Collaborative Telepresence using Skype

So I've been thinking about what I call "Collaborative Telepresence" for a while now. Basically the idea is that you are mobile and you send a video feed to your friend at their desktop (or also mobile). Your friend sees something of interest in your video feed, indicates it (with a cursor or similar) and that video feed comes back to you in real time so you can see what they are pointing at.

I see this as being useful when you are at the grocery store and your better half is at home and want's to point out what you should buy, but it should work for any situation where you have a "field operative" and an "expert" who is trying to advise from a another location. What will totally rock is when we can do this over mobile phones.

I worked out a way to jury rig a system like this by using Skype. Skype allows you to both transmit video feed from a webcam and also to share your screen. To set things up, start a Skype call and have the "field operative" broadcast video. Once the "expert" can see the video feed, have them share their screen back to the field operative. Specifically the part of the screen that has the incoming video. Then, when the "expert" moves their mouse cursor (sometimes you might need to have them grab a file icon if the cursor is too small) over a part of the incoming remote feed it can be seen by the "field operative".

In order to get the mobile "field operative" flavour I ran a demo that involved strapping a UMPC to my chest - running skype on it, and outputting the video to a pair of heads up display built into a pair of Oakley sunglasses (see image). This allowed me to operate as a "field operative" in my yard with my wife (the "expert") telling me which Mangos were ready to pick off our tree and which were not.

Skype is on Android and iPhone, but doesn't have video support yet. Here's hoping that will come soon so my wife can instruct my activities at numerous remote locations :-)

Mobile Social Navigation apps

I recently read two mobile social navigation studies, Barkhuus et al (2008) and Bilandzic et al (2008), that I wish I had conducted myself (particularly Barkhuus et al). Although the results from Bilandzic et al that people were unlikely to phone complete strangers for help finding coffee shops did seem somewhat obvious :-) Interestingly the solution to this problem that Bilandzic et al suggest is similar to the awareness approach taken by Barkhuus et al. So a very interesting couple of papers to read in parallel.

Furthermore some interesting notes about recent commercial technological developments. The CityFlocks system developed by Bilandzic et al has for the most part been replicated by the default google maps application on android phones, in that if you now search for a restaurant on an android phone you get an aggregated list of the reviews of that restaurant from multiple review sites, which includes some information about the reviewer (i.e. their name), if not their contact details. This functionality is not yet available on the iPhone google maps, although it is slated to become available in the future. Latest updates about google mobile stuff here: http://googlemobile.blogspot.com/

Similarly the functionality developed for Connecto by Barkhuus is almost completely replicated by Google Latitude (http://www.google.com/latitude/intro.html) in that you can see the locations of your friends, and you can set your location manually or automatically. The big thing missing from Google latitude (which runs on iPhone (in browser) and Android) when compared with Connecto is that it doesn't appear to run in the background (at least on the iPhone) and doesn't integrate the information about friend status into the contact list, which I think is one of Connecto's great features. I'm assuming that this kind of integration (friend location and contact list) will be hard on the iPhone, potentially easy on android. Here's a nice blog post showing you what google latitude looks like on the android:

http://androidcommunity.com/google-latitude-location-sharing-app-hitting-android-20090204/

Also of potential interest is that google maps on the android now supports layers, e.g. wikipedia, traffic, your google my maps and more. Here's a link on that:

http://www.streetmapmobile.com/20091203/google-maps-for-mobile-layers-2

We live in "interesting times", and it seems like Google is behind a lot of it :-)