A Virtual Spatiotemporal Annotation System: The Virtual Stickies Mobile Augmented Reality Study

Smart-phones and other mobile devices are becoming increasingly ubiquitous. Complex sensory and computing features of these devices provide excellent opportunities for advanced, context- and location-aware applications. In this chapter, we discuss the concept of spatiotemporal annotations of real objects in the urban environment. We stress technological challenges, usability, and novelty of spatiotemporal contexts that can be generated and consumed by users of ubiquitous and mobile computing devices. As an example, we present our implementation of the annotation system called Virtual Stickies. The system allows capturing, storing and presenting time-, context- and location-specific annotations to the user of a smartphone. We describe the system architecture and usability challenges of the system. In our conceptual and experimental deployments we have tried two different user interface-based solutions: the augmented camera view and the augmented map view. We provide a short introduction to mobile augmented reality technologies, present existing work in this area and provide technical insights into the solutions that we have investigated. The study has been conducted on the modern mobile platform Android, and utilises some Google-supported technologies. We briefly conclude with the results of case studies conducted with the system.

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