The Ambient Wood Journals-Replaying the

Experience

Mark Weal (mjw@ecs.soton.ac.uk)IAM Group, University of Southampton

Mark J. Weal, Danius T. Michaelides, Mark K. Thompson, David C. De Roure

Overview• The Equator IRC• The Ambient Wood Project• First trials• The Ambient Wood Journals• Second trials

Equator IRC• Interdisciplinary Research

Collaboration• EPSRC funded • Eight UK Universities• Six years funding (half-way through)• Integrating the Physical and the

Digital

Partners

• Bristol• Glasgow• Lancaster• Nottingham• RCA• Southampton• Sussex• UCL

The Ambient Wood Project

Where and Who?• Just outside

Brighton• Four Partners

– Southampton, Sussex, Nottingham, Bristol

Project Goals• Technology to assist in playful learning

– Helping children to take part and learn more about scientific enquiry, through discovering, reflecting and experimenting in an ambient wood

– Hypothesis testing from Key stage 2 Science

– ‘Disappearing’ technology that will:• “Make the invisible visible”• “Bring the far to the near”• “Bring the past and the future to the present”

Location sensing• Static location

beacons• Global Positioning

System interfaces

The Experience

• Children find information by moving around the wood

• The information they discover includes– Probe readings– Ambient sounds in the wood– Descriptive voiceovers

through the PDA– Information cards on the

PDA

Information Representations

Automated orchestration

• Links triggered based on location and sensed activity– Voice-over played on hand-held– Information card received by hand-held– Sound played in the Wood

• Information builds on the previously presented material

• World model maintained in a MUD

Infrastructure

Recording the Experience

• All events logged– Probe readings– Location notifications (GPS & Pinger)– Information transmission– Sonifications

• Facilitates debugging, analysis, and replay

--- 26 Sep 2002 14:12:36 ---Device-Id: "clearing"Play: "clearing/1/s-grass"WOOD: 1033045956418L

The Journals

• Reflection tool providing an overview of the experience

• Based on the recorded event logs• Generated by processes that

perform:– Consolidation– Identification of meta-structure– Location fusion– Rendering into a web page

Journal architecture

The journal pages

Issues with the first trials

• Location was an arbitrary construct in the model

• Information push left the children confused

• The information model did not mesh well with what they were observing

• Better integration of the probe readings was needed

The Second Trials

• A move to manual orchestration• Tools for the remote facilitator• The children supply the information,

the PDA becomes the journal• Scientific enquiry is added to

hypothesis testing in the goals of the experience

The New Experience

• The children make observations and report them to the remote facilitator

• The remote facilitator sends additional information based on the observations

• The children can take probe readings• The information is logged on the PDA

and reviewed both in the den and in the classroom

The Information Cards

Manual orchestration

Conclusions

• Mixed reality experience • Hypermedia as an orchestration tool• Hypermedia as a reflection tool• Providing transference from the

educational experience in the wood back to the classroom

• Merging physical and digital representations

Further informationwww.equator.ac.uk

MUD Slinging: Virtual Orchestration of Physical InteractionsMark K. Thompson, Mark J. Weal, Danius T. Michaelides, Don G. Cruickshank, and David C. De Roure. Technical Report Equator-02-053, Equator, October 2002.

From Snark to Park: An overview of the design, practical and technological issues when developing novel learning and playing experiences for indoors and outdoors Eric Harris, Ted Phelps, Yvonne Rogers, and Sara Price. Technical Report Equator-02-050, Equator, October 2002.

Learning through digitally-augmented physical experiences: Reflections on the Ambient Wood project Yvonne Rogers, Sara Price, Eric Harris, Ted Phelps, Mia Underwood, Danielle Wilde, Hilary Smith, Henk Muller, Cliff Randell, Danae Stanton, Helen Neale, Mark Thompson, Mark J. Weal, and Danius T. Michaelides.. Technical Report Equator-02-054, Equator, October 2002.