The Blue Bubble: Design and construction of an interpersonal communicator prototype

Many WPAN solutions focus on human interaction with an intelligent environment, as guided by a dominant ubiquitous computing vision. Research found that humans are as important part of the environment as other objects, and CMC has positive effects on human interaction. Interpersonal communication as one aspect of ubiquitous computing was explored. We designed a close-range wireless application using commonly available mobile devices and software components, Blue Bubble, to mimic an extended social personal space of 10 metres. The design was implemented using Bluetooth enabled PDAs with C# and .NET Compact Framework. Blue Bubble automatically detects other users, retrieves published profiles and propagates news with "Ice Breaker", "News Collector", "Chat" and "File Transfer" features. An innovative two-way handshake process improved the devices discovery reliability. Improvements on PDAs and Bluetooth technology were proposed to support future developments of such automatic interpersonal communicators.

[1]  Robert E. Kraut,et al.  Internet paradox. A social technology that reduces social involvement and psychological well-being? , 1998, The American psychologist.

[2]  William G. Griswold,et al.  Digital backchannels in shared physical spaces: attention, intention and contention , 2004, CSCW.

[3]  Gregory D. Abowd,et al.  Charting past, present, and future research in ubiquitous computing , 2000, TCHI.

[4]  Brian H. Spitzberg.  Preliminary Development of a Model and Measure of Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) Competence , 2006, J. Comput. Mediat. Commun..

[5]  Paul Dourish,et al.  Yesterday’s tomorrows: notes on ubiquitous computing’s dominant vision , 2007, Personal and Ubiquitous Computing.

[6]  B. R. Schlenker,et al.  The influence of cognitive load on self-presentation: can cognitive busyness help as well as harm social performance? , 2000, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[7]  E. Hall,et al.  The Hidden Dimension , 1970 .

[8]  Mark H. Chignell,et al.  Mobile text entry: relationship between walking speed and text input task difficulty , 2005, Mobile HCI.

[9]  Vasileios Vitsas,et al.  Performance modelling of the IrDA infrared wireless communications protocol , 2000, Int. J. Commun. Syst..

[10]  Harsha Rao,et al.  Writing Effective Use Cases and Introducing Collaboration Cases , 1998, J. Object Oriented Program..

[11]  Y. Amichai.  Chapter 2 Personality and the Internet , 2004 .

[12]  Thomas G. Zimmerman,et al.  : Near-field , 2022 .

[13]  Ilkka Korhonen,et al.  Health monitoring in the home of the future. , 2003, IEEE engineering in medicine and biology magazine : the quarterly magazine of the Engineering in Medicine & Biology Society.

[14]  Alan J. Demers,et al.  Research issues in ubiquitous computing , 1994, PODC '94.

[15]  Jonathon N. Cummings,et al.  Internet Paradox Revisited , 2002 .

[16]  Polly Huang,et al.  Sensor-assisted wi-fi indoor location system for adapting to environmental dynamics , 2005, MSWiM '05.

[17]  Luc Deneire,et al.  From WPANs to Personal Networks: Technologies and Applications , 2006 .

[18]  Sajal K. Das,et al.  Guest Editorial - Smart Homes , 2002 .

[19]  Stephanie Rosenbaum,et al.  Focus groups in HCI: wealth of information or waste of resources? , 2002, CHI Extended Abstracts.

[20]  Martin R. Gibbs,et al.  Mediating intimacy: designing technologies to support strong-tie relationships , 2005, CHI.

[21]  Andry Rakotonirainy,et al.  A Survey of Research on Context-Aware Homes , 2003, ACSW.

[22]  Ken Sakamura,et al.  Compact, low-cost, but real-time distributed computing for computer augmented environments , 1995, Proceedings of the Fifth IEEE Computer Society Workshop on Future Trends of Distributed Computing Systems.

[23]  Cheryl Albas.  Proxemic Behavior: A Study of Extrusion , 1991 .

[24]  T. Jones,et al.  Interpersonal distance, body orientation, and touch: effects of culture, gender, and age. , 1995, The Journal of social psychology.

[25]  Scott Counts,et al.  Incorporating physical co-presence at events into digital social networking , 2005, CHI EA '05.

[26]  E. Hall.  The Silent Language , 1959 .

[27]  Stefan Agamanolis,et al.  Toward wearable social networking with iBand , 2005, CHI Extended Abstracts.