All posts in EMMA Master of Arts

There has been miscommunication with HP Labs Bristol. Their Mobile Bristol Toolkit has interesting support for use of RFID tags. The editor software allows you to assign actions for RFID tags coming in range of the reader. Also losing a tag (a read tag is going out of range) can get certain actions. Although at first I was told the toolkit needed the ACG CF RFID Reader, when speaking to their technical staff I was told only the next release of their toolkit is going to have support for RFID! This future release, scheduled for around September, is coming too late for me.

I’m currently working on the user interface of my project in Adobe Flash. The Mobile Bristol Toolkit has excellent full screen support. Their Pocket PC client is basically running Pocket Internet Explorer in a fullscreen application. In the HTML page loaded a Flash movie is loaded fullscreen as well (240×320 in my case). The toolkit is able to directly call functions in the Flash movie with its actions on RFID reads.

It looked like the perfect application for a PDA to create graphically interesting RFID applications. The future will not have Flash support. Instead, the MB client software will have timeline support of its own. I can’t imagine the possibilities will be able to meet Flash’ possibilities, but maybe it’s going to be very flexible after all.

For my project hearing this is quite dissapointing. I will have to try to return my reader and will have to look into the possibilities of other RFID readers.

Today I finally received my CompactFlash RFID reader. As I wrote earlier it’s the Multi ISO CompactFlash reader from ACG, that is supposed to work with the Mobile Bristol Toolkit. It came with 30 small round epoxy RFID sticker tags (I-Code SLI).

Although I expected a lot of trouble getting the hardware to work it seemed to go pretty easy. Although I did not get a CD, manual, URL or anything with it, setting it all up went quickly. On the ACG id website a Demo Utility can be found which can be used to test the reader. The manual on the utility (found in the ZIP file) is not too detailed about the available features but it does explain the basics. After clicking one of the two ‘connect’ buttons the ‘select’ command enabled me to read out the tags I received, which had unique numbers written to them already.

The Mobile Bristol Editor provides an excellent programming environment to program the client’s behaviour on encountering and losing tags. It’s now time to get the Mobile Bristol client to actually communicate with the reader.

Earlier I wrote about deciding on a platform for my project. One of the reasons to go mobile was to engage a close relationship with the object. The mobile device would be moving towards the object. This way the interaction is directly the opposite of moving the object to the reader. The user is approaching the object instead of moving the object away from himself.

In the end I decided to go for a PDA with a CompactFlash-based RFID reader. It looked like building a fullscreen Flash application for Windows for Pocket PC was the way to go. With the new Flash Player 7 for Pocket PC .flv video files are also playable. Unfortunately no public standalone Flash Player is released by Macromedia. I could go for the Internet Explorer plugin, but at the top and bottom a lot of screenspace is lost because of the menu bars. Next to that it would be pretty distracting and ugly.

Werner Ruotsalainen wrote a great article describing the possibilities for Flash on Pocket PC. Bryht Flash Player looked like the way to go. It comes with a button bar (play, stop etc.), dissapearing when using the program fullscreen. The trial version was not that smooth, so I could not really test if it was worth the money.

To use the CompactFlash RFID reader in combination with Macromedia Flash a bridge would have to be created. Some readers like the Socket CF RFID Reader Card 6E come with keyboard wedge software faking keyboard presses. This solution would not win the beauty contest but would do the job. The Mobile Bristol Toolkit by HP Labs Bristol however provides a superior interface not just for GPS, but for RFID as well! It’s GPS possibilities were used by the 2005 EMMA group project iPACK. For RFID the toolkit should be working with the ACG CF RFID reader, which I hope to receive soon.

Using the Mobile Bristol Editor the software can be programmed to send commands to Flash upon reading a tag and losing connection with a tag. The client software running on the HP iPAQ is not a standalone Flash Player but is using Internet Explorer functionality. In fact, the client is showing an HTML page where a Flash object can be embedded. It is on the other hand able to display the Flash movie fullscreen!

A little annoyance of Pocket Internet Explorer for Pocket PC 2003 is the popup “Press OK to continue loading the content of this page.”. It was Microsoft’s way to work around a patent, explained here, and pops up every time a Flash movie is played. My project file would only be run once, so for me this is not such a big problem. There is a (commercial) client side solution though, called ‘PressOK‘. It quickly removes the popup but you will still be able to see it for a slight second. The Microsoft Knowledge Base article describes a few Javascript solutions to counter this problem. This is a serverside solution, perfect for my project, and also compatible with the Mobile Bristol toolkit.

The emotional value of an object can lie in experiences with that object, or intensive use of it. Perhaps the object was a precious gift or it reminds you of pleasant or unpleasant times. Crafted objects can be selfreflecting, and souvenirs can remind you of a location.

In this project the emotional stories are narrowed down to childhood nostalgia. The objects used are a Fisher-Price roller skate, a stuffed animal, a plastic military tank and a handcrafted puppet. Because these items were collected in The Netherlands, they might be emotional to only Dutch.

