Had a meeting with my supervisor, Prof. Alan Smeaton on 15th Feb. I presented the GUI I made for the Nokia tablet, reviewed what was done and what needs to be done next.
After the meeting, with Alan' suggestion, I dropped by to Daragh Byrne in CDVP to show how the project is going. I explained the way I'm going to try to present the data collected(more on this in a section below), the GPS extraction. Daragh was very helpful and was familiar with the way I was going to present the data!
Received Signal Strength Indicator
Daragh also pointed out to me Bluetooth has Received Signal Strenth Indicator, and it would be very nice to log this too, you could try to use this measurement as a proximity measurement how close the person/device is to you. It could be used in creating a ranking algorithm for the devices discovered within a Place. Daragh felt it would be great to log this, as he was unable to log this on the Nokia N95 phone.
I did some testing this morning on it,
I had created a connection to my Sony Erickson k800i phone using hcitool command, and was printing out the RSSI value of the connection every 2 seconds and moving the phone around my room.
The 2 areas that are selected, the phone was within few cm from the Nokia tablet, and its possible to see the RSSI value was fairly large, but moving the phone away less than 2 meters away from the Nokia tablet, the RSSI value dropped to 0.
Update: Further test, showed when I have left my room and went downstairs, the RSSI value dropped to around -10 range. With bit of googling around I found
a simple script which uses the RSSI value to lock/unlock screen when the phone moves away certain distance. Also, a graphical version developed in python
So it seems the RSSI value is high positive when the device is within centimeters of the Tablet, 0 within few meters, and negative as it goes further away.
Need to research this further.
Visualisation
I have contacted Dr. Hyowon Lee as he has the book that Alan has showed me at our last meeting, and the book is The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, I'll get it out from the library to skim it. I also will have a meeting with Hyowon early next week to present my visualisation idea(s).
To recap, I'm looging GPS coordinates and Bluetooth devices, so I could identify people that where within a certain Place I was at, and allow to search by:
- Searching by a Place, would show the previous times I was there, and the people around it.
Also, showing pictures of the geotagged photos on Flickr
And (possibly)showing nearby Wikipedia articles. - Searching by a Person, would show the places I have met that person
And a new idea is born! Instead of just having a simple blog-type webpage, I could graphically represent it in a similar way as in Universe. Each entity(Person, Place, Photo) could become the centrepoint, and would have related things rotating around it, when selected, that new thing would become the centrepoint, etc. So:
- Centrepoint: Person
Show places I have met this person, possibly also related people that I meet along with that Person. This could detect simple group of people, for example, if I see this person only in place A, which could be work, I'll see my co-workers there too so I could show them too.
- Centrepoint: Place
Showing people that are found in this place. Also, geotagged flickr photos and wikipedia article.
- Centrepoint: Photo
Showing random photos from Flickr relating to this place.
And then providing a way to review all of this data historically. Possibly by week/month. I really like this idea.
Coding of the interface
Universe, is done in Processing. I have looked at it and it does seem very nice and simple. I'm also thinking of buying Visualizing Data book by one of the authors of Processing.
I also stumbled on fidgt, which is similar to Universe, but for social networks (last.fm and flickr). The source code is available for it, so I'll be able to learn good bit of Processing from it. There is a demo:
And found another framework to do visualisation, Prefuse. Have not looked into it in detail, but worth while exploring as the video on their page seems very nice too:
GPS Location Extraction
I'm not going to be trying to come up with a way to detect the shape of the location visited, but simple will be doing something simpler as both Alan and Daragh said its better to get something done which works and then if I have time to go back to it and do the complex implementation. Will try to begin working on this over the weekend.
Project Architecture
Made this diagram to recap the project architecture:
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