Last day of Hypertext

Today is the last day of Hypertext. Right now is the keynote speech on Ubiquitous Hypermedia and Social Computing, right up my alley, by Kaj Gronbaek (kgronbak AT interactivespaces.net). The problem that he is addressing is that it is hard or impossible to link and annotate documents that you don't own, so this led to open hypermedia work. What is open hypermedia? It separates sructure from content, ok, that makes sense. This leads to the concept of ubiquitous hypermedia, using hypermedia for enabling ubiquitous computing in my opinion, because hypermedia and the web is ubiquitous, and so this is part of Mark Weiser's vision that he set out at PARC which I just finished my summer internship at.

Ubiquitous hypermedia links objects, people, and places. Sounds familiar like HP Lab's Cooltown where objects, people and places are associated with a URL. Kaj's research group created a joint research center for interactive spaces, in conjunction with design companies and architects.

Social Computing in Cyberspace

Social computing according to Wikipedia encompasses a list of social computing software and environments. MySpace is the second most popular property on the web, I can't believe that! Besides chat, messaging, dating, relationship sites, reputation systems or recommendation systems are also part of social computing like eBay, eOpinions, etc. What's getting popular now is MMOGs or massively multiplayer online games, where you are immersed in a virtual environment with other people. We can see that social computing is a real important thing, as there are special research groups in this area, like Microsoft's Social Computing Group and PARC's Socio-Technical and Human Computer Interaction group. Howard Rheingold, who coined virtual community, in his book, SmartMobs talks about the next social revolution which involves social computing wth pervasive physical objects. Social computing is widespread in cyberspace, but Kaj says it's not prevalent in physical space, akin to Mark Weiser's vision. His quote "We should co-evolve social computing for phsyical spaces and take advantage of the full faculty of our bodies". I couldn't agree with him more! Yes, that's what we need!

Social Computing in the Physical World

One example of this is social computing in public spaces. His group created iFloor, which is an interactive library floor where people can debate and interact among the people that show up on the floor. Another example is a collaborative library search for children using the floor and pressing buttons using your feet and having an interactive table which the children can use a pen to select items and books. They've put debate and blog structures, spatial hypermedia and meta-data presentation for the implementation of the interactive floors. They also created an eBag (electronic schoolbag) that links pupils to their digital portfolio. How it works is that students carry a mobile phone with Bluetooth and Bluetooth sensors detect within proximity the student and displays the student's profile and content on an electronic whiteboard, where they can collaborate with other students. The student can drag and drop onto their eBag so they can carry digital resources, just like a student carries a school bag of books and physical objects. Another application is shared mobile annotations, with one example being HyCon, a context-aware hypermedia framework, for location-based moblog with a mobile phone and GPS. One cool application I saw is BibPhone in which an RFID reader is put on a book and then you can do a voice annotation of the book by speaking to the loud speaker.

One of the things that Kaj is saying is that it is not easy for librarians to put digital material in a physical environment with the same ease like librarians put books on the shelves. So they created an InfoColumn/InfoGallery that exhibits digital subscriptions in the physical library space. These digital subscriptions can come through RSS feeds, and users pick up links using Bluetooth phones (just like the squirting mechanism of HP Labs' CoolTown). They've installed this system in 2 of Denmark's largest libraries. I think this is really cool, and really immerses hypermedia with physical spaces and exposes that to the real people, the real users, not just geeks like us!

Besides hypermedia in libraries and for students, they've also done spatial physical hypermedia in the home, where they have an interactive table where the members of the home can interact and show photos and content and then redirect to other places in the home. One example is a context-aware remote control, where you can for example watch a TV show in one place in the house, and then continue that show on the same channel when you go into another place in the house. But with the remote control, you just use motion gestures and the system knows that you want to continue.

A lot of these applications are using Bluetooth for the proximity sensing, Bluetooth is certainly pervasive in Europe, that's for sure! Not quite yet in Canada and the US, Bluetooth so far is being used for calling using a headset to a mobile phone. They're also doing gaming applications for collaborative gaming in a physical setting.

Now, he's talking about where hypermedia skills fit in. He's mentioning that hypermedia principles are powerful in integration of physical entities. When you have a physical resource, that has to be resolved and integrated with the web and services on the web, so this requires hypermedia. So what are the research issues in ubiquitous hypermedia? There needs to be rich structures for physical entities and multimedia content, rich presentation specs are needed, and there is need to understand the behaviour which equally important as the structure. In addition, there are research issues into user interaction, user experience, context-awareness and adaptivity and making hidden actions understandable.

In conclusion, he's saying that the next major steps in ICT development will take place outside the traditional PC and traditional web browser. The research group web site is www.interactivespaces.net. This was a great keynote showing great applications, I thoroughly enjoyed it. I just asked the question about certain examples where the project didn't work and why it didn't work, because he mentioned so many examples where there was positive feedback and support. So one of the unifying themes that I can see when working in ubiquitous hypermedia in physical spaces, is that this adds the element of reliability. Now, I'm not saying that hypermedia cannot be reliable, but this is extremely important in a physical environment, because things can't crash and users have to use this, so they can't have the device and software be unreliable.