WikEye – Camera Phones as Magic Lenses for Paper Maps

In the WikEye project geo-referenced Wikipedia content is made accessible by moving a camera phone over the map. The live camera image of the map is enhanced by graphical overlays and Wikipedia content.

Mobile interaction is restricted by the small display dimensions of mobile devices. This situation can be improved by using mobile devices as magic lenses for large scale external displays that the user finds embedded in the environment. Paper maps are an example of such ubiquitously available external displays.

Compared to handheld displays, paper maps provide a large display surface and high resolution. They are available everywhere and do not consume any power. On the other hand, they only provide long-term static information. They are not personalized and limited in the amount of visual content they can carry.

Camera phones can serve as mediators for up-to-date personalized information. When combined with paper maps they only need to provide missing dynamic information, while the paper map provides the visual context. The user is free to choose information category and mode of presentation. Any geographically referencable content can be overlaid over a paper map, making this approach very flexible.

WikEye is a collaboration between Deutsche Telekom Laboratories and the Institute for Geoinformatics at the University of Münster. See the Mobile Map Interaction homepage of Johannes Schöning at the University of Münster.

Publications

• Michael Rohs, Johannes Schöning, Martin Raubal, Georg Essl, Antonio Krüger
  Map Navigation with Mobile Devices: Virtual versus Physical Movement with and without Visual Context
  Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Multimodal Interfaces (ICMI), Nagoya, Japan, November 2007
  
• Johannes Schöning, Michael Rohs, Antonio Krüger
  Paper Maps as an Entry Point for Tourists to Explore Wikipedia Content
  Demonstration at the 9th International Conference on Multimodal Interfaces (ICMI), Nagoya, Japan, November 12-15, 2007
  
• Johannes Schöning, Brent Hecht, Michael Rohs, Nicole Starosielski
  WikEar – Automatically Generated Location-Based Audio Stories between Public City Maps
  Demonstration at UBICOMP 2007, Innsbruck, Austria, September 16-19, 2007
  Abstract (.txt), paper (.pdf)
• Michael Rohs, Johannes Schöning, Antonio Krüger, Brent Hecht
  Towards Real-Time Markerless Tracking of Magic Lenses on Paper Maps
  Adjunct Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Pervasive Computing (Pervasive), Late Breaking Results, pp. 69-72, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, May 13-16, 2007
  Abstract (.txt), paper (.pdf)
• Brent Hecht, Michael Rohs, Johannes Schöning, Antonio Krüger
  Wikeye – Using Magic Lenses to Explore Georeferenced Wikipedia Content
  Proceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on Pervasive Mobile Interaction Devices (PERMID), Toronto, Ontario, Canada, May 13, 2007
  Abstract (.txt), paper (.pdf)

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