website .

Mobile SprayCan (www.mobspray.com)

Since the first appearance of modern man one trait of human behaviour in our interaction with the physical environment appears to be an inherent desire to leave our mark on a particular object or space. ‘SprayCan’ graffiti that appeared in the 1970s is but a modern extension of this phenomenon, yet it divides communities and generations in terms of how it should be dealt with in terms of either complete acceptance or punitive action. In this project we have developed a system that tries to bridge the divide as it both provides writers with a means of tagging their environment, using mobile phones and RFID tags, whilst minimising the physical effects to the landscape for the communities where it resides. Mobile SprayCan Project

Mobile Spray can site marker

TxT Books (www.thetxtbk.com)

Screenshot from www.thetxtbk.com homepage.

TxT Book is an open, collaborative storybook based upon the technique of ‘Exquisite Corpse’ which was developed by surrealists in the 1920’s for creating accidental poetry. Users may only submit a maximum of 160 characters (standard SMS length) to the book at a time and they may only view the previous person’s entry when considering their own. In order to ensure some kind of (shallow) cohesiveness, when a user is submitting their entry, the database is locked-down to ensure that the entries follow on from each other (in a chain). Once a user has entered his/her story (or their allotted timeslot has expired), the database is unlocked to allow others to participate.

Users can submit entries to TxT Book via two different methods – from their PC or from their mobile phone. By allowing different methods of input, TxT Book seeks to compare the popularity of the two.

TxT Book will attempt to examine the spread of information in way which is not intrusive (this is not viral marketing!), free and, hopefully, quite fun. We will initially seed TxT Book by sending out an SMS to friends containing a link to the WAP submission page. Once a user submits an entry to TxT Book, they are then asked if they would like to forward the original SMS to a friend who might be interested in contributing.

On visiting the TxT Book’s homepage, users are automatically served content based upon the capability of their browser (WAP enabled browsers receive dynamically generated WML files, whilst PC users are delivered XHTML content). Users may also subscribe to an RSS feed of the story which contains the latest submissions.

TxT Book Website

A modified version of the thetxbk was created for the Spoken Word tent at Roskilde Rock Festival July 2007.

Roskilde TxT Book 2007

Whilst many LBS present scenarios for users searching for Points of Interest (POI) that are proximate to the current location whereas geo-wands the commonly observed practice of horizon scanning in which users seek out interesting landmarks within their field of vision of direction of travel (often by pointing at them). This phenomenon is particularly prevalent amongst tourists who often scan their surrounding for interesting buildings or objects which they may then look up on a tourist map to find additional information. Point ‘n’ Seek facilitates this process through a novel gesture based control mechanism using the accelerometers and compass enabling users simply point at the object the wish to have information about.

3D Lancaster

Locoblog

LocoBlog consists of a J2ME client application that allows you to link up your phone via Bluetooth to a GPS unit and then create blogs of text and pictures which are the tagged with positional data such as latitude and longitude. The blog is then sent to the LocoBlog Site( via GPRS) where it can be viewed on Google Maps. The service is currently free to use and the application can be downloaded from the site.

Widget Maps

LocoMash (www.locomash.com)

Locomash is a mobile mass observation system to allow groups of individuals equipped with mobile camera phones and GPS to create real time spatial and temporal photographic mash-ups around particular events or places.

LocoMash of the Wray Festival

We were asked by a colleague in Environmental Science about using a mobile phone to relay pictures back of one of there remote sites every half hour for hopefully about a month. We have created not only bespoke mobile application that allows any suitable mobile camera phone to be used for functionality but is programmable for a variety of operating parameters time of operation, frequency etc. The resultant images can be viewed as a series of time lapse photographs at the project site

Mobile sensor cam project in ealy test phase using additional solar panel

River Flow Monitoring

River flow monitoring system

Our influence on the changing natural environment poses many challenges for future generations. One obvious environmental change relates to the increasing regularity of flooding. Monitoring river and stream velocity enables the accurate modelling of flood planes, river bank erosion, and mans influence over the natural environment. The remote monitoring unit developed for this project gives the environmental science community a ‘real time’ cost effective data collection system, freeing up large amounts of time spent out in the field gathering data and eliminating the potential for human error during the recording process. The system incorporates a sensor placed in the river that users Doppler shift to esimate the flow rate of the river. A unit on the bank relays the sensor reading plus a GPS time stamp to a central server using a GPRS connection to the celluar network. With cellular coverage now extended to even the most remote rural of areas systems this project highlights that mass monitoring of stream and river networks is now a practical solution.

Bus ETA

Application showing ETA of bus at selected stop

Whilst it is readily accepted that mobile phones enable users to obtain information quickly and easily in any location, there are a great many ways in which this information can be accessed and provided. Although mobile phone manufacturers are embracing standardization of mobile phone operating systems, as yet there is no clear market leader, which coupled with extremely variable phone feature sets, make porting applications to different platforms a challenging experience. Further to this, is the fact that even within technologically advanced societies large sections of the population are technologically naïve. Thus, the development of information systems that can be accessed by large numbers of the general public from mobile phones, can be problematic, and all too often such systems provide only a single mode access solution, which limits both their acceptance and usefulness. In this project we developed a mobile information system which has been designed so that it can accommodate both the variation in mobile phone features and the technical sophistication of individual users and can be easily deployed for a wide variety of services. The system was demonstrated through an example service which demonstrated information related to the Estimated Time of Arrival (ETA) of vehicles in a metro-bus public transport system. The solution illustrates that information can be provided in different forms, to suit individual users preferences, from the same mobile information system, without significant increases in the underlying infrastructure.