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The Project |
Sandra attaches her PDA, with built-in Wi-Fi card,
to the dashboard and starts the Sound Pryer application for an
alluring music experience. As she hits the road, Sound Pryer plays
her favourite music on the car stereo. After a while she is bored
by driving. Suddenly, the icon of a red lorry appears on the screen.
She says to herself: “It must be that one over there”,
as the latest Cardigans song fills her loudspeakers. Sound Pryer
returns to playing her own music after she passes the lorry and
sees it fall behind in the |
We present Sound Pryer, which is an implemented peer-to-peer application of mobile wireless ad hoc networking for PDAs. It enables music eavesdropping in traffic encounters, by streaming MP3 files via the Real Time Protocol. The metaphor used to guide the design of Sound Pryer is that of a “collaborative” MP3 player. A user can play his or her own music, but also tune into rear mirror. Sandra thinks “Cool guy, I have to get that music at the next stop.” other players and hear what they are playing as long as he or she is within close proximity. |
The Sound Pryer application serves pure entertainment purposes:
the fun of listening to music, either one’s own selection or
somebody else’s. It draws on the idea that people take an experiential
and aesthetic interest in the surrounding traffic, and that they
are willing to share music, since people are effectively anonymous
to each other in that situation. Still the visual, and now audio,
contact provides for a special and titillating shared experience,
that of prying into other cars. |
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With a CSCW perspective the activity of sharing music is an interesting leisure activity. It is pursued in a variety of forms, from the simple ways, such as physically handing over a record to a friend, to making digitally encoded music files available to unacquainted users through large-scale Internet peer-to-peer systems. However, we are interested in the sharing experience that takes place when jointly listening to music. Is it possible to transpose this kind of sharing to the situation of brief meetings that occur among unacquainted people on the roads? Would a tool like that make road use more enjoyable? SoundPryer is an application designed for sharing music experiences between people in vehicles in the immediate surrounding. This is accomplished by streaming MP3 files between nodes in an ad hoc network. Since the application is based on handheld computers, the usage of the tool is accommodated in a wide variety of settings. |
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We are currently working on a series of prototypes to collect requirements, as well as evaluating the concept of sharing music in traffic. We have completed two protypes. The first is a preliminary version of the full concept running for the Pocket PC/Pocket PC 2002 OS. This version has been tried successfully on the Compaq Ipaq 3850 and the Compaq Ipaq 3760 both running Pocket PC 2002 and making use of the Lucent Orinoco (Silver) WLAN card (and the WLLUC461 driver). See figures below for some screen shots.
Figure 1. The eavsedropping mode (left).
Through this screen a user may eavsedrop the music being played
on some other player. Player mode (right). In this mode a user
may select and play a tune stored locally. The player cycles all
songs in the playlist. Figure 2. Playlist editor (left). This dialog allows a user to add, remove and reorder songs on the play list. Playlist pick file dialog (right). When user wants to add a song, this dialog lets he or she effortlessly browse the selection. The seconds prototype was used in Wizard of Oz experimental evaluation to refine our GUI approach. The test comprised two handhelds, a remote control and the Sound Pryer dummy faking a full implementation. See the evaluation for further information on how the test was performed. Download
source code [zip] 34105 KB
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In order to deepen our understanding of the SoundPryer concept in the traffic context and refine the requirements we ran a test. Our goal was to get an idea of the prototypes ability to provide awareness of from whom you are receiving music. Does the user make a connection of events in traffic and the corresponding icons etc. in the interface? We used a "Wizard of Oz" evaluation method consisting of two handheld computers connected via a WLAN. The first was mounted in the vehicle next to the driver and ran a limited implementation of the SoundPryer concept. It only displayed awareness information and played local files - this prototype was not able to receive and play streams. We prepared it with a selection of snippets of music files. The "wizard" controlled the other device. It worked as a remote control from where it was possible to send commands to first handheld, e.g. making it show a red car and play the fifth track in the playlist. The user was instructed to drive along a particular route and interact with the prototype when the situation allowed. The wizard looked out for vehicles along the road and sent commands that made the first prototype show a corresponding representation of that vehicle. The Wizard also governed the playback to reflect the situation at hand. Thus, we were able to obtain an illusion of the full SoundPryer concept.
Figure 3. Testperson and an early prototype (left). "Wizard" and the remote control (right). We collected the following feedback by performing the test with one user:
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Mattias Östergren [Personal page] |