Exciting developments in eye-wearable technology and its potential industrial applications warrant a thorough understanding of its advantages and drawbacks through empirical evidence. We conducted an experiment to investigate what characteristics of eye-wearable technology impact user performance in machine maintenance, which included a representative set of car maintenance tasks involving Locate, Manipulate, and Compare actions. Participants were asked to follow instructions displayed on one of four technologies: a peripheral eye-wearable display, a central eye-wearable display, a tablet, or a paper manual. We found a significant effect of display position: the peripheral eye-wearable display resulted in longer completion time than the central display; but no effect for hands-free operation. The technology effects were also modulated by different Tasks and Action types. We discuss the human factors implications for designing more effective eye-wearable technology, including display position, issues of monocular display, and how the physical proximity of the technology affects users' reliance level.

Ethernet is the indisputable de facto technology for local area networks due to its simplicity, low cost, and wide-scale adoption. In recent times, Ethernet has entered new networking areas, such as Metro Area Network (MAN) and Industrial Area Network (IAN), where specialized protocols dominate the market. In addition to the well known advantages, Ethernet acts as the common platform to integrate multiple protocols. However, Ethernet falls short of the stringent resilience requirements mandated by applications in MEN and IAN, despite progress made by the community on additional standardization. We describe a new approach for swift failure detection and recovery in Ethernet ring topologies called Rapid Ring Recovery (RRR). RRR is based on the novel usage of multiple virtual rings. Our implementation augmenting an off-the-shelf Ethernet switch shows that RRR reconverges after a fault in 294 microseconds while sustaining the loss of only eight large frames at 95 percent traffic load.

The economics and familiarity of Ethernet technology is motivating the vision of wide-scale adoption of Metro Ethernet Networks (MEN). Despite the progress made by the community on additional Ethernet standardization and commercialization of the first generation of MEN, the fundamental technology does not meet the expectations that carriers have traditionally held in terms of network resiliency and load management. These two important features of MEN have been addressed in this paper. We propose a new concept of Cross-Over Spanning Trees (COST) that increases the resiliency of the MEN while provisioning the support for load balancing. As a result, the capacity in terms of network throughput is greatly enhanced while almost avoiding any re-convergence time in the case of failures. The gain ranges from 1.69% to 7.3% of the total traffic in the face of failure; while load balancing increases an additional 12.76% to 37% of the total throughput.

The cost savings and novel features associated with voice over IP (VoIP) are driving its adoption by service providers. Unfortunately, the Internet's best effort service model provides no quality of service guarantees. Because low latency and jitter are the key requirements for supporting high-quality interactive conversations, VoIP applications use UDP to transfer data, thereby subjecting themselves to quality degradations caused by packet loss and network failures. In this paper, we describe an architecture to improve the performance of such VoIP applications. Two protocols are used for localized packet loss recovery and rapid rerouting in the event of network failures. The protocols are deployed on the nodes of an application-level overlay network and require no changes to the underlying infrastructure. Experimental results indicate that the architecture and protocols can be combined to yield voice quality on par with the public switched telephone network

The cost savings and novel features associated with Voice over IP (VoIP) are driving its adoption by service providers. Such a transition however can successfully happen only if the quality and reliability offered is comparable to the existing PSTN. Unfortunately, the Internet's best effort service model provides no inherent quality of service guarantees. Because low latency and jitter is the key requirement for supporting high quality interactive conversations, VoIP applications use UDP to transfer data, thereby subjecting themselves to performance degradations caused by packet loss and network failures.In this paper we describe two algorithms to improve the performance of such VoIP applications. These mechanisms are used for localized packet loss recovery and rapid rerouting in the event of network failures. The algorithms are deployed on the routers of an application-level overlay network and require no changes to the underlying infrastructure. Initial experimental results indicate that these two approaches can be composed to yield voice quality on par with the PSTN.

Although compact mobile devices are convenient and have many advantages, their small screens can present problems. A significant proportion of HTML documents are optimally designed to look best when rendered on high-resolution displays of desktop and laptop computers - not small screen mobile devices. Transcoding solutions exist that can intercept HTML pages and transform them for small screen devices, but as consequence the original visual layout and structure of the page is barely recognizable. Described in this paper is the mobile page attenuator, a proxy-based framework that preserves the view of the document as it was originally intended for the desktop in a form renderable on a small screen device. A scheme for region-based interactivity is also introduced, further ameliorating the need for excessive scrolling in either direction.

