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Ambient Mobile Information

For brief period after arriving at Motorola Labs, I was working on an existing project that examined the use of ambient information to keep people connected through their mobile devices.

One contribution to the project was an app that would run in the home screen of a windows mobile device. This app would periodically fetch images from Flickr that had been tagged with certain locations (e.g, nearby), friends, or dates (e.g., most recent), and put them in a little home screen ticker that would cycle through them every few seconds.

This app was part of a larger effort (spearheaded by Frank Bentley) that included a number of different apps for sharing small bits of context with friends and loved ones. The main goals of the research were to investigate how these apps promote connectedness and strengthen these relationships.

For more information, have a look at our workshop paper from Pervasive 2007:

Bentley, F., Tullio, J., Metcalf, C., Harry, D., and Massey, N. (2007) A Time to Glance: Studying the use of Mobile Ambient Information, Pervasive 2007 Workshop on Ambient Information Systems, Toronto. [Local PDF]