The Wrap - Or what we will have done by the end of the semester
This is a short post about what we expect the results of our project are going to be after the end of the semester. This final deliverable is called “the Wrap” within the GROCS community. We can’t really say for sure what exactly is going to be in it, but it is definitely going to be comprised of multiple things:
First of all we plan to write a research paper at the end of the semester that we plan to submit to an Human-Computer Interaction related conference. The paper will describe the research that we did about how blind and sighted user’s walk through urban environments and how a system like Talking-Points could augment there experience with information about the locations that they pass. It will also describe our design for Talking-Points and how our research informed our design decisions.
The second more tangible part of our wrap will be a proof-of-concept prototype of our mobile device. It will be some software written Java that can detect location tagged with bluetooth beacons, make a request to the Talking-Points internet database and present the location information to the user. There will be two presentation options: either through a graphical user interface or through a speech interface. We don’t know how far we will get in terms of functionality to navigate through the location information, but that will be the next step after the things described above are working.
The third part of the Talking-Points project is the internet database that will contain all the location information. It will have an interface for user to create new locations and contribute to existing locations and an API so the mobile device can access its information. We will start with a basic interface to create and edit the core information of locations and see how many types of additional information (hours, history, comments) we can integrate.
A long-run goal that we will most definitely not reach, but for which we should be able to present a detailed plan is to make the whole system customizable and social. This should allow users to customize the system to their particular needs and profit from each others use.
Finally this very Blog could also be considered as part of the results of our project. By the end of the semester this should be a fair documentation of the process that our project went through.
