Bridging reality and future

What mobile services will we have in the future and how will our digital world look? A group of researchers from Sweden has spent the last four years looking into the crystal ball, and their work is far from over.

Friday, 1 December, 2006

EMOTO lets people write messages using colors, shapes and animations to express emotions.

Comprising people from the Viktoria Institute in Gothenburg, the Interactive Institute in Stockholm, the Swedish Institute of Computer Science in Kista, and Stockholm University, the group first got together in 2002 to form the Mobile Services project.

Kristina Höök, professor in Human-Machine Interaction at Stockholm University and head of the project, says: “We received funding from the Swedish Foundation for Strategic Research to do research on mobile services. There was absolutely no demand on us to collaborate with the industry. Instead, we were to experiment and have fun. We learnt a lot and came to a point where we had something that the industry started to get interested in.”

What sparked the industry’s interest were the futuristic mobile applications Höök and her group had come up with, from a service that lets motorcyclists exchange messages while on the road to a service that allows strangers to share tips and recommendations in public places.

Among the mobile services Höök was responsible for designing was EMOTO, an SMS service that lets people write messages using colors, shapes and animations to express emotions. The service was trialed among young, professional women, aged 25 to 35.

Höök explains: “We used the P800s and P900s, Sony Ericsson’s Symbian mobile phone series, which have touch-sensitive screens. The pens that come with the phones were extended with an accelerometer and a pressure sensor– the idea being that when someone wrote a message, the background color and animations would change depending on their mood. So, if a person made angry movements with the pen after writing their message, the background color would turn red or into another ‘angry’ color. But if the person made happy, upward movements, the colors and animations would reflect a more positive mood.”

Personal body language

She says the idea behind EMOTO was to see if people would feel comfortable being more expressive in public. “Not surprisingly, we learnt that body language is very personal and changes from person to person,” Höök says. “If you build a service that allows people to make gestures in public places, you have to allow them to have different ways of expressing those gestures.”

While EMOTO was only designed to stimulate ideas, Höök thinks the spin-off service, the Affective Diary, might make it onto the commercial market. “This time we have taken an already commercial product, the sensor bracelet created for sports people, and combined it with the things you do on a mobile phone, such as sending and receiving messages and photo-taking,” she says.

Höök explains that the data from the sensor and the mobile phone is transferred into a computer application, which has a timeline and a character at the lower end of the screen that changes color depending on how the person is feeling. This is measured by how much a person is sweating. “If you take a photo at eight o’clock in the morning, we can see what you were experiencing on a bodily level at the exact same time by looking at the color of the character,” she says.

The feedback Höök and her team has received is encouraging. “Some of our test-users really started to reflect on what they were doing and how they were acting in relation to other people,” she says. “One user said that whenever she had people over for her annual summer party she didn’t have any fun herself because she’d run around making sure everyone were enjoying themselves. Thanks to the Affective Diary, she made a conscious decision to change her behavior and, as a result, had a much more enjoyable time during midsummer. This was also confirmed to her by the Affective Diary as the characters had a calm blue color.”

Mobile eco-systems

Although the Mobile Services project has now come to an end, the group is still working together, ready to embark on their next venture – a VINNOVA Excellence Center, which is due to open in January 2007.

“The difference between what we have done in the past and what we’ll focus on at the Excellence Center is that we will be taking all the mobile services we’ve invented [as part of the Mobile Services project] and imagine a future in which people will be surrounded by all these services. Basically, we are going to look at the holistic picture, from information overload to payment models,” Höök says.

The Excellence Center, which is sponsored by Ericsson, Microsoft, TeliaSonera, Sony Ericsson and the Stockholm City Municipality, will also include sociologists, psychologists and scientists. “Together, we’ll build mobile eco-systems where we’ll study how people feel about using these mobile services and how it changes the way they act,” Höök says.

She thinks it’s great her area of research has finally received the credit she thinks it deserves. “We’ve gone from being this soft, fluffy research area to become mainstream, which is great,” she says. “There were many years when I felt we were working against the tide – that technology always came first and that there was not much interest in how this technology was being used. But today everyone is saying we should think about the user and design things that people want.”

Torunn Hansen-Tangen