Roomotes: ubiquitous room-based remote control over web phones Ryuji Wakikawa, Jonathan Trevor, Bill Schilit, John Boreczky Keio University 5322 Endo Fujisawa-shi Kanagawa-ken, 252-8520 JAPAN [email protected]

FX Palo Alto Laboratory 3400 Hillview Ave., Bldg 4 Palo Alto, CA 94304 USA {trevor, schilit, johnb}@pal.xerox.com

ABSTRACT

and physical spaces.

Roomotes gives people remote control of their physical surroundings through Web phones. The system manages virtual rooms that mirror physical rooms. Roomotes presents not only the devices present in a room, but also the people. Using Roomotes’ real world navigator we can control the lighting and audio-video equipment in our conference room from any Web phone. An unusual aspect of Roomotes is notification: users can request text messages be sent to their phone whenever the contents (e.g., people) or “state” of a room’s devices change.

Here is an example of how a group of people interacts with their environment and each other through Roomotes. Bill and John are at the office in the Kumo meeting room where they use their Web phone to navigate to and “enter” the Roomotes virtual room for Kumo. Roomotes is an easy way to control the many devices in the room and also to check the reservation calendar. While Bill and John continue to setup for their meeting, Alice gets an alert on her Web phone because she had asked Roomotes to notify her whenever her colleagues enter virtual Kumo. By accepting the message, Alice’s phone jumps to the Kumo room page where she sees who is present in the virtual room. Alice selects the person entry for John and dials through to John’s cell phone to let him know she is on her way.

Keywords

Ubiquitous computing, mobile computing, cell phones, user interfaces, virtual/physical interfaces INTRODUCTION

Ubiquitous computing [3], the seamless integration of computers, communication, and information into everyday life, is here. Almost. Computers are in cars, PDAs, books, and toys; the Web cell phone makes data communication from anywhere a reality; and the World Wide Web provides content on almost any topic. However, combining computers, communication, and information into workable systems is still difficult. This paper describes a new system to interact with the world around us that builds on the pervasiveness of the Web and Web phones. Our approach is to mirror the physical world at the level of the room and support interaction from Web phones. The Roomotes System uses “room pages” to store links to people, places and things. When network appliances are present, Roomotes gives users remote control over these devices. Roomotes represents people objects, it facilitates communicating (electronically) with other people in the room. An important aspect of the system is notification. When a person enters a virtual room or a network device changes state, the system sends alerts to user’s cell phones. This creates an awareness that brings people together in the mirror world and helps to bridge the gap between the virtual

Figure 1: a cell phone screen shots showing (a) (b) the real world navigation to a virtual room and (c) a page for a person’s information.

Figure 2: Roomotes mirrors (a) the Kumo conference room (b)(c) and allows remote control to web accessible devices such as lights and projectors INTERFACE DESIGN

We designed the system to be accessed from both Web phones and desktop computers. The desktop interface is appropriate for defining and configuring rooms. The cell phone interface is most useful for interacting with the virtual room you are in. Both interfaces have links to other rooms, so you can explore remote locations.

A session with Roomotes begins when the user enter their password. Each room has security policy for their privacy. (see below). The next step is for the user to select a room. In our prototype system, users navigate a geographic tree, which allows them to choose a room in a few steps. As more rooms get added, this selection process becomes difficult. To avoid this problem, we are exploring alternatives including sensor-based approaches (e.g., GPS). Upon entering a room, the system registers the user in the virtual room, and they can then see other registered users and interact with the room’s network devices. Figure 1. shows the choices for the Kumo conference room. At the top level are people, things, and information about the room. The room page includes telephones so you can easily make a call from your Internet cell phone to the room. From the room page you can see which other users are registered. Figure 1(c) shows a user’s detail that can be used to call or email the user. The room page also includes a directory of “things” such as lights or computer display. Figure 2 shows the user selecting the projector control. SYSTEM ARCHITECTURE & IMPLEMENTATION

The Roomotes System is built on Web technology because it provides a scaleable, extensible, and ubiquitous platform. The system consists of a database, services, and user interfaces component as shown in Figure 3. The database uses the directory hierarchy to store XML files for three entity types: people, rooms, and things. XML allows for easy manipulation of information and also crosslinking with URLs. For example, an XML file for a room includes URL pointers to things and people. The directory structure reflects the geographic hierarchy of countries, cities, organizations, buildings and rooms. Using a directory hierarchy is useful because we take advantage of web server’s ability to protect individual directories, allowing flexible room-level access control. The service component is grouped into 4 categories of server-based programs (CGI). First, Thing Controllers are programs to manage web appliances in the room. Since these are referenced by URLs from the database they can run on any Internet host. Second, the Notifier is a service that alerts users when interesting events happen in the database. Third, Search and Browse service allows searching a room, user or thing from the database and then find them. Finally there are services for Managing (add, delete, update) the database. The user interface component provides the mechanism for services to output to multiple devices with different markup languages from the same XML database. The UI component also manages user sessions so cell phone users only have to type in the password once. We have implemented Roomotes and populated it with information about our offices and conference room. Our

Figure 3: Roomotes is based on java servlets and web servers. Each server manages rooms with a local security administrator. conference room is already highly automated so we were easily able to add Thing Controllers for the lights, projector, screen, speakers, DVD, video, and CD players. Our prototype has shown that mirroring physical rooms with Web pages and viewing them over Web phones is a practical way to interact with a room’s devices. Moreover, when coupled with notification, we have begun to explore a new and exciting way to bring people together in both the virtual and real worlds. RELATED WORK

Our work has it’s roots in the early 1990s when Xerox PARC created hand held computers capable of navigating the devices and information within the office [3] and David Gelernter presented his eloquent vision of the future physical-digital world [1]. More recently, Hewlett-Packard Laboratories has promoted the idea of web presence for people, places and things called Cooltown [2]. FUTURE WORK

Roomotes will support automatic location information (GPS) to give easy interface for selecting rooms from a geographic hierarchy. Also with local networks such as Bluetooth, Roomotes will get advantage of more direct communication channel. Finally, there are many social issues that we have just begun to understand, such as the social implication of giving many people in a room a remote control. REFERENCES

1. D. Gelernter, Mirror Worlds, ISBN 0195068122 Oxford University Press 1991. 2. K. Tim, et. al., People, Places, Things: Web Presence for the Real World, in Proceeding of the Workshop on Mobile Computing Systems and Applications , 2000. 3. . R. Want, B. Schilit, N. Adams, R. Gold, K. Pedersen, D. Goldberg, J. Ellis, and M. Weiser, An overview of the PARCTAB ubiquitous computing experiment, IEEE Personal communications 2(6) 1995