Current Challenges for Mobile Location-Based Pervasive Content Sharing Application

Abstract

Web 2.0 and social software are changing the way millions of users communicate: digital citizens are not only content receptors but also contributors to content creation, collaborating in social networks or communities. Pervasive computing can increase this process taking our contents from everyday life, providing them in the places where there is the sharing need and often in the place where they are originated. Until a few years ago, the ability to use technology to locate people and provide them the capability of sharing formal or informal content related to their location was limited. As an example, Prante et al. proposed the “cooperative building” metaphor, describing very expensive digital furniture, such as tabletop (InteracTable), vertical displays (DynaWall), and chairs (CommChairs) with built-in displays to support collaboration (Prante et al., 2004). However, localization technologies are nowadays more common, along with mobile devices that support them, making possible the combination of computer-mediated communication and location related data. Top-of-the-range mobile devices allow us to adopt Augmented Reality (AR) based technologies to involve users in a mixed reality, made up of real world, observed towards the device camera, and of overlapped informative contents. In particular, the usage of AR is facilitated because of the innovative characteristics of the last device generation (on-board camera, accelerometers, compass, GPS etc.), instantly combine the preview made by the video camera with the AR information. Several prototypes and commercial systems proposed location-based services, some of them associate textual notes to specific location, others provide awareness on places and friends for increasing informal interactions (Jones and Grandhi , 2004). Some of these systems have been successfully used, although the opportunities to innovate offered by new mobile technologies have still to be investigated in depth. The new devices, in fact, give the possibility of facing with the challenges in this field, such as creating innovative interfaces for mobile systems and implementing place-based recommender algorithms that intelligently connect people to places (Jones el al., 2004; Gartner, 2010). Location-based pervasive applications are of growing interest for the scientific and industrial communities. Indeed, according to Gartner (Gartner, 2010b), one of the ICT enterprise world leader, Location-Based Services will be in the first ten required mobile devices applications in 2012. Moreover, the request of these services will strongly increase in