Mobile Spatial Interaction Research Articles

Spatial Search Techniques for Mobile 3D Queries in Sensor Web Environments

Developing mobile geo-information systems for sensor web applications involves technologies that can access linked geographical and semantically related Internet information. Additionally, in tomorrow’s Web 4.0 world, it is envisioned that trillions of inexpensive micro-sensors placed throughout the environment will also become available for discovery based on their unique geo-referenced IP address. Exploring these enormous volumes of disparate heterogeneous data on today’s location and orientation aware smartphones requires context-aware smart applications and services that can deal with “information overload”. 3DQ (Three Dimensional Query) is our novel mobile spatial interaction (MSI) prototype that acts as a next-generation base for human interaction within such geospatial sensor web environments/urban landscapes. It filters information using “Hidden Query Removal” functionality that intelligently refines the search space by calculating the geometry of a three dimensional visibility shape (Vista space) at a user’s current location. This 3D shape then becomes the query “window” in a spatial database for retrieving information on only those objects visible within a user’s actual 3D field-of-view. 3DQ reduces information overload and serves to heighten situation awareness on constrained commercial off-the-shelf devices by providing visibility space searching as a mobile web service. The effects of variations in mobile spatial search techniques in terms of query speed vs. accuracy are evaluated and presented in this paper.

Mobile Visibility Querying for LBS

This article describes research carried out in the area of mobile spatial interaction (MSI) and the development of a 3D mobile version of a 2D web-based directional query processor. The TellMe application integrates location (from GPS, GSM, WiFi) and orientation (from magnetometer/accelerometer) sensor technologies into an enhanced spatial query processing module capable of exploiting a mobile device's position and orientation for querying real-world spatial datasets. This article outlines our technique for combining these technologies and the architecture needed to deploy them on a sensor enabled smartphone (i.e. Nokia Navigator 6210). With all these sensor technologies now available on off-the-shelf devices, it is possible to employ a mobile query system that can work effectively in any environment using location and orientation as primary parameters for directional queries. Novel approaches for determining a user's visible query space in three dimensions based on their line-of-sight (ego-visibility) are investigated to provide for “hidden query removal” functionality. This article presents demonstrable results of a mobile application that is location, direction, and orientation aware, and that retrieves database objects and attributes (e.g. buildings, points-of-interest, etc.) by simply pointing, or “looking”, at them with a mobile phone.

Cooperative Relative Positioning

Many pervasive applications deal with relative positions between interacting entities rather than global coordinates. The Relate project developed sensing methods and a modular system architecture for peer-to-peer relative positioning. It studied the methods and architecture in application case studies on mobile spatial interaction, firefighter navigation, and wearable activity recognition.

Bearing-based selection in mobile spatial interaction

We introduce a mobile spatial interactive application that uses a combination of a GPS, inertial sensing, gestural interaction, probabilistic models and Monte Carlo sampling, with vibration and audio feedback. This system allows the probing or querying of targets in a local area, based on a model of the local environment and specific context variables of interest, to enable a rich, embodied and location---aware spatial interaction. An experiment was conducted to investigate how spatial target selection at different distances, target separations and target widths is affected by a system with added `typical' noise characteristics. Results showed that the successful selection of targets in the virtual environment is maximised with a combination of high angular separation and angular width.

FEATURERealizing the vision of mobile spatial interaction

FEATURERealizing the vision of mobile spatial interaction