Abstract
With information technology becoming increasingly embedded in our everyday physical world, there is a growing set of mobile applications that involve a connection with the digital representation of physical places. This association is normally initiated with a check-in procedure, through which a person asserts her presence at a particular place and determines the context for subsequent interactions. The common assumption is that a mobile application will be able to search the surrounding environment and present the user with the intended check-in target; however, in a world of ubiquitous place-based services, this assumption may no longer hold. A person in an urban environment would, at any moment, be surrounded by a large number of places, all of which could be regarded as possible interaction contexts for that person. In this work, we investigate the real-word challenges associated with wide-scale place selection and how the process can be affected by the place environment, by the position of the person in relation to the target place and by positioning errors. To study this reality, we used Google Places as a directory of georeferenced places. We conducted 14,400 nearby place queries structured around different combinations of our three independent variables. The results suggest that the overall performance is poor, except for low-density scenarios, and that this discovery process, albeit relevant, should always be combined with other place discovery approaches. The results also help to understand how this performance is affected by check-in positions and by the properties of the place environment.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
José R, Cardoso JCS, Alt F, Clinch S, Davies N (2013) Mobile applications for open display networks - common design considerations. Proceedings of the 2nd International Symposium on Pervasive Displays (PerDis’13), 97–102. https://doi.org/10.1145/2491568.2491590
Dey AK (2010) Context-aware computing. In: Krumm J (ed) Ubiquitous computing fundamentals. CRC Press, Boca Raton
Büttner S, Cramer H, Rost M, Belloni N, Holmquist LE (2010) φ2: exploring physical check-ins for location-based services. In UbiComp ’10 adjunct: Proceedings of the 12th ACM internationalconference adjunct papers on Ubiquitous computing - Adjunct, pp 395–396). ACM
Rallapalli S, Dong W, Lee GM, Chen YC, Qiu L (2013) Analysis and applications of smartphone user mobility. Proceedings - IEEE INFOCOM, (December 2011) :3465–3470. https://doi.org/10.1109/INFCOM.2013.6567182
Cramer H, Rost M, Holmquist LE (2011) Performing a check-in: emerging practices, norms and conflicts in location - sharing using Foursquare. In Proceedings of the 13th international conference on human computer interaction with mobile devices and services. ACM, pp 57–66
Zhu F, Mutka M, Ni L (2005) Service discovery in pervasive computing environments. IEEE Pervasive Comput 4(4):81–90
Kindberg T, Barton J, Morgan J, Becker G, Caswell D, Debaty P, …, Spasojevic M (2002) People, places, things: web presence for the real world people, places, things: web presence for the real world. Mobile Networks and Applications 7(5):365–376
Hosio S, Kukka H, Riekki J (2010) Social surroundings: bridging the virtual and physical divide. IEEE Multimedia 17(2):26–33. https://doi.org/10.1109/MMUL.2010.3
Klokmose CN, Korn M, Blunck H (2014) WiFi proximity detection in mobile web applications. Proceedings of the 2014 ACM SIGCHI symposium on engineering interactive computing systems - EICS ’14, pp 123–128. https://doi.org/10.1145/2607023.2610281
Weißker T, Berst A, Hartmann J, Echtler F (2016) the massive mobile multiuser framework: enabling ad-hoc realtime interaction on public displays with mobile devices. Proceedings of the 5th ACM International Symposium on Pervasive Displays - PerDis ’16, pp 168–174. https://doi.org/10.1145/2914920.2915004
Kubitza T, Clinch S, Davies N, Langheinrich M (2013) Using mobile devices to personalize pervasive displays. Mobile Computing and Communications Review 16(4):26–27. https://doi.org/10.1145/2436196.2436211
Alt F, Kubitza T, Bial D, Zaidan F, Ortel M, Zurmaar B, …, Schmidt A (2011) Digifieds: insights into deploying digital public notice areas in the wild. In Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Multimedia - MUM ’11. New York: ACM Press, pp 165–174. https://doi.org/10.1145/2107596.2107618
José R, Pinto H, Silva B, Melro A (2013) Pins and posters: paradigms for content publication on situated displays. IEEE Comput Graph Appl 33(2):64–72
Xavier AI, José R (2018) I am in here: implicit assumptions about proximate selection of nearby places. In: WorldCist’18 - 6th World Conference on Information Systems and Technologies. Springer, Naples
Robusto CC (1957) The cosine-haversine formula. Am Math Mon 64(1):38–40
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Electronic supplementary material
ESM 1
(XLSX 799 kb)
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
José, R., Xavier, A.I. Discovering the right place to check-in using web-based proximate selection. Ann. Telecommun. 74, 325–334 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12243-018-0692-x
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12243-018-0692-x