PROGRESS OF C-MAP: A CONTEXT-AWARE MOBILE ASSISTANT
Sidney Fels, Yasuyuki Sumi, Tameyuki Etani, Nicolas Simonet, Kaoru Kobayashi, Kenji Mase · 1998
An interface agent with a life-like character on a per-sonal mobile computer based guidance system is a plau-sible interface design approach for supporting and medi-ating communication between exhibitors and visitors of museums, laboratory tours and trade-shows. The guide agents should acquire their information ubiquitously and integrate this knowledge to provide context relevant as-sistant to visitors. C-MAP is a context-aware mobile assistant system that provides a mobile guide agent for assisting visitors during exhibitions. The system uses 30 portable computers, two servers, and an active badge location server. The portable computers are networked using a 1Mbit/sec wireless FM connection to the eth-ernet which the servers are connected to. Currently, the guide agent has a life-like animated character with four different behaviours, a physical map and a semantic map. The physical map tracks the visitor’s location rel-ative to the exhibits while the semantic map tracks the visitor’s interests relative to the exhibitions. The guide agent uses the visitor’s interest to plan a tour through the exhibition. A layered infrastructure is used to co-ordinate the guide agents and distribute their compu-tation. This paper presents progress made towards the implementation of C-MAP.