proXimity: Ad-Hoc Networks for Enhanced Mobility

Abstract

David tries not to use unfamiliar trains and buses, he doesn’t travel to places he doesn’t know, and he doesn’t travel in unusual environments without a companion. David is visually impaired and in such cases he becomes disoriented from a lack of preview, knowledge of the environment, and orientation information and is consequently without the foundations on which to base mobility decisions. While his experiences are not always true for all visually impaired travellers they do represent the majority experience of David’s peer user group. proXimity is our attempt to address David’s travel problems and is based on our previous work in Hypermedia and Real-World Mobility. By using combined Hypertext and mobility paradigms we move toward a system that will assist David in his travels. The primary goal of proXimity is to augment David’s reality by giving hypertext a physical presence in the real world. We analogise the real and virtual, and so aim to provide Nodes (link targets), Links, and Anchors in the real world. Therefore, hypertext information that describes a physical location also has a physical presence and ‘local’ physical artifacts can be augmented by ‘remote’ hypertext and semantic information.