4.wanderlust
mobile social networking
Milan, Italy. December 2006
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. Complete dissertation here.
Brief
How to facilitate human relationships, better connect people, communities, knowledge and their physical environment within a mobile realm through the support of mobile devices. Master thesis graduate project
Research
Wanderlust is supported by four main areas of research that are: Knowledge management and collaborative learning, location-based mobile experiences, identities & personality and social networking:mobility communities and spaces.
Design process
The concept generation phase was done in parallel with the research and focus-area phase in a constant loop for refreshing and validating the ideas. At the beginning of the process the initial concepts started from a broad point of view, emerging from the research focuses that were: identity and personality, ad-hoc communities, and knowledge management. The main interest was concentrated on enhancing the community values such as communication, cooperation, endorsement and mediation through a series of tools or models following the knowledge management and social learning framework, the high resolution of information of existing web services filtered with the timely delivery of abbreviated information of the mobile and finally the identity management and the self representation between spaces. More here
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). More here
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. More here
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. More here
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