Published by the IEEE CS n 1536-1268/14/$31.00 © 2014 IEEE PERVASIVE computing 5

Section Title HereEditor: Editor Name Here n Editor affiliation here n editor email here

ApplicationsEditors: Anind Dey n Carnegie Mellon University n anind@cs.cmu.edu

Beverly Harrison n Intel Labs Seattle n beverly.harrison@intel.com

Section Title HereEditor: Editor Name Here n Editor affiliation here n editor email here

Notes from the CommunityEditors: Jason Hong n Carnegie Mellon University n jasonh@cs.cmu.edu

Mary Baker n HP Labs n mary.baker@hp.com

W elcome to the latest column of Notes from the Community!

This quarter’s topics are all about tech-nology for locating, sensing, and inter-acting. Oh, and teddy bears. Enjoy!

SmartPhonESA growing number of posts to the community site relate to smartphones. Below is a sample of some of these shared posts.

Saving PedestriansDedicated Short-Range Communica-tion (DSRC) is a communication stan-dard for vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) safety systems. Honda has been investigating how to extend DSRC to include V2P, or vehicle-to-pedestrian, by sending signals to people’s smartphones. An example scenario is a person stepping out from behind a parked car, with the pedestrian’s smartphone buzzing and the driver getting an alert on the car dashboard.1

Compelling Location-Based ServiceSMSlivräddare is a unique kind of crowdsourcing project that looks for

people with specific skills and tries to route them to the right place at the right time. For example, it sends SMS to CPR-trained volunteers to get more people to start CPR early, before the ambulance arrives. From our perspective, we won-der if there are other combinations of skills and just-in-time groups that can be supported. Car accidents and nearby doctors would be a good one. Street fights and Ryan Gosling would be another (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gauLLAR7njY). At any rate,

learn more about this Swedish service at www.smslivraddare.se/english.

Google Project TangoIn March 2014, Google announced a new kind of smartphone platform that

could have a richer sense of physical spaces. According to their webpage, the current prototype is “a 5 inch Android phone containing highly customized hardware and software designed to track the full 3-dimensional motion of the device as you hold it while simulta-neously creating a map of the environ-ment.” Several of these prototypes have been sent to universities. Many rumors suggest that Google is eyeing this same kind of functionality for tablets as well. Learn more at https://www.google.com/atap/projecttango.

Fun and GamESReaders also shared a number of posts about toys, games, and other fun things.

Osmo Tangible Interface ToyOsmo is a tangible interface toy cur-rently being produced that’s enabled by iPads (see Figure 1). Kids can place a small mirror over the iPad’s camera, which lets the iPad see what’s in the area right in front of it. It then uses some kind of computer vision to iden-tify different toys with which the kids are playing or drawings they’re making. Check out their video on their home-page (https://www.playosmo.com).

Printing Teddy Bears On DemandNew research looks into printing teddy bears on demand (see Figure 2). The work, conducted by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and Disney Research, investigates 3D printing of soft objects. Using several techniques,

Smartphones, Teddy Bears, and ToysJason Hong, Carnegie Mellon UniversityMary Baker, HP Labs

JoIN oUr SUBrEDDIt

this column offers a summary of interesting news and research in pervasive and mobile computing, with content drawn from submissions from a shared community on the social news site reddit, at www.reddit.com/r/pervasivecomputing. We en-courage you to join our subreddit and spread the news of this site to others, so that together we can build a sustainable online community for all aspects of pervasive and ubiquitous computing. —Jason Hong and Mary Baker

Using several techniques, the researchers could print

out soft materials and combine them with yarn

to produce new kinds of materials.

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6 PERVASIVE computing www.computer.org/pervasive

Notes from the CommuNity

Notes from the CommuNity

the researchers could print out soft materials and combine them with yarn to produce new kinds of materials. As of yet, no electronics have been added to the teddy bears, but it’s probably just a matter of time.2,3

EmErGInG tEChnoloGIESCommunity members also shared some new kinds of emerging technologies that might soon be standard fare for pervasive computing.

A Sensor-Based OS for Everyday LifeThere’s growing community interest in Bluetooth Low Energy. BLE is a variant of the Bluetooth protocol that’s not only designed to consume less power but also supports beaconing of information. Perhaps the best-known version of BLE is iBeacon, which is Apple’s extension to BLE for low-powered and low-cost transmitters. Each iBeacon device has a universally unique ID that it trans-mits, which can be detected by iOS and Android devices to trigger the activa-tion of apps.

Estimotes are an implementation of iBeacon (see Figure 3). The company is building durable iBeacons to deploy in stores, and they’re currently selling a developer’s kit for US$99. Wired maga-zine has a more in-depth article about Estimotes and iBeacon.4

Depth Cameras in Laptops and UltrabooksIntel has been looking at how to inte-grate depth cameras into some prod-uct lines in the near future. These depth cameras could add several new dimensions to user experience by allowing computers to sense distance, size, shape, and more, on top of color and image. From our perspective, selling depth cameras as a mass con-sumer product could also help push down the costs of these technologies, which in turn could help spur even newer kinds of interactions (imagine smartphones and cars with depth cameras too).5

Figure 1. Osmo is a system that uses the iPad’s camera to enable tangible interaction for kids. (Source: Osmo, www.playosmo.com; used with permission.)

(a) (b)

Figure 2. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and Disney Research have developed new kinds of soft “printing” technologies. The researchers demonstrate their work with a system that can “print” teddy bears. In an informal user test, these printed teddy bears were found to be quite huggable. (Source: Scott Hudson; used with permission.)

