Mobile Technology

Hello! This is my first post for 2008, and we’ve now begun our second term of the Interactive Multimedia program at Sheridan College. Last term in multimedia pioneering we focused on big, physical interactivity like motion capture, interactive walls and surfaces. This term, the focus has shifted to small interactivity, which leads me to the topic of this post – mobile technology.

We had a visit from internet architect, James Eberhardt today, he was a very captivating guest speaker and gave a presentation on some emerging technology with respect to mobile devices. Of course, the most exciting and talked about mobile device today is the Apple IPhone. Personally, I can’t wait to be gainfully employed again just so I can afford to buy one of these hot gadgets! Its features include a touch screen where you can simply tap on a friend’s name to call them, and it also allows you to sync your entire contacts list with your Mac or PC. You can even choose the order in which you want to listen to your voicemail. Beyond its phone features, you can also listen to music, podcasts, and watch videos easily by syncing to your itunes library. You can even surf the net via a wi-fi connection so it’s simple and cost-effective to check email, browse websites and even upload pictures taken with its built-in camera.

Speaking of uploading pictures, James also showed us a really cool application called ShoZu which takes the gps information from your mobile phone so that when you upload a picture via the phone. Then when you view your pictures on Flickr you can see on a map exactly where the picture was taken. Very cool for people who are travelling because it is sometimes difficult to remember where some pictures were taken, but this way application takes care of remembering for you.

In terms of developing and prototyping mobile phone applications, James discussed a few important points. Firstly, much to my chagrin, it turns out that Flash Lite is not AS3 compatible! James demonstrated how useful and cost-effective it can be for prototyping, because you can test your application on several virtual cell phone platforms. However, there are some other programming languages that are more commonly used for development. One of these is the open source Mobile Processing which is a Java based language with the same design goals as the Processing project. The project was created to teach fundamentals of computer programming within a visual context and to serve as a software sketchbook and professional production tool.

Perhaps most exciting of all that James talked about is the potential for QR codes. These are electronic bar codes which store addresses and URLs. They may appear in magazines, on signs, buses, business cards or just about any object that a user might need information about. A user having a camera phone equipped with the correct reader software can scan the image of the QR Code causing the phone’s browser to launch and redirect to the programmed URL. Below is a demonstration of how it works:

Overall, there are some pretty interesting developments with mobile phone technology, but it also has it’s limitations, mostly because of the size of the screen – what would be the point of watching high quality video on a tiny screen? Or, because of the small buttons on the keypad, most people prefer to type as little as possible on the keypad so that definitely puts some limitations on internet browsing. It appears that QR codes and the Iphone are addressing this problem by creating technology that makes browsing less troublesome for the mobile phone user.