CybStickers - creating digital graffiti with your phone
Senior scientist and PhD student Odd-Wiking Rahlff at SINTEF ICT has as part of his ongoing doctoral work created a new kind of personal stickers, CybStickers ®, for connecting an MMS message with a sticker via your mobile phone. You do not have to install anything on the phone in order to fill the stickers with your own content. All you need is a MMS enabled camera phone. "CybStickers are a new and simple way for creating connections between objects/places and information, much like electronic graffiti, where you stick up your MMS.", Rahlff says. His research is around development and usability evaluation of mobile information systems.
The secret marks of places
You may use this to leave personal imprints and information for e.g. a treasure hunt, poetry and local information, or just as a way of expressing yourself. You will discover marks in your surroundings which contain a small gift which you may choose to "open" with your mobile phone.
Two parts
A typical CybSticker ® contains two parts: 1) A "chessboard"-like unique optical code (2D bar code) which you photo, and which represents a unique coded number for each sticker, just like the registration plate on a car. This is the "umbilical" connection between the sticker and the content, and this code is developed by our section for optical measuring systems. 2) An understandable icon which may be the same for different stickers, e.g. a heart or a smiling face. This gives you a hint to the contents of the cybsticker.
Experimentation
The testing of CybStickers ® is done Winter 2005/2006 at Hvam College outside Oslo where the teachers in Media and Communication look at design and use of the stickers, and on the College of Architecture and Design where 5th year students look at using them for storytelling. "I want to investigate how intelligible, useful and usable, and fun it is to use this , and how we connect information with places and objects. In addition I want to look at how this is used by the youths, the so-called "emergent use" where I study how such information is created and used in our surroundings", Rahlff says. It is not always the case that new media is used in the way it was intended. A good example of this is the text messages which originally were intended for pushing updated stock rates to the brokers. We now know that this took a quite unexpected turn.
The cybstickers can not only contain picture messages, but also sound and video snippets and information that may change, like a bus time table or an always updated business card. The first test was done with partners from NetCom, Telenor R&D and the logo and ring tone company Aspiro. The work was financed by the mobility programme FAMOUS by The Norwegian Research Council. Commercialization is done by the mobile service provider Mobiletech.
UbiComp 2005 UbiPhysics Paper: "CybStickers – Simple Shared Ubiquitous Annotations for All"