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JULy–SEPtEMBEr 2014 PERVASIVE computing 7

the researchers could print out soft materials and combine them with yarn to produce new kinds of materials. As of yet, no electronics have been added to the teddy bears, but it’s probably just a matter of time.2,3

EmErGInG tEChnoloGIESCommunity members also shared some new kinds of emerging technologies that might soon be standard fare for pervasive computing.

A Sensor-Based OS for Everyday LifeThere’s growing community interest in Bluetooth Low Energy. BLE is a variant of the Bluetooth protocol that’s not only designed to consume less power but also supports beaconing of information. Perhaps the best-known version of BLE is iBeacon, which is Apple’s extension to BLE for low-powered and low-cost transmitters. Each iBeacon device has a universally unique ID that it trans-mits, which can be detected by iOS and Android devices to trigger the activa-tion of apps.

Estimotes are an implementation of iBeacon (see Figure 3). The company is building durable iBeacons to deploy in stores, and they’re currently selling a developer’s kit for US$99. Wired maga-zine has a more in-depth article about Estimotes and iBeacon.4

Depth Cameras in Laptops and UltrabooksIntel has been looking at how to inte-grate depth cameras into some prod-uct lines in the near future. These depth cameras could add several new dimensions to user experience by allowing computers to sense distance, size, shape, and more, on top of color and image. From our perspective, selling depth cameras as a mass con-sumer product could also help push down the costs of these technologies, which in turn could help spur even newer kinds of interactions (imagine smartphones and cars with depth cameras too).5

nEwS oF thE wEIrdLastly, as usual, community members shared a lot of posts about uncom-mon uses of pervasive computing technology.

Shaq at SXSWIn one of the most unusual articles we’ve ever seen, famed basketball player Shaquille O’Neal is interviewed by Engadget at SXSW 2014 about wearable technologies. Shaq admits that he’s a geek and talks about his love of technology. He believes that there will be all kinds of wearables for athletes (to bring players more into the game), the elderly, hipsters, golfers, and homeboys, and each of these wearables needs to be attuned to the fashion and functional needs of these segments. You can watch the whole video at www.engadget.com/2014/03/10/shaq-at-sxsw.6

Missing Drone in Palo AltoIn what is possibly a historic moment, someone in Palo Alto, California, has posted a flyer around the town asking for help finding his missing quadcop-ter.7 While the flyer talks about the Palo Alto police, the police depart-ment has confirmed that the quad-copter is not one of theirs. Perhaps we might see flyers of missing self-driving cars one day!

“Tech-Wondo”And to wrap up this quarter’s column, we have an article from the Economist about how Taekwondo has been using sensing technologies to help with scor-ing.8 Sensors are embedded inside of the standard protective gear used in matches, and can automatically help score kicks landed on a competitor. The next steps are to develop similar sens-ing technologies for headgear. Also, parts of this technology were published at UIST 2004.9 This reminds us of the electronic sensing and scoring long used in competitive fencing (see http:// entertainment.howstuffworks.com/fencing-equipment.htm).

REFEREnCES

1. D. Lavrinc, “Honda Thinks Smart-phones Can Save Pedestrians from Bad Drivers,” Wired, 3 Sept. 2009; www.wired.com/2013/09/honda-pedestrian.

2. “Watch: Disney Research Prints Teddy Bears on Demand,” Stich Kingdom, 29 Apr. 2014; www.stitchkingdom.com/disney-research-teddy-bear-printer-70651/#.

3. S.E. Hudson, “Printing Teddy Bears: A Technique for 3D Printing of Soft Inter-active Objects,” Proc. SIGCHI Conf. Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2014, pp. 459–468.

4. K. Vanhemert, “This Startup’s Cheap Sensors Could Create an OS for Everyday Life,” Wired, 7 Aug. 2013; www.wired.com/2013/08/how-a-startups-cheap-sensors-could-bring-shopping-and-mobile-computing- into-the-future.

5. A. Shah, “Intel Bringing Vision, 3D to Laptop and Tablet Cameras,” Network World, 26 Aug. 2013; www.network-world.com/article/2169338/smb/intel-bringing-vision--3d-to-laptop-and-tablet-cameras.html.

6. S. Silbert, “Shaquille O’Neal Talks Fitbit, Google Glass and Smartphones at SXSW,” Engadget, 10 Mar. 2014; www.engadget.com/2014/03/10/shaq-at-sxsw.

7. L. Gannes, “Someone in Palo Alto Would Like Their Missing Drone Back,

Please,” Recode.net, 22 May 2014; http://recode.net/2014/05/22/someone-in-palo-alto-would-like-their-missing-drone-back-please.

8. A.A.K., “Scoring Technology in Mar-tial Arts: Tech-wondo,” blog, Econo-mist, 3 Nov. 2012; www.economist.com/blogs/gametheory/2012/11/scoring-technology-martial-arts.

9. E.H. Chi, J. Song, and G. Corbin, “‘Killer App’ of Wearable Computing: Wireless Force Sensing Body Protectors for Martial Arts,” Proc. 17th Ann. ACM Symp. User Interface Software and Technology, 2004, pp. 277–285.

Selected CS articles and columns are also available for free at http://ComputingNow.computer.org.

Jason hong is an associate professor of com-

puter science at Carnegie Mellon University.

Contact him at jasonh@cs.cmu.edu.

mary Baker is a senior research scientist at HP

Labs. Contact her at mgbaker@hp.com.

Figure 3. iBeacon is Apple’s approach for low-cost and low-power Bluetooth transmitters. Estimote, shown here, is one manufacturer of iBeacons. (Source: Estimote, http://estimote.com; used with permission.)

NoTeS from THe CommUNiTy

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