The Smart Party: A Personalized Location-aware Multimedia Experience

1. The Smart Party: A Personalized Location-aware Multimedia Experience Kevin Eustice, V. Ramakrishna, Nam Nguyen, and Peter Reiher CCNC January 11, 2008

2. The Ubicomp Home of the Future • Increasing numbers of computing and communications devices in the home • Wireless networks are common in the home • The family and visitors carry personal devices with them • What new things can we do for people with these capabilities?

3. One Example: The Smart Party • People commonly carry devices that hold the music they like • Speakers can be connected to the home network • Localization techniques can determine where people are in a house • So why not combine those abilities to improve a party in the house? • Provide a dynamic customized music mix to match the tastes of people in different rooms in the house

4. Mary The Home Family Room Living Room Dining Room Sam Charlie Alice Kevin Carol Todd Betty Shawn Bob What We’ve Got

5. Smart Party Family Room Living Room Rock Dining Room Jazz Folk R&B Rap What We Want

6. The Basic Approach • Run a ubiquitous computing application • On both devices in the home and personal devices • Built using Panoply middleware • Automatically recognize and enroll people you invited to the party as they arrive • Figure out everyone’s location • Use musical preferences of those in a room to choose music • Get chosen music from personal device and play it

7. Major Challenges • Configuring the personal devices • Only for those invited, of course • Localization • Selecting the music • To maximize overall satisfaction of partygoers • Handling dynamism

8. A partygoer arrives Smart Party Architecture The personal device localizes Access Negotiation Smart Party Localization Map Updates Mary SmartParty UserDeviceApp Bob Family Room SmartPartyLocationApp Living Room SmartPartyLocationApp A room gathers music preferences Music is selected, fetched, and played Kitchen SmartPartyLocationApp Content Provisioning Protocol Content Selection Protocol Sam SmartParty UserDeviceApp Alice SmartParty UserDeviceApp

9. Handling the Hard Parts • Configuration • Cryptographic voucher carries both invitation and necessary configuration information • Localization • Using maps of 802.11 wireless characteristics • Selecting and retrieving the music • Automated voting algorithm based on known user preferences • Handling dynamism • Middleware builds and maintains groups based on users’ locations

10. Smart Party Status • Working version in UCLA LASR lab • Based on our Panoply ubicomp middleware • Required around 1800 lines of Java • Continuing work • To measure user satisfaction • To study different methods of choosing music • To handle changing wireless maps • New application features

11. Conclusion • The Smart Party is an example of neat things ubicomp can do for users • The Panoply middleware made the Smart Party easy to build • The Smart Party demonstrates the value of organizing applications by groups • The Smart Party demonstrates practical solutions to common ubicomp problems