This article introduces a framework for creating rich augmented environments based on a social web of intelligent things and people. We target outdoor environments, aiming to transform a region into a smart environment that can share its cultural heritage with people, promoting itself and its special qualities. Using the applications developed in the framework, people can interact with things, listen to the stories that these things tell them, and make their own contributions. The things are intelligent in the sense that they aggregate information provided by users and behave in a socially active way. They can autonomously establish social relationships on the basis of their properties and their interaction with users. Hence when a user gets in touch with a thing, she is also introduced to its social network consisting of other things and of users; she can navigate this network to discover and explore the world around the thing itself. Thus the system supports serendipitous navigation in a network of things and people that evolves according to the behavior of users. An innovative interaction model was defined that allows users to interact with objects in a natural, playful way using smartphones without the need for a specially created infrastructure. The framework was instantiated into a suite of applications called WantEat, in which objects from the domain of tourism and gastronomy (such as cheese wheels or bottles of wine) are taken as testimonials of the cultural roots of a region. WantEat includes an application that allows the definition and registration of things, a mobile application that allows users to interact with things, and an application that supports stakeholders in getting feedback about the things that they have registered in the system. WantEat was developed and tested in a real-world context which involved a region and gastronomy-related items from it (such as products, shops, restaurants, and recipes), through an early evaluation with stakeholders and a final evaluation with hundreds of users.
Although in recent years the Quantified Self (QS) application domain is growing, there are still some palpable fundamental problems that relegate the QS movement in a phase of low maturity. The first is a technological problem, and specifically, a lack of maturity in technologies for the collection, processing, and data visualization. This is accompanied by a perhaps more fundamental problem of deficit, bias, and lack of integration of aspects concerning the human side of the QS idea. The step that the authors tried to make in this chapter is to highlight aspects that could lead to a more robust approach in QS area. This was done, primarily, through a new approach in data visualization and, secondly, through a necessary management of complexity, both in technological terms and, for what concerns the human side of the whole issue, in theoretical terms. The authors have gone a little further stressing how the future directions of research could lead to significant impacts on both individual and social level.
Although in recent years the Quantified Self (QS) application domain is growing, there are still some palpable fundamental problems that relegate the QS movement in a phase of low maturity. The first is a technological problem, and specifically, a lack of maturity in technologies for the collection, processing, and data visualization. This is accompanied by a perhaps more fundamental problem of deficit, bias, and lack of integration of aspects concerning the human side of the QS idea. The step that the authors tried to make in this chapter is to highlight aspects that could lead to a more robust approach in QS area. This was done, primarily, through a new approach in data visualization and, secondly, through a necessary management of complexity, both in technological terms and, for what concerns the human side of the whole issue, in theoretical terms. The authors have gone a little further stressing how the future directions of research could lead to significant impacts on both individual and social level.
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