13-06-2012, 11:42 AM
The technical part - Digital Jewellery
The technical part - Digital Jewellery.pdf (Size: 51.8 KB / Downloads: 175)
ABSTRACT
In this paper we describe the technical part of the Digital
Jewellery project at the Institute for Geoinformatics
Münster, Germany. This project takes place during
summer term 2007. The two main parts are a video player
containing a bluetooth scanner running on our iDisplays
and several digital jewellery created by Jayne Wallace and
Patrick Olivier at the Culture Lab Newcastle of the
University of Newcastle. This text focuses on the software
part, not the digital jewellery part.
INTRODUCTION
During the last years, large displays have been getting
cheaper and cheaper. So more and more large displays are
placed into the environment. The Digital Jewellery project
tries to establish a more personal connection between
people and these displays. Normally, only impersonal
informations are shown on displays, like news, timetables
or commercials. But these displays could also be used for
showing some more of „you“.
TEST PROCEDURE
Technical part
During the last projects using bluetooth in any way, the
open source java bluetooth implementation BlueCove has
proved its vantages. The major disadvantage of BlueCove,
the missing Linux implementation and the only usage of
the Microsoft bluetooth stack, can be left out of focus
because all of the iDisplay systems are running Windows
XP SP2. The used video clips from the participants are
located on (different) webservers so that the video player
is able to load them on demand and video clips can be
exchanged without the need of changing anything on the
iDisplays directly.
Video player
The video player is the second major part of the software.
In general, Java and multimedia are two things that don't
consort very much. A proof for that is the Java Media
Framework (JMF). It's latest achievement is the mp3
support. And this achievement has been introduced in
November 2004! So there is a problem to deal with
because the JMF doesn't know anything about modern
video codecs like MPEG-4, DivX or XviD. There are
several further (open source) project based upon the old
JMF but nearly all of them are in a early beta or almost
alpha stadium and not adapted for this project.
Digital Jewellery
The digital jewellery will contain a small bluetooth device.
What exactly isn't know yet because the devices are still
under development. The requirements are that the device
will operate continuously, without any external input and
will be “visible”. In this combination, “visible” means that
it will be visible to the bluetooth scanner, like any
bluetooth mouse or headset. Higher bluetooth devices can
be set to an invisible mode that will hide them from the
bluetooth scanner.
IMPLEMENTATION
Bluetooth Scanner
The bluetooth scanner mainly is one single thread which
starts several threads for the scan events. During the
bluetooth scan, the main thread is sleeping and starts a new
scan just after the old one has finished. After, not during
the scan, a list of found bluetooth devices is generated. Not
only devices belonging to the digital jewellery are found,
also mobile phones or laptops with bluetooth are in the list.
A lookup for all digital jewellery devices is done by the
database and a list of these devices is generated. The list of
all found devices is compared with the list of all
participants. Only matching devices are taken and
committed to the video player.
Video Player
The first goal while developing the video player has been
the ability to play video clips independent of any used
compression codes, e.g. MPEG-4, DivX, XviD. This
problem has been solved completely by using FOBS. No
configuration has to be done except adding the jmf.jar
(from the Java Media Framework) and the fobs4jmf.jar
(from the FOBS project) to the build path of the project.
Additionally a system library file fobs4jmf.dll has to be
placed either into a Windows system directory or just into
the directory the project will finally run from.
CONCLUSION
The evaluation conclusion of the whole project will be
presented in another paper after the evaluation has finished
in august 2007.
The bluetooth scanner and video player developed during
this project are able to play video clips independent from
any codecs based upon found bluetooth devices in full
screen mode on the iDisplay systems at the Institute for
Geoinformatics. During a short test period the software
runs 24h without any problems on the iDisplays.