Tactile Geiger Counter for Ubiquitous Computing

Acknowledgements Firstly and most importantly I would like to thank Professor Stephen Brewster for guiding me through this dissertation, for all the advice, phones and resources he lent me and for giving me the opportunity to work on a project that nobody else has really done before. I would very much like to thank Andrew Crossan for regularly diagnosing and fixing my slightly fickle and temperamental SHAKE module, as well as Mark McGill and Andrew Ramsay for giving me the all the code I needed to get started on my project. Thanks also to Eve Hoggan for helping me to create and produce the vibration patterns used and Tony McBryan for lending me the SHAKE-compatible Anycom USB-200 Bluetooth dongle. It will be returned in one piece. Summary Many studies have been carried out on using mobile devices and location-based technology such as digital compasses and Global Positioning Systems for the purposes of locating, extracting or navigating towards virtual targets in 3-dimensional space. There have been significant successes in showing that users can accurately orient towards and locate virtual items when the existence of these items is known, often having access to only audio or tactile feedback regarding the targets location. However a gap in the research exists to look into how the existence of virtual items is established in the first instance and how well users can understand what the nature of those targets is: a natural precursor to the behaviours investigated in the previous studies. This project aimed to investigate how accurately users would be able to identify the presence of 3 different types of target using only vibrotactile feedback as a cue. Applications were developed using Java Platform, Micro Edition (Java ME) and deployed on a Nokia N95 mobile phone to expose users to structured vibrotactile patterns via a vibrotactile transducer attached to the skin that related to the detection of either a text, video or image message before testing their ability to correctly identify those patterns. A final experiment used a SHAKE sensor pack as a digital compass connected via Bluetooth to the N95 as a Geiger counter pointer for users to investigate 160° of their visible horizon in order to establish the existence or otherwise of any of those virtual target/message types. Results indicated that both the size of the virtual targets (in compass-heading degrees wide) as well as the number of targets that are present …