I have been implementing an application for a Wizard of Oz experiment with a mobile phone. The experiment has been designed and carried out by Henriette Cramer (in the context of the DIADEM project).
The system consists of two applications; the observer (Wizard of Oz) application running on a normal PC and the user application running on the HTC Dream phone. The observer application is a Java application which enables us to pretend the application on the mobile phone is quite intelligent while actually the observer is doing all the intelligent stuff. The user application was implemented using the Android development platform.
The main part of the application was an “indoor-GPS” system. The phone application shows a map of a part of an office building and displays the position of the user. Because actual GPS is not reliable indoors and not sufficiently accurate, camera’s were used to see the position of a participant. The wizard uses these video images to determine where the participant is and click on a map in the observer application to indicate the current position of the participant. The observer application will then send this position to the phone application using either a wireless or GPRS connection.
I talked to a few participants after they did the experiment and they didn’t realize it was a WOZ experiment. At least for them the application behaved convincingly enough to think that somehow GPS was working indoors.
Tags: Android · Google · HTC dream · user experiment · Wizard of Oz
