Tetra and SCYP strengthen collaborations

The Tetra Society of North America, a volunteer-based organization that creates simple assistive devices and adaptations for people with disabilities, is collaborating closely with SCYP and the ATRC in order to increase its capacity and quality of services in the GTA.

As part of this collaboration, Tetra has established a student representative position, which was filled recently by William Li, an outstanding 4th year Engineering Science student. We hope this partnership will provide lots of experiential learning opportunities to UofT students, who will be able to assist Tetra volunteers in the solution of inclusive design challenges in real contexts. At the same time, students with disabilities at UofT may be benefitted by Tetra's on-campus prescence. If you are interested in working with us or have a request to make, please don't hesitate to contact us!

WIPS gearing up for BETA release

Within the next few weeks, the SCYP team will be announcing the first beta release of the WiFi-based Indoor Positioning System (WIPS) developed in-house. We will also make a positioning server available to students, staff and faculty at the University of Toronto, who may be interested in prototyping location-based services for the UofT community.

We cannot yet give out many of the details on how access to this positioning server will be enabled, since things will likely keep changing as we prepare for the release, but there are some basic details that are likely to remain unchanged. For instance:

• Clients accessing the WIPS server will be required to establish a UDP connection in order to submit position estimate requests.
• The WIPS server will respond to XML-formatted requests containing information about the WiFi access points available in a particular location. For example:
  

  <?xml version="1.0"?>
  <!DOCTYPE note [<!ELEMENT beacons (ap+)>
  <!ELEMENT ap (mac+,strength+,channel+,mode+)>
  <!ELEMENT mac (#PCDATA)>
  <!ELEMENT strength (#PCDATA)>
  <!ELEMENT channel (#PCDATA)>
  <!ELEMENT mode (#PCDATA)>
  <beacons>
  <ap>
    <mac>001188F521B0</mac>
    <strength>81.9505719298</strength>
    <channel>1</channel>
    <mode>Master</mode>
  </ap>
  <ap>
    <mac>0201214A0E00</mac>
    <strength>78.0</strength>
    <channel>11</channel>
    <mode>Ad-Hoc</mode>
  </ap>
  <ap>
    <mac>001188A5A790</mac>
    <strength>78.3485142958</strength>
    <channel>6</channel>
    <mode>Master</mode>
  </ap>
  </beacons>
  

  
  
• Once such a request is received, the WIPS server will return XML-formatted data containing the estimated position. This will include:
  • the building name,
  • the floor number,
  • the floorplan URL,
  • the X and Y graphical coordinates (with respect to the floorplan), and
  • the accuracy of the estimate
    

As part of the beta release, we will be collecting data in select buildings across the UofT campus, so if you can't wait to use the WIPS indoor positioning system, please let us know so we include your building in the beta testing.

WIPS Site Launched

We have been super busy in the past couple of months building the infrastructure that will allow mobile application developers to bring location-based services indoors. As part of this effort, we have recently launched the WIPS site. WIPS, which stands for WiFi-based Indoor Positioning System, enables practical indoor localization, an essential requirement for the extension of mapping, navigation, tagging, social networking and tons more into indoor environments.

We will soon come up with an API and other development tools that will allow students, staff and faculty at the University of Toronto to play with this new technology, but in the meanwhile, feel free to drop by the site!

Indoor positioning prototype application

The future of the wifi location tool is looking pretty bright -- we've got a workng data collection and location tool using just indoor wifi!

The above screen shot is of real wifi scan done using the prototype wifi+gps scanning application that Jorge, Jamon and Yura have been working on. The image shows a series of overlapping circles of varying colours that represent three different algorithms used to calculate a current postion. Green is Yura's algorithm, red is Jorge's, and the blue is a combination of the two. The black dots represent past scans of the wireless environment. Already the application has a 5-10 metre degree of relative accuracy on the floorplan and is able to locate a user on a specific floor of a specific building. The most important part? This ability to locate a user within a given area on a floor only uses wifi signals -- the application doesn't rely on GPS or cellular tracking at all.

Looking forward, the next step is to implement a user friendly interface that can be used to allow users to tag or leave notes about specific locations. Other users can then read and respond at a later date with their own tag/comment. This functionality is similar to Mozilla's recently announced Geode project that locates users in a city using wifi and allows tagging locations. Another task is to create a way to inform users that they are indeed on a particular floor without having to run the data collection tool (which is admittedly a little scary ). The Mozilla Geode interface, complete with a W3C Geolocation API might be just the ticket there too. Finally, refining the algorithm that Yura and Jorge have created to achieve a higher degree of precision may allow users to navigate through areas of specific floors, which would be a truly remarkable achievement indeed!

Printed circuit boards anyone?

We would like to extend our appreciation to the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering at the University of Toronto and Cadence Design Systems since they have made available to us a handful of licenses for industry-quality printed circuit board (PCB) computer-aided design (CAD) software.

The software will be available to UofT students working with SCYP at the ATRC and will be most useful in the completion of our current alternative input projects. Special thanks to Jaro Pristupa for helping us provide the best available resources to our students!