Vivid Campus project launched

This past Monday May 26, Faculty of Information students Norman Valdez and Duygu Basmaci launched the Vivid Campus project at the University of Toronto, campus Mississauga. Vivid Campus aims to intersect social networks, online campus services and the mobile space in a web application that promisses to revolutionize the way students, staff and faculty at the University of Toronto interact and communicate with each other.

Synthetic Imaging and the ATRC to evaluate Nokia's Navigator 6210 phone

Nokia will be sending at least one Navigator 6210 unit to Synthetic Imaging and the ATRC for evaluation of the device's current usability features, limitations and potential. This collaboration will certainly strengthen the ties between the leading manufacturer of phones for blind users and the SCYP community.

CNS and SCYP Join Forces

The office of Central Network Services (CNS) at the University of Toronto has agreed to collaborate with the SCYP team for the creation of a WiFi-Based Indoor Positioning System that would work in a way similar to the primarily outdoors Global Positioning System (GPS). This indoor system will allow students to design applications and services that provide members of the University of Toronto community with information relevant to their particular location. For example, a staff member may be able to retrieve the necessary information to determine the location of the nearest accessible washrooms while an ESL student streams real-time captioning data in a given class.

We look forward to working with the CNS and other members of our community in order to create services that respond to the needs of students staff and faculty with and without disabilities at the University of Toronto!

OS/OT Students to Join SCYP

We just learned that three students from the Department of Occupational Science and Occupational Therapy (OS/OT) at the University of Toronto will be joining the SCYP team in the fall to help us tackle some of our key research questions. These students will be exposed to a variety of research techniques that range from the application of ethnographic methods to the design of usability evaluations. This will all be possible thanks to our participation in the OCT 1220Y Graduate Research Project Course, coordinated by Professor Heather Carnahan, which provides MScOT students with practical research experience. We are definitely looking forward to working with Laura, Naomi and Persis!

Here is our preliminary student-project match table:

Student	Project Title
Laura Kaptein	Tactile Feedback for Practical Outdoor Navigation
Naomi Mitchell	GPS-Based Navigation for the Blind: An Evaluation of Everyday Use
Persis Leung	Head Tracking with the Wii Remote: A Comparative Study

SCYP uses The Force

We have received news that Immersion Corporation has accepted our proposal to study the potential use of vibration patterns in combination with GPS data in order to help students with and without disabilities identify nearby buildings and/or provide them with appropriate force-feedback cues as they navigate the University of Toronto St. George Campus.

In order to develop this project, Immersion will be lending us at least one Samsung i718 smart phone as well as a license for their VibeTonz® software developer suite. In addition to the Nokia 6682 phone that Synthetic Imaging recently provided for our Digital Tagging project, the Samsung i718 will become the third target platform available to SCYP developers!