Research in Symbian OS at University of OULU

History

University of Oulu is a science community of 3,100 employees and over 15,800 students. The university has a large scientific base of nine educational areas, which are organized in six faculties. The focus areas that encompass the entire university are Biotechnology, Information technology, Northern and Environmental Issues. A suitable work environment and excellent research equipment enable research that requires state-of-the-art technology. The outstanding achievements of information technology have created a center of IT technology in the Oulu region. This "Oulu phenomenon" is a constant marvel for visitors from all over the world.

Involvement with Symbian

Department of Information processing science started teaching Symbian related courses already at the end of 1990's, supported initially by Nokia. The first course, EPOC programming, has been offered continuously, nowadays named Symbian programming. Later, department has actively participated in the development and implementation of the course Mobile systems programming.

This networked course between several Finnish universities has originated from and coordinated by the Tampere University of Technology.

Symbian OS has also been presented as part of other courses such as testing and mobile services development. Department is also part of the MobEdu network of academics, focusing on development of Symbian related teaching material. Also several research groups (e.g. INTERACT) and projects (e.g. IPCity, Capnet, Rooster, Minne, Monica, Nomadic media) relate to mobility and have used also Symbian based devices in the development and testing of mobile technologies and services.

University members engaged with Symbian

- Peter Antoniac, PhD, Assistant Professor, Dept. of Information Processing Science
- Antti Juustila, Phil Lic, Researcher, Dept. of Information Processing Science
- Toni Räisänen, Assistant teacher, Dept. of Information Processing Science
- Kimmo Romppanen, Teaching Assistant, Dept. of Information Processing Science

- Antti Juustila

Antti Juustila is doing research in different areas of Symbian OS and he is also teaching different courses at the Oulu University. He has also supervised different projects. All the details can be found on this web page:
http://www.tol.oulu.fi/users/antti.juustila/

Example Projects

Simple music player application for S60 2nd Edition
This is a small application where you can create playlists which contain songs. There are two forms for inputting/editing playlist and song data. Then you can start playing the music, seeing a small animated dancer moving while music is played. Playing is done using CMdaAudioPlayerUtility. Features GUI, file handling, active objects, timers, audio playing, using Forms for data entry, S60 application framework.

Monopoly game for S60 2nd Edition
A simple text based GUI for playing a simple form of a Monopoly game. Have two views, of which the other is not used in the game but left for you to implement and use for some purpose. Features GUI, file handling (text file), using TLex for parsing, active objects and timers, using the Visitor design pattern to visit a circular list data structure.

Memory game for S60 2nd Edition
This is a small game where the user has to open a pair of “cards” and if they match, they are left open. If they do not match, they are hidden and you try again. When all the cards have been opened, the game is finished. Time is taken and a top ten list is maintained of the best players. Features GUI, file handling, timers, active objects, S60 application framework, dialogs.

Mobile Media Collector

A mobile tool for collecting location based media using Nokia Symbian smart phones. The idea is to provide means to record stories (in wav files) on the phone so that the GPS location of the story is saved together with the author name and date/time of the story. This media file and the associated metadata is then uploaded to a HMDB (HyperMedia DataBase) server. Then you can use a browser and Google Maps to view the location based media. Alternatively Google Earth can also be used. The server side HMDB and KML export support has been developed by a colleague, Toni Räisänen, as part of the Studio’n'Site and IPCity research projects.

The MMC is a Symbian S60 application developed with C++ and uses the phone’s camera, integrated GPS and microphone to record location based stories and pictures. The phone’s data connection (be it GPRS, EDGE, 3G or WLAN) is then used to upload the media to a web service for later use. The tool also records user actions for research purposes.

The tool (Mobile Media Collector; MMC or Tell-a-story (Kerro Tarina in Finnish)) was trialed in Sevettijärvi by 10 school children during September and October. The kids (from 3rd to 9th grade) collected about 90 stories and associated photographs for a group of architecture students. These stories and images of the children’s’ everyday living environment are then used by the architects in their planning of land use in Sevettijärvi. I’ve still not finished analyzing the results of the experiments, so nothing to tell about it here yet.

Meanwhile, I’ve also enhanced the application with new features. Most important one is the Radar view (screenshot below). This view allows the users to view the content while moving about the area where user generated content exists. So when the architect goes back to Sevettijärvi, he or she is able to walk about the area and listen to the kids’ stories where they were actually told, with accompanying photos they took. Maybe this brings additional insights to the planning process. Surely it gives the inhabitants (kids in this case) a possibility to influence the planning process by offering local views of the place to the planners and architects.

The image below shows the basic Radar view contents. The center of the radar shows the position of the user holding the phone. Small yellow circles indicate positions of sound recordings (stories) as small red rectangles indicate photographs. All this content is parsed from a KML file downloaded from the HMDB. The upper left corner displays the name of the person who told the currently selected story (Antti in this example; selection is indicated by drawing a white circle/rectangle around the selected place mark), upper right corner indicates the date the selected story was told. Lower right corner tells the distance of the user from the place the story was told at. North is always up. The lower left corner indicates the distance between the green circles of the radar view, 216 meters in this example. User is able to zoom in and out of the view so that up to 20 km can be viewed in a screenful.

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When a place mark is selected, the associated media file is downloaded from the HMDB using http. A magenta colored radar beam starts to circle around the screen while the download is commencing (image below). When a sound file has been downloaded, the beam turns to yellow and indicates playback of the sound file (image below). If an image was downloaded instead of a sound file it is then shown on the screen. If the media file has been downloaded before, the local file is used instead.

As the user moves around, the position is updated automatically and new place marks become visible. Also, if the user travels far enough, the content from the HMDB is automatically reloaded to get access to place marks which should now be visible in the Radar screen. Also the server side has been taken further. Now the Google Maps (as well as Earth) provides a neater view to the uploaded data than in the last post of mine.