Looks Can Cost; Especially On A Small Screen

In recent years, small screen devices, such as cellular phones or Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs), enjoy phenomenal popularity. PDAs can be used to complement traditional computing systems to access personal multimedia information beyond the usage as digital organizers. However, due to the physical limitations accessing rich multimedia contents and diverse services using a single PDA is more difficult. Hence, the Situated Computing Framework (SCF) research project at Siemens Corporate Research (SCR) aims to develop a ubiquitous computing infrastructure that facilitates nomadic users to access rich multimedia contents using small screen devices. This paper describes a new distributed computing concept, the Small Screen/Composite Device (SS/CD) framework, which offers mobile users new classes of ubiquitous and mobile multimedia services without to limit the diversity and the richness of the provided services.

Small screen appliances, such as cellular phones or Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs), enjoy enormous popularity as is evidenced by the tremendous commercial success. One focus of the ubiquitous research community is the potential utility of this class of devices beyond that of a basic organizer or communication device. The pocket-sized requirement imposes constraints upon the computational power and user interface of these small screen devices. This paper describes the Composite Device Computing Environment (CDCE) that offers a framework for supporting nomadic users with small screen devices for the retrieval of rich contents and the access of diverse services. CDCE provides a communication network infrastructure for seeking, unifying and exploiting any surrounding devices as a means to overcome the small screen client constraints. This paper describes the architecture and reports the current status of the ongoing realization of CDCE.

With the rapid development of wireless communication technology, in addition to desktop computers, many users are accessing the internet from hand-held appliances, such as tablets, PDAs, and cellular phones. Many new computation paradigms, such as pervasive computing and ubiquitous computing, have been proposed to embrace this emerging portable computation framework. However, because of the difference in users’ speed in adopting new technologies, hand-held devices in use have miscellaneous hardware limitations, such as CPU speed, power, memory, bandwidth, and image resolutions. They also have various restrictions in software support, such as operating system, installed programs, real-time processing capability, and rendering functionality. These ad hoc limitations have become barriers in human-computer interaction. Most web contents, such as web pages and images, are mainly in the HTML format, which is designed for desktop computers. Without proper modification, most rendered web contents in hand-held devices encounter distorted or fragmented user interface, broken images, slow responses, etc. These ad hoc characteristics of hand-held devices have become a barrier in enhancing web availability. In this chapter, we illustrate how a semantics-based content adaptation framework could be utilized to fill up the computational gap between mobile devices and desktop computers. The transcoding mechanism of our framework, called Content Adaptation Proxy Server [CAPS], resides behind web servers. In CAPS, web pages and image files are transcoded according to: (1) RDF (Resource Description Framework) (Manola et al., 2004) of web content; and (2) semantics extracted from the CC/PP (Composite Capability Preferences Profiles) (Klyne et al., 2004) client device configuration. These semantic properties will be stored and interpreted inside the Jena Inference System (Carroll et al., 2004) as knowledge facts to obtain proper transcoding parameters for each particular device. Then web pages with proper layout modification and images with proper rendering parameters for each particular device will be constructed and delivered. This technology will recreate contents suitable for resource-limited devices to balance information loss and information availability. For the rest of this chapter, we will review related work in Section 2. In Section 3, we describe the design principle and system architecture of CAPS. Semantics extraction and knowledge base construction for the Jena Inference System are discussed in Sections 4 and 5.