A maintenance engineer who talks to pumps and pipes may not seem like the ideal person to entrust with keeping a factory running smoothly, but we hope that our mobile speech-enabled augmented reality (SEAR) framework will enable such behavior in the future to be anything but suspicious. We describe how the SEAR framework uses our flexible and scalable vision-based localization techniques to offer the engineer a seamless multi-modal user interface. This interface juxtaposes a graphical augmented reality view with a context-sensitive speech dialog concerning the industrial equipment located in the immediate vicinity.

Bluetooth is a relatively new wireless technology that holds much promise as an inexpensive, power conserving, pervasive global standard for short-range communication with support for voice, data, ad-hoc networking and LAN access. A scalable LAN access solution based on Bluetooth, called blu21, has been developed by Siemens to support information access via mobile devices in enterprise and public hotspots. In this paper we introduce blu21 then describe an associated dynamic content adaptation service called bluMediator and additional services aimed toward improving the efficacy of the mobile browsing experience.

While monochrome unformatted text and richly colored graphical content are both capable of conveying a message, well designed graphical content has the potential for better engaging the human sensory system. It is our contention that the author of an audio presentation should be afforded the benefit of judiciously exploiting the human aural perceptual ability to deliver content in a more compelling, concise and realistic manner. While contemporary streaming media players and voice browsers share the ability to render content non-textually, neither technology is currently capable of rendering three dimensional media. The contributions described in this paper are proposed 3D audio extensions to SMIL and a server-based framework able to receive a request and, on-demand, process such a SMIL file and dynamically create the multiple simultaneous audio objects, spatialize them in 3D space, multiplex them into a single stereo audio and prepare it for transmission over an audio stream to a mobile device. To the knowledge of the authors, this is the first reported solution for delivering and rendering on a commercially available wireless handheld device a rich 3D audio listening experience as described by a markup language. Naturally, in addition to mobile devices this solution also works with desktop streaming media players.

Small screen devices like cellular phones or Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) are the artifacts of information technology almost everybody carries around today. Together with wireless networks they are the ubiquitous gateway to information and services. Especially the increasing bandwidth together with the improving processing power of these devices supply us with capabilities known only from desktop computers a couple of years ago. However, the access to rich multimedia content using these devices is almost impossible due to the physical limitations without performing lossy content reduction. An idea to overcome these limitations results from the observation that our daily life is surrounded by information technology almost everywhere, e.g. PC’s, Laptops TV sets, public terminals, etc.. These “larger screen devices” can be used in conjunction with the small screen device to extend its capabilities and to provide access to rich multimedia content and services without any sacrifice. In order to do so the small screen device must be able to access these devices and to remotely control them. UPnP (Universal Plug and Play) [1] is a technology, which connects appliances on an adhoc basis. In this paper we will present our concept of ad-hoc personal ubiquitous multimedia services and illustrate an UPnP based implementation, which allows users a high degree of mobility and in parallel facilitates the access of rich multimedia contents by using a small screen device.

In recent years, small screen devices, such as cellular phones or Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs), enjoy phenomenal popularity. PDAs can be used to complement traditional computing systems to access personal multimedia information beyond the usage as digital organizers. However, due to the physical limitations accessing rich multimedia contents and diverse services using a single PDA is more difficult. Hence, the Situated Computing Framework (SCF) research project at Siemens Corporate Research (SCR) aims to develop a ubiquitous computing infrastructure that facilitates nomadic users to access rich multimedia contents using small screen devices. This paper describes a new distributed computing concept, the Small Screen/Composite Device (SS/CD) framework, which offers mobile users new classes of ubiquitous and mobile multimedia services without to limit the diversity and the richness of the provided services.

Interactive audio browsers provide both sighted and visually impaired users with access to the WWW. In addition to the desktop PC, audio browsing technology can be deployed that enable users to browse the WWW using a telephone or while driving a car. This paper describes a new conceptual model of the HTML document structure and its mapping to a 3D audio space. Novel features are discussed that provide information such as: an audio structural survey of the HTML document; accurate positional audio feedback of the source and destination anchors when traversing both inter-and intra-document links; a linguistic progress indicator; the announcement of destination document meta-information as new links are encountered. These new features can improve both the user's comprehension of the HTML document structure and their orientation within it. These factors, in turn, can improve the effectiveness of the browsing experience.