The Smart Party: A Personalized Location-Aware Multimedia Experience

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Project Summary

The personal audio player has become ubiquitous, and is now attached to the hips, pockets, and hearts of hundreds of millions of users. Users exchange digital audio content with each other socially, sharing their digital audio players in a mostly ad hoc manner. New digital audio players like the Microsoft Zune allow users to share music wirelessly with others, but have proven troublesome to connect and configure in practice. The Smart Party represents the next generation in social media sharing: it allows user devices to interact seamlessly and transparently in physical locations. At the Smart Party, users bring their media preferences and library on their portable device. Their devices automatically detect, and are configured for, their environment, and interact to select the media that will play in the various rooms in which the party is situated. Per-room play lists are dynamically generated based on the current user population.

Old Technology: The Dumb Party

The Panoply-Enabled Smart Party

Architecture (Illustrated Through an Example)

Key Components

• Configuration
  • Cryptographic voucher carries both invitation and necessary configuration information
• Localization
  • Using maps of 802.11 wireless characteristics
• Selecting and retrieving the music
  • Automated voting algorithm based on known user preferences
• Handling dynamism
  • Middleware builds and maintains groups based on users’ locations

Publications and Presentations

Kevin Eustice, V. Ramakrishna, Nam Nguyen, and Peter Reiher. The Smart Party: A Personalized Location-aware Multimedia Experience, In the Proceedings of the 2008 Consumer Communications and Networking Conference, January 2008 in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Kevin Eustice, V. Ramakrishna, Nam Nguyen, and Peter Reiher, The Smart Party: A Personalized Location-aware Multimedia Experience , presented at the Consumer Communications and Networking Conference (CCNC), January 2008.

The Panoply project is supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. CNS 0427748.