In this study we focused on the social representations of digital teaching among Higher Education agents, considering their reported experience (more or less diversified) and type of access (mobile devices or not, large-screen devices or small screen-devices). The context of the study was a public Higher Education institution in the North of Portugal in which the Moodle was adopted years-ago to support learning activities. The participants were 36 teachers (39% males, 61% females), aged between 25 and 55 years-old, and 144 freshmen students (20% males, 80% females), aged between 18 and 57 years-old, enrolled in different programs in the area of Health care. They answered to a questionnaire that consisted of: free association tasks around stimuli such as digital teaching and Moodle; a semantic differentiation scale on the attitudes towards Moodle; multiple choice questions about the levels of use and type of access to the platform; and demographic questions, including age and sex. A content-analysis of the qualitative data was conducted, using a macro developed in Excel. Words evoked by the participants were reduced to their most common form and phases rewritten to their common theme. Words and themes were then grouped under overarching categories. A descriptive analysis of the quantitative data was also performed. Results revealed that whereas for the teachers the semantic field of digital teaching consisted of the categories accessibility (47%), evolution (42%), and distance (39%); for the students it consisted of technology (97%), evolution (59%), and easiness (37%). The Moodle was seen as a kind of repository by the majority of the students (89%). Such image is shared by less than one half of teachers (36%) and it was more common among those who declared to use more functionalities of the learning management system (LMS). It is worth mentioning that almost one half of students associated the Moodle with knowledge (49%). Errors and the dependency on the Internet were pointed out as the main constrains of the LMS, while accessibility and easiness of use were the main advantages. With respect to access, the portable computer was the device most used by both teachers and students (90%). Desktops were used by more than 80% of teachers and by less than 20% of students, while the reverse picture was found in the access by mobile phone (around 20% of teachers and around 70% of students). This study provides interesting clues about the relation between the social position of the agents and their representations. The social representations seem to be more homogeneous among students than among teachers, suggesting that there is a relation with practices. The fact that the image of the Moodle as a repository is more present among the teachers who reported having used more functionalities of the Moodle is somewhat counter-intuitive and urges for more studies. It is also very suggestive that the agents use different anchors to represent digital teaching: distance in the case of the teachers and technology in the case of the students, though they converge in seeing it as a sign of evolution. Although mobile access seems to be more frequent among students, big screen devices are more used than small screen devices. These results do not support the idea of a screen-device gap among the participants, but should nevertheless open a discussion about what kind of affordances are being explored in digital teaching.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to carry out a survey in order to better understand the nature of handheld mobile computing use by academic library users and to determine whether there is a significant demand for using the library services with these small screen devices.Design/methodology/approachA survey is created to measure whether people want to access an OPAC with a small screen. Additionally, through open‐ended questions, the survey attempts to gain a broader understanding of handheld mobile computing's impact on, and implications for, the services provided by academic libraries.FindingsA total of 58.4 percent of respondents who own a web‐enabled handheld device indicate that they would use small screen devices, such as PDAs or web‐enabled cell phones to search a library OPAC.Originality/valueThe increasing prevalence of handheld mobile computing devices such as PDAs and web‐enabled cell phones warrants investigation as to its impact on libraries. This study examines an academic library user population and the potential demand for using the library's catalog with handheld mobile computing devices

A great deal of research has been done focusing on font, text size, and background colors for use with PowerPoint and on Web pages; but no research has been done to aid in the development of PowerPoint presentations for use on small screen devices such as the iPod.In this study, the researcher developed a PowerPoint that tested font size and clarity, text color against background, as well as clarity of images and graphs and found that much of what works in a quality PowerPoint presentation for computer screens does not work for small screens. This paper presents the result of this study and suggests some guidelines that can be used to create video podcasts that can be viewed in a variety of settings; thereby making the video podcast a useful extension of the classroom PowerPoint.

This study proposes a submenu window as a navigation aid for mobile Internet access on a cellular phone. The submenu window presents child-level menu items along with their upper-level menu. The effectiveness of the submenu window was investigated in an experiment. The factors manipulated in the experiment include the types of submenu window, age of participants, and timing of presenting the submenu. Task completion time, number of button clicks, and subjective preference were measured while the participants were performing target search tasks. The results showed that they preferred the separate submenu window. The best performance was obtained when the submenu immediately followed the selection of its parent menu. In addition, the participants in their 20s found a target menu item with fewer button clicks than did the teenagers. The separate submenu window with no delay was recommended in terms of both performance and subjective preference. The design guidelines for submenu windows on a small-screen device are also provided. The results of this study are expected to be applicable to menu-driven interfaces of many small-screen devices such as digital cameras and personal digital assistants.

With the tremendous growth in the information communication sector, the mobile phones have become the prime information communication devices. The convergence of traditional telephony with the modern web enabled communication in the mobile devices has made the communication much effective and simpler. As mobile phones are becoming the crucial source of accessing the contents of the World Wide Web which was originally designed for personal computers, has opened up a new challenge of accommodating the web contents in to the smaller mobile devices. This paper proposes an approach towards building a model for rendering the web pages in mobile devices. The proposed model is based on a multi-dimensional web page segment evaluation model. The incorporation of personalization in the proposed model makes the rendering user-centric. The proposed model is validated with a prototype implementation.

