Brief:

Motorola is interested in understanding how to facilitate human relationships, better connect people, communities, knowledge and their physical environment within a mobile realm through the support of mobile devices. Both the concepts of social networking and mobility are strongly representing the contemporary life of the so called Y generation (20 to 35 years old) and are living demonstrations of the potentiality of digital and electronic media in supporting/shaping our social environment. Motorola is interested in exploring the mutual relations between these two concepts and to explore how social networking and mobility will impact location-based communities in a medium term perspective (3 to 6 years).

Research

Wanderlust is supported by four main areas of research that are: Knowledge management and collaborative learning, location-based mobile experience, identities & personality and social networking:mobility communities and spaces.

Concept Generation

Wanderlust is a mobile service tailored for creative people that use their identities and needs (in terms of time and distance) to allow them to immerse in new or unexplored spaces as well to meet people with similar interests. Wanderlust enhances community behaviours by providing suggestions from people and places that can be relevant to you (ad-hoc social networking) using a knowledge management model.

More about the design process, Concept Generation (touch points, entry points, system flow, and matching), and the User Interface

more posts on UI here.

Prototypes

For the final exhibition 3 full working prototypes were shown.

Prototype 1

This prototype is designed as a distributed system following the three tier architecture, adopting the following technologies for each of the tiers:
1. data (Database) uses MySQL Community Server
2. application logic (executes most of the tasks related to the business application) Implemented in Java using JDBC to access the database and Web services to expose the functionality of the system
3. presentation tier (presents the information to the end users possible in different platforms and devices) A Flash RIA communicates with the server (Apache Tomcat & Axis) via WebServices (communication model between applications based on XML) which implement open standards and protocols (HTTP and SOAP).

With adoption of the Java programming language it is possible to deploy the application under different platforms, while the use of Web services responds to the fact that they facilitate the development of clients for different platforms and devices. The UI metaphor is based on the View-Master look and interaction

Client running on a UMPC

Prototype 2

This prototype demonstrates a user’s different identities represented by physical tokens (reels). Each reel is mapped to an identity; when this reel is introduced to the View-Master it will play a video showing the contents and attributes of this identity.
Components:original View-Master (red), epo wood body, arduino board, RFID reader & antenna

Prototype 3

This prototype uses the View-Master original interaction to cycle through a series of photographs. The mobile phone screen substitutes the original reels shown on the View-Master, the keyboard of the mobile was hacked and connected to a pushbutton.
Components:original View-Master (blue), epo wood body, nokia 2650 mobile phone, and a push-button

Conclusions

My aim was to build a service that would meliorate community behaviors with a set of tools and models following the knowledge management and social learning framework using the existing web services filtered with abbreviated information of the mobile. This service also contemplated the managing and visualization of multiple identities of each member of the community without building another layer of complexity in terms of user interaction and information retrieval. I believe that sharing experiences, point of views, comments, annotations, tips, and information can amend every community. Wanderlust is a vertical application build with these specifications. The context in which is exemplified can be changed into any other realm where community interactions and behaviors are valuable.
Wanderlust can be as an add-on of existing tourist, restaurant, museum, and gallery guides. It can also be in partnership with a series of public and private spaces to promote their activities, promotions, and events.Wanderlust solves one soft and subtle problematic that most of us have like don’t knowing what to do or how and where to spend our time. It also helps not socially gifted people to “break the ice” and engage into a conversation as well as cultural shocker reducer by making faster the integration
of a new member in a community by discovering commonalities within people. Wanderlust is favourable to you.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to:

Mika for the inspiration and cheerfulness, to Yasmina for the constant and useful critique, to Alex for brining the good times and the spirit, to Hayat for the listening, and encouraging, to Morgan and Melissa for the feedback and cooking, to Victor for the amazing support and guidance, to Pablo for the front end developing help and late night guidance, to Vinay and Patrizio for their prototyping abilities

For the concept guidance and ideas to Claudio, Federico, Fabio Sergio, Jan-Christoph, Alie Rose, Heather Martin, Simona Maschi , Vinay Venkatraman, Joseph Forakis, and Imran Ali.

For letting me use their beautiful illustrations: Kasumi Yasuda, Wabisabi, Matteo Sedile, Silja Göetz, Pascal Campion, Edtsuwaki, Ailadi Cortelletti, and Sigmund

These days I have been immersed in the modeling lab along with Patrizio, the “capo” there. His modeling abilities are awesome, so as his patience, and step by step I’m getting to the end of Prototype 2 & 3.

