Objectives: Provide the user with information about location, distance and direction to POIs or other transport related features like car parking spot, bus stop location, arrival time at destination stop, etc.
4.3.1 System Functionalities
For providing travel and transit information for a door-to-door transit system, the Hap-ticTransit system is used along with the HapticPedestrian and Haptic GeoWand. The Haptic Transit Model includes the various sub systems: Haptic Navigation (pedestrian navigation module), HapticAlert (the notification system), User Interaction Model (lo-cal user or tourist to provide relevant information), and Expected Arrival Time system (the system that predicts arrival time of bus/train).
The Haptic GeoWand query is used to also help in exploring distant objects not within sight of the user. It helps provide the user with information about the general heading direction and distance to any particular POI of choice. This is done by the use of
Figure 40: Multiple modes of travel: This is a screenshow of the user querying public transport information using Haptic Transit and using Haptic GeoWand to query for POIs
varying vibration patterns by using vibration frequency to encode distance information when the user points in the direction of the POI. The HapticAlert system provides the user with location specific notifications about information that is important to the user.
The Haptic Pedestrian system provides navigation cues to get to a particular POI of choice of the user.
4.3.2 Scenario
Oliver just moved to Ireland from Austria and lives in Lucan. He wants to travel to Dublin to visit his friend, Nicole near ‘The Porterhouse Temple Bar’ on Sunday. Since Oliver is new to the place he uses Haptic assistance for his travel to meet his friend.
It is 8:15am and Oliver runs the Haptic Transit system and inputs ‘The Porterhouse Temple Bar’ as his destination. He then uses the pointing gesture to query for the bus
Figure 41: Multiple modes of travel: This is a screenshow of the notification provided to users of HapticAlert when they within a short distance from the destination stop.
stop he needs to walk to. It provided him haptic feedback with distance when he was pointing towards the direction of the bus stop (Figure 40). He also gets real-time bus arrival time inforamtion. It provides him information that the next bus arrives in 5 minutes (8:20am) but also added it would take him 12 minutes by walk to reach his destination. Thus the system recommended he start a little later as he would miss this bus and the next bus is only at 9:00am. He then thinks of picking up a cup of coffee and a sandwich before catching the bus to Dublin as he also realised he needed some coins for the bus. He thus uses the Haptic GeoWand to search for distance and direction and also navigation assitsance to the nearest shop that is open on Sunday.
He found ‘Centra’ was open and was within walking distance and also close to the bus stop. He gets walking direction to ‘Centra’ from his home using the Haptic Pedestrian system (Figure 40). He reaches ‘Centra’ by 8:30am, on querying the real-time transit information he learns that the bus is 5 minute late and so will reach the bus stop only at 9:05am. He thus realises he has enough time to finish breakfast and walk to the bus stop as it is only a 5 minute walk from Centra to the bus stop. He reaches the bus stop at 8:58am to wait for his bus to Dublin. Once he boards the bus and buys his ticket, he then keeps the Haptic Transit system running as he wants the HapticAlert system to notify him when he is nearing the destination bus stop nearest to ‘The Porterhouse’.
The system displyaed the arrival time at the destination bus stop and since it was a a 30 minute trip, he decided to listen to some music on his iPod and look outside the window to look for interesting landmarks along the way. And then after about 20-25 minutes he got a subtle vibration alert notifying him that he has to get off at the next bus stop (Figure 41). As he began preparing to get off, HapticAlert provides stronger vibrations which suggested that he press the ‘Stop’ button in the bus (for the driver to know that he has to stop) to alight from the bus at the next stop. Once he alights from the bus he using the Haptic DestinationPointer to get walking directions to ‘The Porterhouse’
(Figure 41). He walks across the bridge and reaches the entrance to ‘The Porterhouse’.
It is about 9:45 now as he meet Nicole they decide to walk through Temple Bar towards Trinity college (Figure 42). After spending 2 hours in Trinity college they decide to go to an Indian restaurant which Nicole’s friend had suggested for lunch (Figure 42). So they typed in ‘Madina Restaurant’ as their destination and used the Haptic Navigator to get walking directions to reach the restaurant. After this, Oliver then used the Haptic Transit system and queried for bus information to get back to Lucan and found a bus stop near Trinity college where he could catch a bus.
In the following chapters we describe the integration of haptic feedback into various
Figure 42: Multiple modes of travel: This is a screenshow of the user getting navigation assitance by using Haptic Pedestrian
types of mobile location based services as listed below:
• Knowledge Discovery: Haptic Geowand (Chapter 5)
• Pedestrian Navigation: Haptic Pedestrian (Chapter 6), and
• Notification System: Haptic Alert (Chapter 7)
5 Knowledge Discovery
5.1 Introduction
Knowledge discovery can be defined as the stage 1 activity (referred to in the section 3.6) where the user performs local searches for features nearby to check what/where are the Points of Interest (POIs). Users usually limit their search to features that are within walking distance.
In the past few years, mobile phones have developed into devices not only capable of making and receiving phone calls but can now access the internet via Wi-Fi or mobile networks. The majority of devices called ‘smart’ phones also come embedded with a GPS receiver as well as other in-built sensors such as a gyroscope, proximity sensor and accelerometer (Robinson et al., 2010b; Robinson and Jones, 2010; Coelho et al., 2011; Jacob et al., 2012a). People use their smartphones to perform local searches to obtain information about various features, for example restaurants, entertainment, re-tail/grocery, and travel. In the UK alone, 84% of smartphone owners use their device to search for local information with 78% of these users taking action afterwards (Google-MobileResearch, 2012). This demonstrates the demand for these types of application and their benefit to local businesses and communities. Thus it is beneficial to provide such information about local searches to the user in the most usable format.
In this chapter we discuss the various processes involved in a knowledge discovery sys-tem. The chapter deals with how the information from such systems is represented to the user and how haptic feedback can ensure quick decision making when querying such information. We first understand the various sub systems in a knowledge discovery system. The representation of information using visual and non-visual techniques are discussed. Our Haptic Geowand model is described and the functionalities and imple-mentation are discussed. We then conclude on how a Haptic Geowand can be used as a quick knowledge discovery tool and integrated into other systems.