pd-net - Towards Future Pervasive Display Networks
Funded by the European Union Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement no. 244011.
Welcome to PD-NET!
"The PD-NET project aims to lay the scientific foundations for a new form of communications medium with the same potential impact on society as radio, television and the Internet. The goal is to explore the scientific challenges and to assess the new technologies required to enable the emergence of large scale networks of pervasive public displays and associated sensors. This display network will be designed and implemented to be open to applications and content from many sources and thus provide the foundation for work on a new global communications medium for information access and interaction."
FunSquare wins UbiChallenge
After almost a year of hard work results of the first International Ubichallenge were announced on December 9th during the Tenth International Mobile and Ubiquitous Multimedia Conference (MUM’11) in Beijing, China. We are very proud to say that the FunSquare service was the winner while Digifieds took the third place! The FunSquare [1] service creates autopoiesic, i.e., self-generated, content by matching information that comes form within display surrounding (e.g., current wind speed (12 m/s)) with information coming from without (e.g., the speed of a honey bee (6 m/s)) into novel content (The current wind speed (12 m/s) is two times more than the average speed of a honey bee (6 m/s)). On the other hand Digifieds [2] is an example of a digital shared public notice area that allows users to post classifieds on public displays.
More information about FunSquare and Digifieds can be found here and here.
[1] F. Alt, A. S. Shirazi, T. Kubitza, D. Bial, F. Zaidan, M. Ortel, B. Zurmaar, T. Lewen, and A. Schmidt, “Digifieds: Insights into Deploying Digital Public Notice Areas in the Wild,” in 10th International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Multimedia (MUM 2011), 2011. (pdf)
[2] N. Memarovic, I. Elhart, and M. Langheinrich, “FunSquare: First Experiences with Autopoiesic Content,” in 10th International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Multimedia (MUM 2011), 2011.(pdf)
Official press release: http://www.ubioulu.fi/sites/default/files/UBI_Challenge_Awards_2011_12_09_press_release.pdf
Digifieds and FunSquare Deployment
Currently, there are only few environments available that allow for testing public display applications on an urban scale in the wild. In the context of the UbiChallenge 2011 we developed two services in Oulu, Finland over the course of 6 months. Digifieds (derived from digital classified), is a digital public notice area that allows information to be created, posted and taken away from public displays, either directly or using a mobile phone. The FunSquare service is based on self-generative autopoiesic content assembled dynamically by matching real-time context streams with existing content fragments into localized “fun facts”.
During the evaluation we were able to gather valuable insights from observations, interviews, and a field trial with regard to content, privacy, and users’ motivations.
Full Paper at Pervasive 2011
We presented our Full Paper on “Designing Shared Public Display Networks – Implications from Today’s Paper-Based Notice Areas” at the Ninth International Conference on Pervasive Computing in San Francisco, US (full paper).
Abstract: Large public displays have become a regular conceptual element in many shops and businesses, where they advertise products or highlight upcoming events. In our work, we are interested in exploring how these isolated display solutions can be interconnected to form a single large network of public displays, thus supporting novel forms of sharing access to display real estate. In order to explore the feasibility of this vision, we investigated today’s practices surrounding shared notice areas, i.e. places where customers and visitors can put up event posters and classifieds, such as shop windows or notice boards. In particular, we looked at the content posted to such areas, the means for sharing it (i.e., forms of content control), and the reason for providing the shared notice area. Based on two-week long photo logs and a number of in-depth interviews with providers of such notice areas, we provide a systematic assessment of factors that inhibit or promote the shared use of public display space, ultimately leading to a set of concrete design implication for providing future digital versions of such public notice areas in the form of networked public displays.
Additionally we presented a poster on Digifieds, a digital public notice area (poster).
Abstract: Public notice areas are nowadays being widely used in stores, restaurants, cafes and public institutions by customers and visitors to sell or advertise products and upcoming events. Although web platforms such as Craigslist or eBay offer similar services, traditional notice areas are highly popular as using pen and paper poses only a minimal barrier to share content. With public displays proliferating the public space and with means to network these displays, novel opportunities arise as to how information can be managed and shared. In an initial step we systematically assessed factors inhibiting or promoting the shared use of public display space and derived design implications for providing a digital version of such public notice areas. In this poster we report on the implementation of such a digital shared notice area, called Digifieds. With an initial lab study we aimed at understanding suitable means of interaction when it comes to creating, posting, and taking away content.
