Mobile User Agent Strings and Wreckage Ahead

In a society with strong diversity, you design the system to be flexible enough for everyone. Often it means to find the sweet spot where you maximize the experience and the access whatever your requirements are. The work of Web standards is part of this system to maximize the experience.

The mobile devices are bringing a lot of diversity to the Web world. That is good. It should encourage universal design, respect of Web standards and not designing systems for specific systems. Unfortunately, Web developers, designers are being caught in the way they designed past Web sites : Desktop designs. The experience is then being very poor on a mobile device.

Their first incentive is then to design yet another entirely new site that will be specific for the mobile. That is a mistake. Browser sniffing stinks, even more so with the mobile era. It’s a sisyphean challenge. Every year, new handsets, new specific browsers. Willing to sniff Webkit user agent string? There is no Webkit on mobile. The list of user agent strings can be daunting. And the future with the rise of mobile in North America, the tablets and ebooks readers will be colorful.

Design your Web site for any devices. If you want to create an experience on the mobile, then design specific applications for mobile devices. APIs should help here.

Commentez / Le 22 février 2010 / Experience Utilisateur / par karl

Mobile World Congress, day 3

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These are my notes for day 3 of the Mobile World Congress 2010, in Barcelona. For past entries, see my impressions on day 1 and my reading of the pre-summit consensus on mobile augmented reality on day 2.

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This is day three of the congress and I think I am starting to get the hang of it! Orienting oneself in this maze of booths can be daunting at first, but one eventually finds the two or three exhibition halls most relevant to their business, and focuses on these areas.

The past couple of days brought me a new set of observations. I’d already noted on day 1 how much the congress was focused on hardcore technologies, with a strong showing by telco hardware vendors and video streaming/encoding/delivery, for instance, but it took me an incredulous two days to accept another conclusion.

Where is the Web?

The most strikingly absent word in all this congress was, in my opinion, « web ». Of the thousands of exhibitors, I think only one built their message around it, and it was nvidia, with banners claiming that they “power the mobile Web”. Quite a strange messaging from this video chipset vendor, which I would expect to claim to power mobile gaming, mobile video… but the web?

Other than nvidia, I think only the browser vendors were talking about the web. Opera had a decent presence, sandwiched between the enormous areas dedicated to Microsoft and Adobe; OpenWave was here too, and so were a number of browser vendors I did not know before, including for instance Bolt. Coming from North America where I suspect the mobile web usage is almost strictly limited to powerful, large-screened smartphones, one has to remember that other markets have a strong demand for Web browsing capabilities on smaller, less able handsets. The ability to download a « PC-like » browser capable of displaying CSS-styled, complex layouts on a tiny screens is a very big deal.

The absence of the “Web” word does not mean that the Web technologies are no longer relevant to the mobile world. On the contrary, I believe that no-one is talking about the Web because it has become such an integral part of mobile technologies. And thus, what used to be a buzzword has become the silent foundation, leaving more space for new darlings such as NFC, geolocation or others.

One such important buzzword this year is “mobile widget”, which in most case refers to packaged web application! In this area, one interesting announcement made during the congress was the opening of the Wholesale Applications Community. This looks like a joint effort from a number of vendors to fight the current fragmentation in mobile applications development, with Apple’s success causing every vendor and their dog to release their own apps platform and market. The announcement is still rather unclear about what technologies will be used, but it seems likely that they will build upon existing consensus on widgets.

Mobile Augmented Reality Summit

Day 3 of the congress was also the occasion for many actors in the “augmented reality” scene to come together and look at the state of the art, the state of the market, and most importantly, look at potential areas for collaboration.

And what a great meeting it was. 65 people joined the summit for more than 4 hours or passionate discussions on the themes of technology, business, user experience or privacy.

Interestingly enough, even after the summit, I still find it hard to define the scope of mobile augmented reality. At the moment, it tends to take the shape of applications superimposing layers of data (Points of Interest, most often) on a video feed, but there seems to be an agreement that this may not be, in the long run, the preferred mode of interaction. As one participant stated, “no-one likes to walk around with a mobile phone in front of their face”, and many agreed that AR was not a stated user need. Perhaps, we all agreed, we should look at Mobile AR as an enhancement to existing applications, but not necessarily standalone applications for a unique usage.

In the end, the best definition of Mobile AR (albeit vague) may be the one proposed by Vodafone’s Daniel Appelquist: Mobile AR is where the mobile platform bridges the digital and physical world.

More on the Mobile Augmented Reality summit in a matter of days, as soon as the embargo on the summit materials gets lifted.

Commentez / Le 18 février 2010 / Experience Utilisateur, Technologie / par olivier

The Rough Consensus on Mobile Augmented Reality

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This is the second post in my coverage of Mobile World Congress (see also the first post with my first impressions and the major trends at the MWC). Today I finished reading the 30-odd position papers for the upcoming Mobile Augmented Reality Summit, and while I am not yet at liberty to share the location of the papers, I took the time to write down what I think is the rough consensus among the participants, before the summit itself.

