Design of Spatial Apps

PlaceMap is a theoretical (as in thoughts) and practical (as in code) framework for building spatial applications. We say that spatial applications are any kind of app (web app, phone app, desktop app) that uses spatial information like where you are or who’s nearby to do intesting things. These things can be social, practical, or somewhere in between. The main focus for us to explore how to build these applications in novel (hopefully better ways). Right now the focus is on “user centered mapping” which is all about putting the user at the center of their map and letting that map conform to them (not the other way around).

Research Descriptions

• Research Theme: User Centered Mapping: User centered mapping is focused on personal maps (so-called mental maps) where the primary driving interest is in the presentation and exploration of your personal information. While there is ample opportunity for new information, the focus is on intergrating that new information from your perspective. That means we try to do things like create maps with things that are interesting to you. Show the world as you experience it.
• PlaceMap: PlaceMap is a software architecture for building and visualizing user centered maps. It focuses on the display of people and events as holistic components of place and place based interactions. To this end it supports ideas like graph based display, perspective, distortion, and places as objects.
• PlaceSense: PlaceSense is a common sense ai system for building, interpreting and sharing sense of place. It is the ‘backend’ to PlaceMap’s ‘frontend’ (although they are distinct pieces). PlaceSense looks at understanding place in an opportunistic way, but ultimately comes down to looking at how humans understand and share place… i.e. natural language. At the Media Lab all of the research groups, professors and students web pages, blogs, and so on serve as descriptions of place from different perspectives. By looking at this is a weighted holistic way, we can create a system that supports a constructed sense of place right from the start.

Research Platforms

Being big believers in naturalistic observation and passive empiricism we plan to use research platforms that function as both a community service as well as a chance to observe our ideas in the real world.

• CampusMap
  Campus map is a user centered map application that explores the intersections of people, place and possibilities on MIT’s Campus. It serves as both a rich interaction system for understanding what is going on at campus as well as a light community for discussing and exploring those possibilities. It serves as a student’s spatial view of the school. To this end it enables a student to view events, services, and people within a spatial landscape.

This is a research platform for exploring our PlaceMap ideas, so one might say that it is *ahem* powered by placemap. I wouldn’t, but other people might. While general PlaceMap techologies include the capability for arbitrary distortion CampusMap focuses on a less radical, softer, implementation of these ideas (perspective, in this case).

The goal of CampusMap is to offer a compelling and useful service to MIT students while at the same time allowing us to explore the effects of our research interests in a real world application. While we probably will be keeping a focus on simplicity and usability, there is still a lot of opportunity to perform a naturalistic observation of limited examples of our research ideas in a useful real world setting.

Supported Features: real time display of people on the map, interactive chat with those people, rich user profile system, updated event display of what’s going on at mit, building information and services, arbitrary annotation of information (tagging), fun and integrated user interface experience.

Publications

This is a partial listing of some of the publications, presentations, etc… that have been produced by members of The PlaceMap Project. Usually there is some date and conference information associated with the publication or ttalk, unless there isn’t.

• Grounding for a Computational Model of Place, MS Thesis
  Hockenberry, M. (Readers: Ted Selker, John Maeda, Henry Lieberman) (MIT)
• PlaceMap: A User-Based Mapping Application, Undergraduate Thesis
  Hoff, J. (Reader: Ted Selker) (MIT)
• A Mindset for User-Centered Spatial Applications
  Hockenberry, M., Hoff, J., Selker, T. Intl. Conference on Spatial Cognition. (ICSC, 2006)
• A Metro of Meaning
  Hockenberry, M., Selker, T. International Symposium of Electronic Art (ISEA, 2006)
• A Sense of Spatial Semantics
  Hockenberry, M., Selker, T. Conference on Computer Human Interaction (CHI, 2006)
• User Centered Mapping: Theoretical and Practical Framework
  Hockenberry, M., Gens, R., Selker, T. (Whitepaper, 2005)
• PlaceMap: Building Community through Active Context Mapping
  Hockenberry, M., Gens, R. Special Interest Group on Graphics (Siggraph, 2005)

Extra People

Rob Gens is bad at describing himself. He’s worked at the media lab for way too long for such a young student, but he’s trying really hard to live up to the title of “honorary grad student.” Right now he’s trying to do as much work as possible while trying to do as much work as possible. In his spare time Rob enjoys pretending to be a professonal photographer and going into obscure places while trying to avoid campus police.

Jeff Hoff is a senior int MIT’s department of Computer Science. Before coming to MIT he was excited about robotics, but found out building them wasn’t as fun as making them think too. Because of this, he was originally working on a Mechanical Engineering degree, but switched to CS mid junior year. Jeff’s interests usually focus on whatever is in front of him at the time, but center around automation and human processes.