Ubiquitous Wireless

The Ubiquitous Wireless group is working to develop the next generation of social applications enabled by the advent of high-speed wireless Internet access everywhere we go. The current work is funded by an industry grant from the HiMax group.

Narrative

A world is soon arriving where ubiquitous and incredibly high speed wireless access will be commonplace. As with other leaps forward the network performance of many existing applications will benefit (e.g. applications accessed on cellphones via wireless Internet), but the question arises what will be the new applications that become possible through this ubiquitous wireless access? Imagine for a moment that from any location: office building, mountain top, beach park, you could access every movie ever made in a matter of seconds. While there might be immediate implications for the movie industry, the Ubiquitous Wireless research project at the University of Hawai‘i is envisioning the new sorts of applications that will be made possible by this technological shift.

Our team is working on a number of applications:

• Annotated Earth
• Augmented Driving
• Augmented Museum
• Collaborative Telepresence
• Social Sense [Patent Pending]

While many new applications will become possible, it may be that users are not ready for some of them. More often then not, it is the need for rather than novelty of a technology that is responsible for its mass adoption; novelty wears off, needs root in. Often the potential of application is not apparent until users have become familiar with the supporting technology, e.g. a sufficient number of users had to become familiar with basic Internet services before Wikipedia could become successful. As a consequence the UH Ubiquitous Wireless research team is looking carefully at the how applications that take advantage of ubiquitous wireless environments can evolve from those that are quite similar to what is currently available, to others that are truly revolutionary. Suitable extensions to existing applications will pave the way to the acceptance of the concepts and possibilities of augmented reality, preparing users to accept and even desire subsequent paradigm breaking developments.

Evolutionary Path

The goal of this research project is to provide compelling ubiquitous wireless applications. To this end we have broken the project timeline into distinct phases. In the first 12 months we will focus on developing simple prototypes, while simultaneously producing revolutionary visions of new applications that can be developed over a five year period. The development of functioning prototypes in 12 months will restrict the instantiated applications to the lower end of AR systems, specifically those which do not include full registration; that is true embedding of virtual objects within the users view of the physical world. Initially virtual entities will be related but appear disconnected from the physical reality.

In addition at least some of the initial prototypes will make use of existing hardware for ease of deployment. In the longer five year term we will be building our own novel devices and hardware, but in the short term the ability of applications to leverage existing hardware already in public use makes the process of adoption much simpler. For example, the first FAX machine was effectively useless. It was only as the number of FAX machines increased that the value of having a FAX machine rose sufficiently to make it worthwhile to acquire one (the network effect). Similarly with our AR social networking application "Magic Ring". If there is only one person with a Magic Ring AR system then there is not much social networking possible. If the system can deploy both on mobile phones and AR headsets then there is a social base to leverage, and the AR headset is value added to something that already has value.

As a consequence our research work will incorporate two architectural principles. First, our applications will be explicitly designed whenever possible so that they can run on multiple platforms, particularly ones that many people already own such as smartphones and laptops, in addition to wearable systems with heads up displays (HUD). This will ease both the development bootstrapping efforts, and barriers to building a user base.

Second, our applications will be designed to be both modeless and modular. Instead of having a special purpose prototype system for one application (such as a museum guide), we will build a system where applications coexist and are activated based on context. For example, when entering a museum our system would alert the user that they are entering an area where the museum guide application can be used. Applications and content will even be streamed on demand to the AR system much like Java applets and Flash animations are on the web.

Modularity is important architectural tenet. We will strive to make our system as easy to extend as possible, allowing us (and our users) to build new functionality in small increments. The canonical example is the Unix tool philosophy of doing one small task well, allowing larger tasks to be performed by stringing together tools in a pipeline. The specialized input and output systems of AR will also be modularized so that as new technologies become available to us they can be added without major rewrites of applications. This modularity is also crucial to ensure that we can deploy applications with varying degrees of functionality to different platforms (smartphone, laptop, wearable HUD).

All the applications are supported by work from the Enabling Technologies sub-group:

• Enabling Technologies