Thanks to an ever increasing processing power that can today support advanced graphical capabilities within high bandwidth mobile devices, augmented reality technologies are now ubiquitous, finding profitable uses in a wide variety of scenarios. Augmented reality principles, in fact, can be beneficially put to good use within many types of mobile applications: for example, augmented city guides can properly display additional virtual objects that show how a monument was at the time of its construction (e.g., the Colosseum with the inclusion of its missing parts), or augmented games can add fictitious characters and objects to real world settings in proper places (e.g., Lara Croft in search of Bartoli in Venice). Nonetheless, the totality of such augmented mobile applications, to the best of our knowledge, limit the interactions that may occur to those that can happen between a single mobile user and the objects that are displayed on his/her mobile platform screen. In this work, we show that it is possible to devise a new interaction paradigm, augmenting augmented reality apps with the interactions that may occur between multiple users via the virtual objects displayed on multiple mobile platforms. In particular, we applied such ideas to the devise of a shooting game set in the 17 th century to celebrate the 300 th anniversary since the foundation of the Academy of Science of Bologna by Count Luigi Ferdinando Marsili. The paper describes and discusses the design choices and the technical issues at the basis of our system.
The specific features of inter-vehicular communications are allowing the deployment of a broad gamut of possible applications including traffic control, road safety and in-car entertainment. At the basis of all this lies the improvement of VANET-based transmission techniques that are becoming technologically mature. Within this context, in this paper we provide an experimental comparison between two of the most effectual algorithms whose aim is that of quickly broadcasting messages throughout a given platoon of vehicles. The most prominent characteristic of both the algorithms under investigation is that they were designed for wireless vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications, with in mind only realistic transmission conditions (that is, asymmetric and variable vehicles' transmission ranges). Even if both algorithms were conceived based on the idea to span application messages as far as possible, while minimizing the number of relaying vehicles, our extensive analysis demonstrates that one of the two outperforms the other.
In this paper we will describe recent research that has addressed the particular problem of assessing the performance of Vehicular Ad Hoc Network-based accident warning systems for highway scenarios. The authors of the cited works have shown that it is possible to recreate the conditions that would be experienced in reality implementing a virtual overlay network on top of a few cars. In particular, when testing an accident warning system specifically designed for highway scenarios, it has been possible to experience and observe alert messages that propagated up to 20 km away from the origin.
We present a distributed algorithm to fast multi-hop message propagation for ad hoc vehicular networks (VANET). Our protocol obtains optimal performances in challenging scenarios which are likely in real situations, but that have been not extensively studied in the literature as they are complex to be tackled. In particular, the Farther Relay and Oracle for VANET (FROV) deals with asymmetric communications and varying transmission ranges. Even in this case, FROV broadcast any application message with the minimal number of hops. Moreover, FROV is both scalable with respect to the number of participating vehicles, and tolerant to faults and changes of membership of the platoon, vehicles that leave or join it. At the current state of development, our protocol is optimal in the case of unidimensional roads and we are studying its extension to a web of urban roads. This paper presents the preliminary results of simulations carried out to verify the main characteristics of FROV.
This paper describes a few aspects of the work that led to the first experiments ever carried out on the road with an accident warning system based on vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications. The mentioned experiments were performed in Los Angeles as part of a collaboration project between two teams, one from the University of Bologna and one from UCLA. In essence, driving along a few of the most crowded streets of LA and mounting on each vehicle an 802.11 based communication system, an accident warning dissemination algorithm was took for a test ride. The tested algorithm demonstrated being both in theory and simulation the optimal one, as it could successfully deal with realistic asymmetric links always choosing the optimal relay. However, a practical assessment was lacking. This required an important research and financial investment, as an accident warning system based on V2V technologies was never tested before. On the basis of that pioneering experience, we here revisit its "behind the scenes" results and the lessons we learned. In fact, we believe that those experiments provide new insights and point new possible directions of work. The contribution of this paper, hence, goes beyond the sharing of information, as its scope is also that of providing a vision of how vehicular research can be applied in practical terms when taken on the road.
Simulation today plays a key role in the study and understanding of extremely complex systems, which range from transportation networks to virus spread, and include large-scale vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs). Regarding VANET scenarios, until very recently, simulation has represented the only tool with which it was possible to estimate and compare the performances of different communication protocols. In fact, it was not possible to thoroughly test on the road any VANET-based multi-hop communication system, as no highly dense vehicular testbed exists to this date. This situation has recently changed, with the introduction of a new COGNITIVE approach to VANET systems research, where it has been shown that it is possible to perform realistic experiments using only a few real vehicular resources (i.e., only a few vehicles that are equipped with wireless communication interfaces). Now, the scope of this paper is to show that it is possible to move further ahead along this recently drawn path, utilizing the features provided by cognitive network technologies. In particular, we will show that cognitive interfaces can play a role as an additional tunable dimension to be used within an experimental platform where highly dense vehicular testbeds can be structured, even in the presence of a few real vehicular resources. The advantage is twofold: (a) they can be used to test new strategies for dealing with the scarcity of spectrum in a very dynamic environment as the vehicular one is, and, (b) they can be used to test the performances of VANET protocols as a function of different frequencies and interface switching delays. As an example of how this can be done, we will provide preliminary results from a set of experiments that have been performed with a highway accident warning system and with a cognitive network based on the Microsoft Software Radio (SORA) technology.
We describe the architecture of a middleware sys- tem that exploit a novel technology to enhance the traditional pen and paper agenda. We describe the architecture of an Ap- plication Service Handler to synchronize a digital agenda with its classical paper counterpart. A user may create, modify, or delete appointments in the paper agenda, and the system reproduces these modifications into the digital agenda. The system is almost transparent to the user. The same methodology has been applied to the address book of the agenda. Our system has the lower impact as possible to the classical users, at the actual state of the art. Our system allows to enhance the traditional paper agenda transforming it into a proactive tool instead of a passive one. I. INTRODUCTION The the computing is as pervasively as the desktop one. In the recent past the definition of mobile was restricted to the laptop computers, while nowadays this definitions extends to comprehend a lot of smaller devices, such as the handheld computers and the last generation of cellular phones (smartphones). By means of these small devices the user can also surf the web and read the e-mail; those devices are powerful enough to run the same operating systems of the desktop computers and to connect by means of wireless communications. The traditional users of a pen and paper agenda do not take any advantage of the actual technologies because they prefer to apply the usual tools. By means of our system the users can make, almost effortless, backup of their paper agenda, can maintain multimodal and up-to date copies of the agenda, and can send over the Internet handwritten messages. By means of the new technology that we applied, it is possible to exploit the usual writing and sketching tools, such as pen and paper, as input devices of devices. The core technology that we applied provides a pen, almost indistinguishable by a common one, that writes on a special paper, that seems sightly grey than usual. The pen is capable to connect with a device, such as a smartphone or a laptop computer, by means of either a bluetooth sub-system or by a wired cradle. Moreover, the pen is also equipped with a miniaturized camera, with a re-writable memory, with a processor, and with a tank of ink. The pen is capable to sense its paths on the special paper while it is writing, to store those paths and, upon user request, to send them to a connected device.
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