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The rough consensus on mobile augmented reality seems to be the following: Mobile Augmented Reality (MAR or just AR) is a field with a lot of potential, but it is still in its infancy. Yet, 2009 has seen MAR in the spotlight and receiving a lot of attention and hype. All the players thus feel that they need to make progress, and make it fast.

There is no doubt that the current breed of mobile AR tools are, for the most part, a new generation of what was called « mashups » only a few years ago: superposition of several sources of information, mostly based on geolocation metadata. Indeed, one of the basic technology used for mobile AR (KML) is the same being used for google maps, the darling child of the mashups hype. This geolocation-based technology is already being useful, but there seems to be an agreement among the industry that AR needs to go beyond the current state of the art to really shine.

The path forward, according to many, will necessarily take the shape of strong, fast and effective visual recognition. While a lot of progress has already been made in providing AR services through markers (usually barcodes, or NFC tags). Others, however, think that the real value to the user will not necessarily come from technological breakthroughs, but with the smart use of the existing framework, and the solving of some of the most pressing policy issues, with privacy for instance: with the integration of the physical world and online information mass becoming more and more seamless, how do we ensure the right to privacy and mitigate the effects of « too much information » being available on everyone at everyone’s fingertip?

You can also read the position paper I wrote for Pheromone on MAR here.

Commentez / Le 16 février 2010 / Technologie / par olivier

Mobile World Congress 2010, Day 1

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I am currently in Barcelona, Spain for the 2010 edition of the Mobile World Congress. I will be trying to cover the event as I experience it, through pseudo-live-blogging articles. I also plan to produce an ePub report at the end.

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After a week-end marred by flight delays, surprisingly cold weather and mild food poisoning, here I am on the Plaça d’Espanya, in one of my favorite cities in the world, about to enter the Mobile World Congress for the first time.

The first impression when you pass the gates of the Fira de Montjuic, and get your identity checked (thrice – just in case) is that the congress is huge. HUGE! Each hall could host a sizable international congress… and there are eight of those, not counting the extra halls requisitioned by companies like Nokia, Huawei or Vodafone.

A lot of the exhibitors are here to sell hardware: amplifiers, antennas and handset components, about which I know little so skipped most of the time. Instead, I tried to go through the whole exhibition in one go and try to distinguish some trends for the contents industry.

SMS, payments and platform fragmentation

So many booths seem to be dedicated to micropayments, payment solution, and billing solutions. This seems to be a very big market, both oriented towards the mobile operator business (billing, payment) and content providers (micropayments).

SMS/MMS messaging still appears to be the leading mode of messaging. Although most new UI innovation seems to be revolving around all-integrated platforms mixing e-mail and social networks for rich applications, a lot of the companies specializing in mobile communication still tout their SMS throughput.

NFC is an interesting trend. Short for « Near-Field communication », it encompasses all the technologies allowing contactless communication between devices.

As would be expected, video is big, between the makers of DSP, video on demand, mobile TV and other similar solutions.

So much greenwashing! Every big player seems to have the obligatory part of their booth dedicated to how green they are – but mostly they limit themselves to claiming their hardware is not laden with harmful chemicals. The actual green presence is tiny and hidden in one of the most remote parts of the congress: a handful of companies selling wind turbines, solar panels and other alternative energy sources to power mobile grid. No sign of the recent trend to product and sell hardware made from recycled materials. I’ll assume these were not selling so well.

Content providers are clearly not playing here. No Time Warner, no Sony. Google is supposed to be around, but nowhere to be found. Mobile apps developers are few, too, which surprised me. So far, beyond a few companies presenting variants of geolocation systems, the apps world has eluded me at the congress.

Big platform vendors are here, however – except for the very conspicuous absence of Apple. This is a great opportunity for others to show off their development platforms. The sheer number of mobile development platforms is actually scary. Samsung just released bada, their new Operating System and associated development platform. Others seemed to be doing the same, promoting their proprietary OS and development platform as the best, most powerful and flexible.

At the other end of the spectrum, the LiMo Foundation appears to be a cross-vendor effort to build an open-source operating system for mobile, based on linux. Motorola, Panasonic, Else and Samsung seem to be on board, along with a few carriers such as Vodafone.

Win7 Phone Event

One of the large events of the day was the announcement of the new windows 7 phone. Steve Ballmer was here, and Joe Belfiore, VP of the Windows Phone programme came and explained the philosophical shift behind the Win7 Phones. In a nutshell, they wanted to revisit the User Experience of the phone and move beyond the pc metaphor. They devised a new UI made of “live tiles” which are basically concentrated aggregation of information, from a view of people (from various social networks), agenda, mail, media, etc. The goal it seems is to finally mix home and work into a single device.

update 16 Feb 2010: Paul Kwiatkowski has a good analysis of the phone’s potential path to success, along with a video of its interface.