This paper has described specialized zooming tools on mobile devices with designing and developing basic geometric and semantic zooming methods in order to increase the usability of the device. Based on three zooming methods, we created new zooming tools for the device by describing the detail prototype and implementation of these applications were introduced in this paper. However, we have problems because the tools were designed for the PDA simulation program in a desktop computer. So, we do not know how many different results exist between the application program and the real physical device. Especially, in terms of hardware, the current PDA does not have enough pixels, so users could potentially encounter broken characters when the magnifying glass is used. Although these zooming tools are not substantially implemented in commercial PDAs, it will be used for new interfaces in mobile devices by supporting various zooming functions. We look forward to continuing the research and development of this tool according to the future development of the PDA’s hardware performance and elements. Therefore, the biggest contribution of this paper is the creation of zooming tools on PDAs by encouraging the development of practical zooming methods over theoretical methods.

Navigation techniques for small-screen devices: An evaluation on maps and web pages

In this paper, we illustrate the use of space-time trade-offs for information presentation on small screens. We propose the use of Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP) to provide a rich set of navigational information for Web browsing. The principle of RSVP browsing is applied to the development of a Web browser for small screen devices, the RSVP browser. The results of an experiment in which Web browsing with the RSVP browser is compared with that of a typical WAP browser suggests that RSVP browsing may indeed offer alternative to other forms of Web browsing on small screen devices.

Mobile devices have made the world a small place. They are also being used widely, to access the Web. However, because most available web pages are designed for desktop PC in mind, it is inconvenient to browse these large web pages on a mobile device with a small screen. With the enormous increase in mobile users since last decade, to such an extent that it even exceeds the number of desktop users in many developing countries, it becomes crucial to design systems for Web Manipulation, there by providing easier and greater accessibility and device independence. In this paper, we propose a new browsing technique to facilitate efficient web access and provide a better user experience on a device with rather small screen as compared to the usual desktop. It also proposes a novel technique to handle multimedia content, especially the images and video on a web page. In order to solve the problem of incomplete tags in HTML, an equivalent XML is generated for the desired webpage. For efficient browsing, the web page is represented as a multi level hierarchy, with the index of major sections on the first level and the sections indexed again in to sub-sections on the second level and so on, until we reach sub-sections that can be represented as sub-pages that fit in the small screen. We also propose an efficient algorithm for navigating through the sub-pages, thereby providing better user experience. The proposed technique provides better and efficient web browsing on mobile small displays up to user satisfaction.

Mobile devices such as cell phones and personal digital assistants (PDAs) are becoming increasingly popular tools to access the Internet. Unfortunately, the experience of users attempting to access web pages with these mobile devices has been less than satisfactory because of their small display areas, slow communications links and low computing power. In this paper, we propose a trained scorer to estimate the mobile-friendliness scores of web pages, providing an indication of their suitability for mobile devices. These scores help mobile-friendly pages receive higher ranks in search results when mobile users seek information on the web. Our experiments show that the search results re-ranked by our mobile-friendliness scores increase mobile user satisfaction.

In recent years, small screen devices have seen widespread increase in their acceptance and use. Combining mobility with their increased technological advances many such devices can now be considered mobile information terminals. However, user interactions with small screen devices remain a challenge due to the inherent limited display capabilities. These challenges are particularly evident for tasks, such as information seeking. In this paper we assess the effectiveness of using hierarchical-query biased summaries as a means of supporting the results of an information search conducted on a small screen device, a PDA. We present the results of an experiment focused on measuring users’ perception of relevance of displayed documents, in the form of automatically generated summaries of increasing length, in response to a simulated submitted query. The aim is to study experimentally how users’ perception of relevance varies depending on the length of summary, in relation to the characteristics of the PDA interface on which the content is presented. Experimental results suggest that hierarchical query-biased summaries are useful and assist users in making relevance judgments.

In the ubiquitous environment, mobile terminals like personal digital assistant or cellular phone are used to access the Web. Although the presentation of Web content depends on the terminal type, the Web interface of mobile terminals is designed almost the same as that of personal computers. However, comparing mobile and desktop terminals, some difference in device characteristics, such as screen resolution or sound faithfulness, affect the presentation on the terminal. Moreover, when changing the access style between interactive and passive, the presentation should be adjusted for the terminal type because the lacking information is usually not perceived after transformation. To adjust the play style of Web content to the terminal type, we developed a method for visual presentation. First, using keyword analysis, we represent the emotional aspect of a Web page by adjusting the background color of the screen. Second, we emphasize the subject of the content by the logotype of the keyword. Third, we segment the picture of the content into pieces and present one after another using visual effects. These procedures can be applied to any type of terminal. We implemented the procedures in a ubiquitous/universal passive viewer (u-PaV) system that transforms Web content into passive viewing content that is especially useful for mobile terminals. Extracting images and text from Web content, u-PaV generates a Macromedia Flash file, which is a popular multimedia format.