Simulating ubiquitous computing environments

• Author(s): Moreira, Samuel
• Date: 2013
• Persistent ID: http://hdl.handle.net/1822/28040
• Origin: RepositóriUM - Universidade do Minho
• Subject(s): Ubiquitous and context-aware computing; Rapid prototyping; 3D virtual environments; Evaluation; User experience; Computação ubíqua e sensível do contexto; Prototipagem rápida; Ambientes virtuais 3D; Avaliação; Experiência do utilizador
• Document Type: Master Thesis
• Language: English
• Advisor(s): Campos, J. Creissac; José, Rui

Description

Dissertação de mestrado em Engenharia Informática Ubiquitous computing (Ubicomp) technologies provide exciting new opportunities for enhancing physical spaces to support the needs and activities of people within them. The ability to develop such systems effectively will offer significant competitive advantage. Tools are required to predict problems related with use early in the design cycle. At the Department of Informatics in the University of Minho the rApid Prototyping for user EXperience (APEX) framework is being developed. This framework allows a rapid prototyping and simulation of ubiquitous environments. The goal of APEX is to ease the creation of immersive prototypes of ubiquitous environments, so that they can be realistically explored by the users. These prototypes enable the early evaluation of how users will experience the ubiquitous environment. This dissertation presents a state of the art in ubicomp simulation platforms. It also presents a study that defines analysis dimensions for immersive prototyping based on 3D simulation. Thus providing a framework to guide the alignment between specific evaluation goals and particular prototype properties. The focus of this dissertation is on creating two virtual environments based on real environments, with the goal of supporting the usability testing of those environments. These tests aim to assess aspects such as people’s reaction in virtual environments, assessing the ubiquitous environments created, and analyzing if these ubiquitous environments can provide a rich and desirable experience to users (based on user satisfaction when interacting with the system). Results indicate that indeed APEX can be used to provide early feedback on the design of ubiquitous computing environments.