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

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

Mirage Space

Motion controlled 3D multiplayer space combat game. Mirage Space uses the same S60 Mirage-X API to create a motion controlled 3D space battle game in which you compete with opponents via Bluetooth to save the galaxy. As can be seen the video shows players first select their space ship and then they must engage in a space dogfight shooting their opponents as they appear on their screen. The player movement is controlled entirely through tilt but speed and fire are controlled via the joypad using up and centre button respectively.

Mobi-Tron

Mobi-Tron in action

The game is based on the old arcade classic Tron which was first released in 1982 to coincide with the Walt Disney picture of the same name. Although the arcade game consisted of four sub-games: Light Cycles; MCP Cone; Input/Output Tower; and Battle Tanks, it is the Light Cycle game most often associated with the title. The game requires the blue player to guide his light cycle around the game arena meanwhile avoiding running into walls or the light trails left by his or the opposing player’s yellow cycle.In the arcade game it could be played as either a two-player game or against an Artificial Intelligence (AI) opponent. Mobi-Tron basically employs the same game play, although there is currently no option to play against the computer. However, it does allow more than two players to be active in a game simultaneously. The players’ names are displayed as their Bluetooth friendly names at the top of the screen and each player starts from opposite corners of the game board. The play continues until one player has either crossed their own or opponents trail or runs into one of the side walls.

Tilt Racer

Tilt Racer is a novel multiplayer game running on a large public display were the players cars are controlled using Nokia 5500 with their in-built 3-D motion sensors via Bluetooth.

Tunnel Run

In terms of games implemented using tilt on mobile phones there have been numerous implementations using the camera and one for the Nokia 5500 using the accelerometers all of which have been based on the marble type games previously described. Whilst these games are no doubt fun, they are replicating the existing game input mechanic of the previous games and in this research we wanted to explore tilt in relation to other game genres. Therefore, for this project we decided to implement a 3D graphics first person driving game which has been called Tunnel Run.

MIRAGE-X

• Mirage Money Experience For Mobile HCI

Since the advent of accelerometers on programmable mobile phones an array of implementations have appeared from navigating through menus without pressing buttons to creating Wii-like game controllers for games running on large public screens as in Tilt Racer and Tunnel Run. However, all of these controllers limited the interaction experience in the 2-D visual plane. The MIRAGE-X API we present here allows the use of the in-built accelerometers on mobile phones to maneuver in 3-D OpenGL ES virtual or augmented reality (mixed reality) worlds with full 3-D motion control. The API is currently implemented for the most prevalent smart phone platform: the Symbian OS. It provides the user with a first-person view which allows for instinctive navigation through the 3-D world by simply moving the phone in the direction the user wishes to go to. According to that movement the relative view direction in the 3-D environments gets updated and displayed on screen.

The game MirageMoney has been developed as the first demonstration of the capabilities MIRAGE-X API. The game is a flight-simulation with the phone screen being the window to the virtual, or augmented, world the player is flying through. The mission of the player is to control his/her plane and ‘fly’ around in the 3-D world collecting the floating silver and gold coins by colliding with them on the screen.

This control is achieved by pitching the phone up or down and rotating it clock-wise or counter clock-wise as in the pictures below. Note that speed through the world is controlled by the joy-pad buttons: up tp speed-up, down to slow-down.

Download Mirage Money application to your phone from MOSH

Mirage Money Forum

Poppet

The system developed is part of a generic framework, which we have termed Poppet , for utilizing on-board phone sensors such as cameras, accelerometers, Radio Frequency Identification (RFID)/ Near Field Communications (NFC), which can be linked to games running on large public displays via Bluetooth.

Poppet public display controller framework

Although Poppet is capable of addressing a range of devices, in this section, we specifically describe the design challenges involved in producing a mobile client for the Nokia 5500 together with its on-board accelerometers.

Accessing the 3-D motion sensors requires the use of the Symbian Sensor API which is similar in function to J2ME’s Mobile Sensor API (JSR-256). Both of these APIs provides the potential to access a wide range of sensors such as accelerometers, thermometers, barometers, and humidity monitors, in fact any type of sensor designed to be incorporated in a mobile phone, or those accessible via Bluetooth. Sensors need only be supported by the API library to be usable. The Symbian Sensor API is available from Nokia and requires the use of the Symbian S60 3rd Edition SDK. Whilst there is support for the Symbian Sensor API on several mobile devices, there are currently no mobile phones that include JSR-256. The general Poppet framework uses J2ME, as this is currently the most widely deployed mobile platform. Although the sensor data is not directly accessible from J2ME because of the lack of JSR-256 as previously highlighted, the problem can be overcome by using a socket connection on the mobile phone to allow access to native services. The general solution for accessing native services from J2ME on Symbian S60 phones is by opening a low level socket connection in a Symbian C++ application then connecting to the defined port on the loop-back address from the J2ME application. Thus the Symbian C++ application can retrieve any information from the phone and then the data can be passed to any other application that can process the received information. This solution has been applied in our simple mobile client to allow J2ME applications to access the 3-D sensor data. The connection between the game client and server is based on Bluetooth, which creates a reasonably high bandwidth (data rates can vary between 1 megabit and a few kilobits per second depending upon the type of transfer mode initiated) between the devices. In order to allow a device to become discoverable by others, it is necessary to advertise at least one Bluetooth service. In the case of Poppet, the mobile client implementation uses the official Java Bluetooth API (JSR-82) to alleviate porting issues.

Example annoucement to Infolab21 visitors

In the emerging world of m-commerce potential users consistently cite location based services as a technology they would be interested in using. However, solutions to obtaining the specific location of the user predominately rely on the provision of additional hardware and/or software within the mobile phone or the system infrastructure. These techniques are often inappropriate for indoor and highly urban environments where the line of sight to the location measurement unit is often unavailable resulting in inaccurate and unreliable positional information. In this project we developed a system that can be used with any current mobile phone system to provide location based information/advertisements to any mobile phone, equipped with Bluetooth technology, without any necessity of installing client side software. The system can be used to provide systems such as location based information for tourist in cities or museums or location based advertisements.

3D Mobile Advertising

Mobile 3D advert for a lovely vase

Providing advertising to mobile phones currently is limited to either: commercial text messages; short-code text-back messages; two dimensional (2D) images; or Wireless Access Protocol (WAP) clickable push links. None of these traditional methods facilitate an advertising approach were consumers can interact with prospective purchases. In this project we have introduced a novel and highly interactive location- and permission based advertising system that allows 3D product adverts to be displayed on users’ mobile phones. With mobile phones and 3D interactive tools, advertising becomes more engaging, rewarding and entertaining and provides marketing executives with new means of directing their campaigns to a more specific target audience.