Utilising contactless communications for next generation of mobile ubiquitous applications

Location plays an important role in current mobile applications and services whether it is social applications, gaming, entertainment or mobile commerce, the global market for LBS is projected to reach £13.26 billion by 2015 and a subscriber base of 1.24 billion. It is the well proven winning combination of location awareness and ubiquitous nature of mobile phones that is responsible for a steady increase in mobile data usage and it is predicted that by 2013 mobile devices will overtake PC as the most common web access device. Applications and services utilising traditional location tracking approaches of GPS and Cell id fail to provide a good experience indoors so alternative location positioning schemes need to be utilised. These applications claim to be truly ubiquitous however whether they are social applications, commerce, advertising, gaming or entertainment applications they still tend to engulf the user in computing process, for example if we consider location based or mobile mixed reality gaming it becomes clear that although location plays a part in the game play actual user interaction with the localised environment is often limited. , The work presented in this thesis explores the utilisation of implied location technologies to bridge the gap left by the current applications. In particular it investigates the use of ~ Bluetooth and NFC in to locate the mobile user. The approach taken by this research is to look at utilisation of implied location technologies across a range of applications and services through real world experimentation. In particular their effectiveness has been researched in relation to three areas considered likely to benefit most from location based information: mobile advertising, mixed reality gaming and mobile social applications. Work carried out on providing location based advertising for existing mobile users via Bluetooth has shown that implied location technologies can be very useful to improve the diminishing response to mobile advertising. Mixed reality game, Pac-Lan demonstrates that NFC can not only be utilised as an implied location positioning scheme but also for improving user interaction with the real world. It has also shown that effective user interaction with physical objects can be achieved through NFC resulting in an enhanced user experience. Results presented within have also shown that implied location positioning schemes are effective in mixed reality gaming context and can lead to interesting tactics developing over subsequent game play. From a mobile social application perspective the work presented here shows that through use of NFC social inclusion can be achieved at both individual and group level. Moreover utilising NFC for mobile social applications can help achieve a symbiosis between user, device and environment where interaction space is not simply the space where interaction amongst users takes place but is an integral part the of the experience.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo