tagin-devel team mailing list archive

[Ravi Agarwal <raviagarwal.iiith@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

I talked to my friend Venkatesh here about the project and the final goal we
are trying to achieve. He is visually impaired and uses assistive
technologies for operating computer etc. I got a wonderful feedback from
him. He is excited to use the technology and thinks that it will be very
useful. He also said that if this was implemented universally, like it can
be made compulsory for some buildings to have a Wifi network and tagged
fingerprints stored so that one could easily navigate room to room. He asked
me some interesting questions which I hadn't thought of myself-
1)What happens if two rooms are opposite to each other. Will the fingerprint
be different?
2)The application is good as a location finder but if you want to navigate
in a building then fingerprint will only be different after a certain
range...what will be that range?...also the map of the building should
already be known by the application. If the rooms are numbered in an ordered
fashion then it could easily be assessed in which way one should move to
reach the destination once you know the proximity but what is rooms are not
ordered.

One more guy suggested another application of this technology. Suppose you
have a house with multiple rooms. Now if a telephone call comes then you
don't want all the phones to ring...through wifi fingerprinting it can be
sensed that in which room you are and only that phone can be made to ring.

I know that all these will be applications once we are through with the
project it seemed very interesting to me so I thought I will share it with
you.

-Ravi Agarwal

On Thu, Apr 14, 2011 at 2:31 AM, Jorge Silva <jsilva@xxxxxxx> wrote:

> thanks yibin, this is useful information!
>
>
> On 11-04-12 01:33 PM, yibin wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> For those who are interested, I did some research and it looks like
>> Android emulator has no wifi support. If you try to use wifi scanning on
>> the emulator it will fail. One way to simulate wifi scanning on the
>> emulator would be to get a wifi scanning data from another device and
>> then feed the data to the program. But I don't think it is a good idea
>> for the purpose of testing targin.
>>
>> Best,
>> Yibin
>>
>> On 2011/4/10 23:44, Jorge Silva wrote:
>>
>>> Hola Yibin,
>>>
>>> I don't actually know where the emulator would grab the WiFi data
>>> from. If it takes ir from the host OS I would be very impressed, but I
>>> don't think the SDK can do that yet. Otherwise, there might be a way
>>> to emulate the data. I just have never tried. If you find out, let us
>>> know!
>>>
>>> cheers!
>>> Jorge
>>>
>>> On 11-04-10 11:33 PM, yibin wrote:
>>>
>>>> Hi Jorge,
>>>>
>>>> I don't have an android device. So I am probably gonna try it on the
>>>> emulator. But before I try it I want to know if you are aware of any
>>>> issue for running tagin on the emulator? This could be helpful for those
>>>> of us who don't have an actual device.
>>>>
>>>> Best,
>>>> Yibin
>>>>
>>>> 于 2011/4/10 23:20, Jorge Silva 写道:
>>>>
>>>>> Hola All,
>>>>>
>>>>> Done! I have created a series at:
>>>>> https://launchpad.net/tagin/android-sdk
>>>>>
>>>>> you can pull the code from there if you are interested in trying it
>>>>> out. The series should evolve into a SDK for creating location-based
>>>>> Android applications that work indoors. I will continue to maintain
>>>>> and document this series with the objective of facilitating
>>>>> third-party application development (including the geocaching game
>>>>> planned for the Google Summer of Code).
>>>>>
>>>>> The code includes an activity with two buttons at the top:
>>>>> "Fingerprint" and "Snapshot". The fingerprint button will collect a
>>>>> new fingerprint and dump it to a text view below. The "snapshot"
>>>>> button will take a snapshot of the current fingerprint for reference
>>>>> in subsequent comparisons.
>>>>>
>>>>> *How to test*
>>>>> Preferably install on an actual device since the emulator won't cut it.
>>>>>
>>>>> FIrst open the "tagin! Fingerprinter" app... it should collect a
>>>>> fingerprint as soon as you open it. Take a few more fingerprints just
>>>>> so you see how the WiFi patterns change. In the text dump you will see
>>>>> three comma separated values: BSSID, RSSI, Rank. The BSSID is the mac
>>>>> address of an observed access point, the RSSI is the signal strength
>>>>> in dBm, and the Rank is a number between 0 and 1 representing the RSSI
>>>>> (1 being the strongest/highest RSSI ever recorded). The rank
>>>>> normalizes the RSSI and it is meant to account for differences in how
>>>>> different handsets measure strength since there is no standard. If you
>>>>> are interested in learning how the rank is calculated, just look at
>>>>> the getRanks() method in the Fingerprint class.
>>>>>
>>>>> The snapshot button will make a copy of the current fingerprint and
>>>>> dump it into another text view with the header "SNAPSHOT". If you get
>>>>> another fingerprint after you have created a snapshot, the "Rank
>>>>> distance" between your fingerprint and the snapshot will be calculated
>>>>> and reported. The Rank distance is again a number between 0 and 1
>>>>> where 0 means no difference (i.e., both fingerprints are identical)
>>>>> and 1 means no similarity (i.e., fingerprints don't share a single
>>>>> access point). If you take a snapshot and stay still, you should get a
>>>>> number between 0 and 0.25. Anything between 0.25 and 0.5 usually means
>>>>> you moved but you may still be in the same room, and anything above
>>>>> 0.5 typically means you are close but not in the same room. If you get
>>>>> 1 then you could be around the building, but you could also be in a
>>>>> different country!
>>>>>
>>>>> I would be interested in knowing what ranges you get when you walk
>>>>> around the same room and when you go outside the room just to see if
>>>>> it is the same I am getting. Maybe I'll put your data on the wiki to
>>>>> have a preliminary reference.
>>>>>
>>>>> If you have some basic idea of AI and/or machine learning, I hope you
>>>>> could already imagine how you could use the Rank distance to quickly
>>>>> put together an application using a simple approach like nearest
>>>>> neighbours or similar, so do play around with it.
>>>>>
>>>>> That is is for now... if you have any questions, comments,
>>>>> suggestions, please reply to the thread.
>>>>>
>>>>> cheers!
>>>>> Jorge
>>>>>
>>>>> On 11-04-10 03:58 PM, Jorge Silva wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>> Hola all,
>>>>>>
>>>>>> I have been working on upgrading the fingerprinting code for tagin! in
>>>>>> anticipation of the re-write of the engine that we will be
>>>>>> completed as
>>>>>> part of the Google Summer of Code. This is just to let everybody know
>>>>>> that I will be pushing this code soon (hopefully later today).
>>>>>>
>>>>>> The code will be in the form of a bunch of classes and a very
>>>>>> rudimentary activity that will show how fingerprinting works, what it
>>>>>> does and how it can be used to differentiate between distinct
>>>>>> locations
>>>>>> indoors. Initially there will not be much documentation but I hope to
>>>>>> focus a bit more on that in the coming days (with your help).
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Let me know if you have any comments. I will follow up on this thread
>>>>>> once I push the code online.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> cheers!
>>>>>> Jorge
>>>>>>
>>>>>
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>>>>
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