To test this hypothesis the objects would have to be presented to people from different countries. To find people not in a hurry or not going somewhere a good place to look is a park or a square. People there would be relaxing and not be bothering too much by a few questions. The ideal place to meet people from a lot of different nationalities would be a tourist hot spot. I found a perfect combination of the two in Union Square, San Francisco.

There was a chance that people would not recognise the objects at all. Their emotional stories would be geographically bound. However it was very interesting to see nearly everybody coorporating recognising the objects. Interesting stories were captured. The story-telling people came from Canada, the US, Hong Kong, Ukraine, Spain, Germany, Russia, France, Scotland and England. Together this created an interesting mixture of emotions, with some emotions being country specific, and others being global.

It seemed like the perfect place to interview people, but unfortunately it also had a downside. The sound quality of the recordings is pretty low because of constant traffic and construction background sounds. Nevertheless the great emotional and international stories weigh easily up against this loss of quality.

Last weekend (23rd and 24th of June 2006) another Dorkbot was held in Nieuwpoorttheater in Ghent. Dorkbot is a global festival with “People doing strange things with electricity.” ‘De Ambassade’ (the embassy) is a place in Nieuwpoorttheater where artists and students collectively research the relation between art, society and the balance of power. This time an ‘RFID embassy’ was set up as a research project by the collective nMn (naarstige Media nijverheid).

Friday night’s theme was RFID. I was invited to do a lecture on my experiences in my research project on RFID. I especially talked about the evolution I found in the way RFID is applied. My presentation “Evolving RFID Devices” can be downloaded here:
Presentation Dorkbot Gent 23rd of June 2006.pdf

That same night Rob van Kranenburg spoke about ‘RFID and Pervasive Computing”. An interesting lecture on the consequences of RFID and the way it is entering our lives. He was followed by Melanie Rieback of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, creator of the RFID virus. She’s researching the privacy issues involved with RFID from the context of Computer Science. Although she did mention the virus, a great deal of her talk was about her RFID Guardian, a mobile device protecting your privacy. Later that night Tilman Runge and Christopher Hirschmann were supposed to talk about their RFID Zapper. Unfortunately their presentation was cancelled that night. nMe itself built the RFIDude: a robot driving around the room autonomous. Visitors were handed out RFID badges with their hobbies associated to them. A built in reader allowed the robot to scan people’s badges and show their relationship with other people on a big screen.

It was an interesting night, with interesting talks. Later that night some lively conversations arose. Unfortunately I was unable to attend the next night, missing out on the RFID zapper and the other interesting projects like Johannes Taelman’s DIY touch screen. A nice day in Ghent with lovely weather slightly made up for that.

Although I expected an audience focused on RFID I was positively surprised that uninitiated people came by, interested in learning about this new technology. Also my compliments for the organisation. Some photographs were made. If I can get hold of some of them they might show up here later.

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As I’m proceeding on my research I’m getting quite deep into the matter. The possibilities I create with my project tell the story of a future scenario. In this project RFID is a technique being used, but more important, it’s also the subject of this story.

The Story Tool I create is enabling users to add their own stories to objects of their choice. These stories form a second dimension. My goal is to place those user stories in the same context of all objects being tagged by RFID. This way these stories strengthen my project and make the scenario more interesting to people unaware of RFID.

Download the PDF document by clicking on the image below:

An update of my Project Description. The PDF document can be downloaded here:
Project Description.pdf

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Because I know some Java but I’m not a Java expert a very important decision factor in chosing the platform is my ability to actually realize the programming work. I created a flow chart to give an overview of what would have to be possible in the system I want to create.

Have a look at it here, or click the image to download the PDF file.

The last couple of days I’ve been looking into the platform possibilities of my project. I have several options, although not all of them are just as good. I’m really looking for a mobile device because that would emphasize the freedom of the user.

In a perfect world that would be a user’s cellphone with embedded RFID/NFC reader and a nice and big screen that would be able to show a goodlooking and user friendly user interface. Add on top of that a camera and microphone. At the moment there are no cellphones with such specifications. What are the options?

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Yesterday I had to present my project for the Mock Exam comity. I’m creating a tool enabling users to associate their own narrative to objects. I want to provide people adhesive RFID tags that can be stuck on anything you like. You would then be able to tell your story by adding pictures, video’s or sound. On the EMMA project market I will show a room with different objects that have a narrative associated to them.

The comity was very positive but did tell me to improve the relation between the content of the narratives and the infrastructure (RFID). In other words, try to create narratives in the context of RFID and privacy invasion. The main reason for this was that most people, when hearing about RFID, will not be able to look further than privacy invasion. Let’s see how I can use this feedback and keep the whole project in a positive perspective.

I passed, so I’m in production fase. All the research on RFID has taken quite some time of the total exegesis. I’m not behind on schedule but it does mean I have to put extra time on production right now. My thesis is well under way though.

What’s left for me to do?

• Find the right platform (hardware/software) for my product
• Improve the relation between the content of the narrative and the infrastructure (RFID)
• Build infrastructure (User Interface, database)
• Create photo/video/audio for narratives
• Build object room
• Finish thesis