Video games are of increasing importance, both as a cultural phenomenon and as an application of collaborative technology. In particular, many recent online games feature persistent collaborative virtual environments (CVEs), with complex social organisation and strong social bonds between players. This paper presents a study of `There', one such game, focusing on how There has been appropriated by its players. In particular we describe how its flexibility has allowed players t o develop their own forms of play within the game. Three aspects of There are discussed: first, how the environment supports a range of social activities around objects. Second, how the chat environment is used to produce overlapping chat and how the game itself provides topics for conversation. Lastly, how the `place' of There is a fluid interaction space that supports safe interactions between strangers. The paper concludes by drawing design lessons concerning the importance of supporting shared online activity, interaction between strangers, and the difficulties of designing for play.

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Interesting characteristics of large-scale events are their spatial distribution, their extended duration over days, and the fact that they are set apart from daily life. The increasing pervasiveness of computational media encourages us to investigate such unexplored domains, especially when thinking of applications for spectator groups. Here we report of a field study on two groups of rally spectators who were equipped with multimedia phones, and we present a novel mobile group media application called mGroup that supports groups in creating and sharing experiences. Particularly, we look at the possibilities of and boundary conditions for computer applications posed by our findings on group identity and formation, group awareness and coordination, the meaningful construction of an event experience and its grounding in the event context, the shared context and discourses, protagonism and active spectatorship. Moreover, we aim at providing a new perspective on spectatorship at large scale events, which can make research and development more aware of the socio-cultural dimension.

Abstract. Brief encounters between acquainted and unacquainted motorcyclists are enjoyable moments. This truly mobile form of social interaction is difficult to study through traditional ethnographic fieldwork. However, the method is applicable when integrated in a design approach where the participants collaborate to integrate the field study, the design and the evaluation. This has made it possible to generate a novel mobile service. The service, Hocman, is a peer-to-peer application with mobile wireless ad hoc networking for PDAs. It enhances traffic encounters between bikers by playing a sound icon and automatically exchanging personal HTML pages. We have successfully demonstrated through performance tests and field trials that it is successful in doing this, and that bikers enjoy such added value to biking, especially hearing the sound icon when meeting other bikers.

To fully appreciate the opportunities provided by interactive and ubiquitous multimedia to record and share experiences, we report on an ethnographic investigation on the settings and nature of human memory and experience at a large-scale event. We studied two groups of spectators at a FIA World Rally Championship in Finland, both equipped with multimedia mobile phones. Our analysis of the organization of experience-related activities in the mass event focuses on the active role of technology-mediated memories in constructing experiences. Continuity, reflexivity in regard to the Self and the group, maintaining and re-creating group identity, protagonism and active spectatorship were important social aspects of the experience and were directly reflected in how multimedia was used. Particularly, we witnessed multimedia-mediated forms of expression such as staging, competition, storytelling, joking, communicating presence, and portraying others; and the motivation for these stemmed from the engaging, processual, and shared nature of experience. Moreover, we observed how temporality and spatiality provided a platform for constructing experiences. The analysis advocates applications that not only store or capture human experience for sharing or later use but also actively participates in the very construction of experience. The approach conveys several valuable design implications. Large-scale events, ethnographic field study, sharing experiences, constructive memory, mobile and ubiquitous multimedia, active spectators 1

Abstract. As ubiquitous computing technologies mature, they must move out of laboratory settings and into the everyday world. In the process, they will increasingly be used by heterogeneous groups, made up of individuals with different attitudes and social roles. We have been studying an example of this in a campus setting. Our field work highlights the complex relationships between technology use and institutional arrangements – the roles, relationships, and responsibilities that characterize social settings. In heterogeneous groups, concerns such as location, infrastructure, access, and mobility can take on quite different forms, with very different implications for technology design and use. 1

We present a narrative theory-based approach to data mining that generates cohesive stories from a Wikipedia corpus. This approach is based on a data mining-friendly view of narrative derived from narratology, and uses a prototype mining algorithm that implements this view. Our initial test case and focus is that of field-based educational tour narrative generation, for which we have successfully implemented a proof-of-concept system called Minotour. This system operates on a client-server model, in which the server mines a Wikipedia database dump to generate narratives between any two spatial features that have associated Wikipedia articles. The server then delivers those narratives to mobile device clients. 1.

Abstract. Many mobile applications that lead tourists to landmarks and businesses ignore the educational component of tourism. The systems that do satiate the tourist’s desire for learning about visited places require so much costly custom content development that they can only be implemented at very local scales. Moreover, these systems quickly fall out-of-date and continually have to be manually updated. In our approach, called WikEar, data mined from Wikipedia is automatically organized according to principles derived from narrative theory to woven into an educational audio tours starting and ending at stationary city maps. The system generates custom, location-based “guided tours ” that are never out-of-date and ubiquitous – even at an international scale. WikEar uses a magic lens-based interaction scheme for paper maps, which have been shown to be particularly important in the tourist experience. By leveraging on the wide availability of large public city maps, WikEar avoids the costs of GPS and the interaction problems of small screen map programs.

You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation. – Plato 427-347 BC Ubiquitous computing, by its very definition, aspires to weave computing technologies across the fabric of our everyday lives. Many of the successes and failures encountered during the pursuit of ubiquitous computing will be dictated by the manifest integration of play. It is play that helps us cope with the past, understand the present, and prepare for the future. This panel of experts is passionately interested in engaging in a critical dialogue around the applicability, adoption, and consequences of such elements of play in ubiquitous computing research. As motivation, several tremendously popular ubiquitous computing themes with playful elements will be examined: blogging, tagging, and message play.

Paper persists as an important medium for documents and this has motivated the development of new technologies for interactive paper that enable actions on paper to be linked to digital actions. A major issue that remains is how to integrate these technologies into the document life cycle and, specifically, how to facilitate the authoring of links between printed documents and digital documents and services. We describe how we have extended a general web publishing framework to support the production of interactive paper documents, thereby integrating paper as a new web channel in a platform for multi-channel access.