I am not (yet) impressed and couldn’t help shake off the impression that Ballmer was a terrible speaker, and that Belfiore was a bit too much of a Steve-Jobs-wannabe in his pushy enthusiasm. But if you want to read more about the phone UI – engadget has a hands-on review.

Wait… what?

Finally, the « are you for real? » award of the day goes to the DoCoMo team who were presenting a most interesting piece of innovation: eye-controlled earphones. Look left to play or pause, look right to fast-forward. Roll your eyes for volume control (no, not kidding…). I’m suspecting you have to cross eyes to shuffle?

Commentez / Le 15 février 2010 / Technologie / par olivier

Mobile Augmented Reality: beyond the glorified tour guide and the dystopian future

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This post is a position paper for the upcoming Mobile Augmented Reality Summit, held in Barcelona on Feb 17th, 2010 held in conjunction with the Mobile World Congress.
Pheromone, as company developing Web services and applications, and online social networks in particular, will be joining this summit to observe the upcoming technological trends in Augmented Reality. We would also like to propose our vision of MAR beyond the usual scenarios of the online tour guide and the dystopian overflow of information without any concern for privacy: Mobile Augmented Reality as a very personal tool for memory, egocasting, serendipity and discovery.

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With the increase in power of smart phones and mobile computing devices, the promise of enriching our daily context has recently taken the face of Mobile Augmented Reality. In a study, Matthew Buckland and Philip Langley write:

Imagine holding up your phone or other digital device against a person you’ve just met or passing by. You’d instantly have information returned about that person within seconds, gleaned from an automatic web, public profile and social network search. You’d discover common friends, talking points — and then have the ability to add him/her to your network. Using a semantic scan, you’d discover negative or positive comments on Google or elsewhere relating to this individual.

For now however, AR on mobile platforms is still burgeoning. Companies like layar, acrossair wikitude or robotvision are leading the charge with their mobile AR browsers.

Strictly speaking, one could argue that these are not exactly AR, since their technology is mostly limited to the knowledge of a list of geolocated Points of Interest, which are then overlaid on a live video view of the geography around the user.

The usual definition of Augmented Reality would involve analysis of the video feed and its « augmentation » with meta data about the scene, and thus, the current crop of MAR browsers are often refered to as « pseudo-AR ». Regardless, these are technological prowesses that do provide extra information about a scene, and would fit a more etymological interpretation of « augmented reality ».

Regardless of the semantic debate, the current MAR solutions are acceptable, albeit often flawed because of the relative lack of precision of positioning systems. One can imagine future progress in AR transcending the technical limitations of geolocation systems, and actually use face or building image recognition. This is the scenario that most AR ideation seems to be heading towards: Mobile Augmented Reality as a ultra-precise and dense overlay engine of *everything* around me.

The problem with this vision of augmented reality is that it leads us from the current situation where AR is but a glorified tour guide tool, to a disturbing dystopia where the thin veil of privacy (or complete lack thereof) in the online world becomes the reality of our AR-mediated physical world.

We could imagine, however, less disturbing scenarios for the evolution of AR. This require taking a few steps back and looking at what our perception our reality in a generic context is, and what our needs are.

Most AR futuristic scenarios take place in a situation when the user would already know a lot of information on the scene (e.g: the name of participants of my meeting, the name of the street in which I am walking, etc.). AR can then repeat and enhance all this knowledge and overlay it onto the perceived scene. But what if instead of « enhancing » data I already know, AR actually surprised me with relevant information I may not know about, or remind me of information I may have forgotten.

Indeed, rather than leverage crowdsourcing and masses of data, it would enhance my life through the analysis of my own recorded behavior, and my choices of « egosourcing ».

Rather than knowing the names of all the people in the street – some mildly useful knowledge, not to mention a little disturbing – I would be happy to know whether my favorite restaurant in the area is open and what its menu du jour is, I would be interested to receive suggestions of an exhibition just opened in the museum a block away from here.

Without needing to wait for technology to allow for some of the advanced capabilities that MAR promises, there is a yet untapped market for MAR to look into:

1. egocasting and personalized bookmarking
2. collaborative filtering for unique, personalized suggestions. That is, going beyond raw data and the overlay of POIs, and instead doing the hard work
3. becoming a serendipity engine by matching social behavior analysis with the wealth of online data

Next week, amidst the Mobile World Congress, I plan to attend the Mobile Augmented Reality Summit and observe the trends in the MAR industry: are we rapidly heading towards highly technological Augmented Reality, or will MAR be the new media platform for lo-fi personalized information and social networking?

Commentez / Le 9 février 2010 / Experience Utilisateur, Technologie / par olivier