Technical sectionMADE: developing edutainment applications on mobile computers
Introduction
The upcoming scenario of the convergence of mobile communications and computing promises to merge hand-held computers’ and cellular phones’ functions into a single hardware platform. In the next few years, the availability, through 3G networks, of more evolved, higher quality services is likely to make Internet-enabled multimedia palmtop computers a common object in everybody's pockets [1]. This will let a great computing power be always available to millions of people in their daily life activities. But a full exploitation of such a potential—which can offer location-aware services, positioning, e-ticketing, etc.—requires study and implementation of Human–Computer Interaction (HCI) modalities able to support usability of the new mobile tools by the general public.
As already shown by current trends, software applications for palmtop computers are going to become ever more widespread [2]. This implies the necessity to resort to programming methodologies and tools specifically dedicated to the new platform. In fact, palmtop computers significantly differ from desktop computers. For instance, they host ad hoc designed operating systems (e.g. PalmOS or Epoc) or compact versions of common desktop OSs (e.g. WinCe and Linux). Even in this last case differences in the supported APIs and peripherals and the lack of available libraries are significant. While the push seems to be towards standardization, as testified by the recent diffusion of Java [3] and Microsoft's.net [4] technologies, hand-held and desktop platforms still differ significantly in terms of usage patterns (i.e. how and why end-users interact with the system) and available hardware and software resources. Thus, we believe that the approaches used for the programming of these two platforms will still remain quite different, at least in the medium-term. Limited hardware resources (e.g. CPU speed, battery life, screen size and memory availability) pose relevant constraints, in particular for user interaction. New, ad hoc devised solutions in HCI have to be found to guarantee usability of applications by the general public. Wide usability is a key factor to the success of new generation networks. Otherwise, new services would be available only to a limited audience of computer-literate people, and this is not the target of the huge investments made by the mobile telecom operators which set up the networks.
We have explored the design and the implementation of new mobile services in the context of the E-Tour, IST (Information Society Technologies) European project [5]. E-Tour is aimed at developing information-rich, multimedia guides on mobile devices for tourists. In particular, the focus is on edutainment, which provides cultural and tourist information and services in a pleasant and appealing way through high-quality interactive programs.
Tourists represent a wide category of computer-illiterate people. In this research we do not assume the end-users to have any specific knowledge of computers. Thus, tourists can be considered as a sample of general public. This allows our work to cover a wide range of usability situations and issues, although implementation only concerns the tourism field.
The contribution presented in this paper does not concern new HCI theories for mobile computing platforms. Rather, we present a new tool aimed at supporting an efficient development of mobile tour guide applications. The tool has been designed to meet the requirements of both end-users and tourist sites’ management, captured in field-tests of early prototypes and from the analysis of tourist information needs in environments such as museums, parks and urban and mountainous areas [6]. The E-Tour project adopted a user-centric design methodology, including participatory design, contextual design and usability specifications, in order to provide a wide usability by the general public [7]. This analysis highlighted in particular the need to integrate several different services, such as interactive maps, database querying, positioning and tour planning, within a single, highly usable interface.
We could not make extensive use of standard desktop HCI solutions to face these issues, since end-users, usage patterns, sensors and computational tools of our tourist applications are significantly different from the desktop-computing environment's ones. Thus, it was very important for us to use dedicated tools capable of supporting an efficient exploration of HCI solutions.
Although a lot of research work has been done in the single fields of multimedia presentations and of advanced functions for mobile users (e.g. [8], [9], [10]), the user needs analysis revealed that usability of applications requires the provision of advanced contents and functions through a pleasant multimedia interface [6]. But little has been done with regard to tools able to support the integration of advanced functions in appealing multimedia interfaces usable by the general public. Our work aims at bridging this gap, by describing a software development toolkit (namely: MADE, Mobile Applications Development Environment) which supports integration, at a programming-language level.
MADE includes the Multimedia Services Language (MSL) and the MicroMultiMedia Player (M3P). MSL provides components encapsulating advanced services and multimedia features, while M3P manages communication among the objects and with the user. Such a language-level integration allows the developer to focus on a single development tool (MSL), which should reduce the learning, development and maintenance time.
Section snippets
HCI issues on palmtop computers
Developing effective HCI for palmtop computers is a new and challenging research field, which requires a careful exploration of several design choices, involving issues such as:
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Exploitation of high-quality graphics effects, such as animations, transparencies and panorama images, in order to support the implementation of appealing edutainment applications (i.e. applications for education/information and entertainment). These effects are not native in current palmtop environments and their
Enhancing efficiency in the development of multimedia interfaces
A crucial factor to developing interfaces usable by the general public is the possibility of using design tools that support HCI designers in their research for new interaction solutions [19]. To this end, we have implemented a simple Object Oriented (OO) scripting language, the Micromultimedia Services Language (MSL), which supports the development of interactive multimedia programs able to integrate added-value services for mobile users. A typical MSL presentation consists of a set of pages (
Graphics programming on PocketPCs
Evolving from the first monochromatic devices which essentially provided simple applications such as agendas and personal organizers, palmtop computers have reached a level of performance similar to that of the desktop computers of almost 5 years ago, with up to 128 MB of Ram, 150–200 MHz processors and 16 bit graphics. Several brands currently on the market offer products which differ for costs, performance and kinds of target applications. The most common environments are PalmOS and PocketPC.
M3P architecture
M3P is the software engine that interprets at runtime the MSL script specifying the behavior of the multimedia application.
Since the mobile devices’ market, including Internet enabled cellular phones, is fragmented in a number of different, still incompatible hardware/software platforms [25], we consider portability to different kinds of mobile devices (e.g. PDAs, Java-enabled cellular phones) as a key-factor for the multimedia player.
To this end the M3P's core relies on a two layer
MSL: MicroMultimedia Services Language
MSL is a scripting language aimed at supporting an easy development of edutainment programs on mobile devices. An MSL file is given as input to the M3P multimedia engine. At runtime, M3P interprets the commands specified in the file. Through the commands, the MSL developer defines the appearance and the behavior of the components of the multimedia pages. M3P automatically recognizes the user or the system-generated events (e.g. a click on a button or a tick of a timer) and reacts according to
Support for high-quality graphics
Since quality of the graphics and of the contents is an essential factor for the success of multimedia applications, we have designed M3P in order to support high graphics quality, implementing low-level routines to compensate for the shortcomings of current palmtop computers. These routines are encapsulated in the interface of the MSL components, allowing developers to use graphics effects with ease. In particular, we highlight the following features:
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Full support for custom graphics. There is
Evaluation
The main target of MADE consists in enhancing the development of service-rich multimedia edutainment applications. In this section we briefly present some applications implemented in MSL, show the results of some tests aimed at assessing MADE's support for an efficient application development and discuss the findings.
Conclusions and future work
The next generation networks promise to make multimedia contents widely available to mobile users. However, a wide usability of the new services requires an accurate study and test of HCI solutions enabling users to easily access and interact with multimedia data.
While a lot of research work has been carried on concerning advanced functions for mobile workers, little has been done about the integration of such functions within homogeneous interfaces usable by the general public. We have
Acknowledgements
The research work presented in this paper has been partly funded by the European Union, in the context of the E-Tour project (IST1999-20447) of the V Framework Programme.
We would like to thank the anonymous referees for their precious suggestions that have contributed to improve the quality of the paper.
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