Both Prototype 2 (Arduino + RFID) & 3 (Mobile phone screen inside a view master) are made with an extra middle “body part” made of synthetic wood. The whole craftsmanship is quite interesting and at the same time hard. I have learned to use all this crazy robotic machines on the lab as well a little bit of materials, super glues and safety “issues”.

I hope that tomorrow the bodies of this prototypes will be done so I can paint them and finally test them. Still a lot of work to do, the pace is slower than expected but the experience is truly beautiful.

more pics here

Today the prototype 1 of Wanderlust is finally working I believe at a 90%. The server is running on a windows machine (my horrible PC)

and the client on a nice old ibook.

Well so far what you can do is register through a webiste, name, etc and tags that will define your identity within the service. Then, you can login using the flash application and GLANCE through the community. If there is another user(s) logged in into the system that shares a tag with you it will be displayed on the visualization, if you make an over of the user in the visualization you can see the common tag shared by both of you. If you click you will go into the user details where you can see all the tags that define him/her. The size of the user shown on the visualization depends on how many tags you share (the more the bigger) and the opacity depends on the other user time available on the service.

using a keyboard hack with two push buttons.

Then, Im using the viewmaster simple interaction (the little orange handle) to swap or change different images displayed on the cellphone screen.

Through the testing I found out that the lens that the viewmaster has brings a really cool low-tech old school effect to the mobile screen.

Now the challenge is to make it all fit and of course to look cool.
Thanks Vinay (soldering Jedi) for the help

The idea of this 2nd prototype is representing different online identities with physical View Master reels. By placing this different reels on the View Master your matching id will be shown on a LCD screen. Its pretty easy, works with Arduino with an attached RFID reader to it. This is my first time on the modeling shop, and today with the help of Patrizio, I almost done with the extra add on part to the existing View Master.

This prototype is the one that will run on my laptop as a server on the school network. The clients can be any other computer within the school and hopefully I will get 1 or 2 UMPC (Ultra Mobile PC) for showing it.

Here is a video of how the prototype works so far. Still there is lots to polish, but the main functions are running.

Wanderlust prototype is a distributed application following the three tier architecture:

1. data (Data Base) using MySQL Community Server
2. application logic (executes most of the tasks related to the business application) J2EE
3. presentation tier (presents the information to the end users possible in different platforms and devices) Flash RIAA communicates with the server(Apache Tomcat & Axis) via WebServices (communication model between applications based on XML) and implementing open standards and protocols.

Remember to use the arrow keys to navigate the presentation ;)

Thanks to all those people that made this document possible.

Almost done!
my final presentation is on Wednesday 29th of November at Via Watt # 27 Milan, Italy. If anyone is interested it will open, if you are around here, don’t hesitate to join!

After having a good and insightful revision at Frog Design I made some changes to this presentation. Thanks Fabio and all the cool people there!

Well here is the final presentation I’m going to give the next 30th of November. Still the link to the video prototype and the ui prototype are not working (working on them this last week).

Sorry for the huge size, (its a flash), and I totally disagree with the school in making the final presentation in Flash mandatory…common! Anyway…
U
se the spacebar or the arrow keys to navigate back and forth… or use the menu (u_u)

These last days I have been planning the shooting for the video prototype (scenario). After doing the storyboards yesterday finally the shooting was over. Thanks a lot to the actors (Lillith, Mariana, Daniel & Mateo) and to the owners of the cafe and restaurant.

The video scenario consists of the life of 4 strangers that using marvelous Wanderlust n_n get together. They all access the service from a different entry point. The locations were done in the south-center part of Milan (St. Ambrogrio) and the west (Lotto).

Now I’m capturing (if this Adobe Premiere works because its kind of cranky and it expired even though I had a valid serial number) and editing the whole weekend. After the editing I’m planning to do some color correction of the video in Adobe After Effects as well as to add a nice and moody song. The song has to transmit the whole “look & feel” of Wanderlust as well to enhance and not to distract to much from the story. From a list of possible 50 I have narrow it to 11 items… but you never know, music is beautiful and so hard to choose. Damn it

• Pacific Theme - Broken Social Scene
• Bizarre Love Triangle - New Order
• Sheffield Song - The Supernaturals
• You only live once - The Strokes
• Letter from an occupant - The New Pornographers
• When you were young - The Killers
• Start me up - Corcovado Fr.
• Summer(The Butcher 2) - Matt Pond
• 1979 - The Smashing Pumpkins
• Black is Black - Los Bravos
• Life through the same lens - A Girl Called Eddy