UbiChallenge Kick-Off / Poster
The deployment teams for the UbiChallenge 2011 have arrived in Oulu, Finland to make Digifieds and FunSquare available to the public. After the initial deployment phase, services will go live on July 6th, followed by a 2 month evaluation phase. Evaluation is expected to continue throughout summer 2011 and the teams will submit their technical report to the MUM 2011 UbiChallenge track.
Prior to the deployment in Oulu, the Digifieds team has conducted a lab study on suitable interaction techniques for creating, publishing, and taking away content from public displays. Early insights have been submitted and accepted for the poster track of Pervasive 2011 in San Francisco (see Publication section).
Workshop at Pervasive 2011
A workshop related to PD-Net has been accepted at Pervasive 2011.
4th Workshop on Pervasive Advertising
The overall topic of the workshop is the application of Pervasive Computing technologies for advertising purposes. This topic is of particular interest at this time because advertising is considered by multiple researchers as one main business models for pervasive computing and has recently been called the “Killer application for the 21st century”. The market is rapidly growing, and major companies (Apple iAd, JCDecaux, Wall, ClearChannel, Google etc.) are invested in pervasive advertising projects. The main hinderance today is that advertisers lack the technological skills, and pervasive computing researchers and practitioners lack the advertising knowledge and experience. Furthermore, these groups rarely talk to each other.
Based on the success of previous workshops we envision to continue and further establish the workshop series as a prime venue bringing together people from academia and practice, hence driving forward research in the field of Pervasive Advertising. We believe that our research community has a responsibility to contribute towards a joint understanding of how pervasive advertising of the future will look like. To this end, this workshop looks at the future of advertising from the perspective of pervasive computing. It aims to provide a foundational structure for the field and will attempt to sketch a roadmap for further research and deployment challenges in this domain.
Workshop Organizers: Jörg Müller, Florian Alt, Daniel Michelis
Website: http://www.pervasiveadvertising.org/
FunSquare and Digifieds at UbiChallenge 2011
The UbiChallenge
The UBIChallenge competition in Oulu, Finland will take place from June until August 2011. This competition is oriented towards creating, distributing, (June 2011) and examining (July, August 2011) public display applications in a real world setting, i.e., on eleven public displays in the city of Oulu. Our proposals for the ’Funsquare’ and ‘Digifieds’ systems were accepted.
FunSquare
The Funsquare application leverages the existing UBI Challenge deployment to generate locally relevant, easy-to-generate “fun facts” that not only educate and entertain citizens, but also improve social interaction between strangers and friends alike. It offers a sustainable business model through “funmercial” (sponsored “fun facts”), as well as minimal overhead in terms of administration and implementation.
Digifieds
Despite the advent of the Internet traditional paper-‐based notice areas are still very popular due to their easy usage and high potential to reach a local community. However, they did not yet enter the digital domain due to the lack of easy means for creating and taking away content and as suitable display technologies are still costly (touch, vandalism proof). We take a first step towards establishing public displays as a communication medium of the future by exploring suitable interaction techniques (touch, mobile phone, web) for creating and taking away user‐generated content.
The official pdnet website is online
After some weeks of hard work the official website of the EU project pdnet is finished. The purpose of this site is to inform about the project, our research and the project members. If you are interested in one part in particular do not hesitate to contact us.
The pdnet team consists of a group of researchers who want to explore the possibilities and challenges of future large scale public display networks. The main objectives are
- To create enabling technologies for large-scale pervasive display networks through the design, development and evaluation of a robust, scalable,distributed and open platform for interconnecting displays and their sensors.
- To establish Europe as the international centre for work on pervasive display networks.
- To address key scientific challenges that may inhibit the widespread adoption of pervasive display network technology: Tensions between privacy and personalization, situated displays, business and legislative requirements, User Interaction.
If you would like to know more you should have a look at the About section.