The Blue Bubble: Design and construction of an interpersonal communicator prototype

Many WPAN solutions focus on human interaction with an intelligent environment, as guided by a dominant ubiquitous computing vision. Research found that humans are as important part of the environment as other objects, and CMC has positive effects on human interaction. Interpersonal communication as one aspect of ubiquitous computing was explored. We designed a close-range wireless application using commonly available mobile devices and software components, Blue Bubble, to mimic an extended social personal space of 10 meters. The design was implemented using Bluetooth enabled PDAs with C# and .NET Compact Framework. Blue Bubble automatically detects other users, retrieves published profiles and propagates news with “Ice Breaker”, “News Collector”, “Chat” and “File Transfer” features. An innovative two-way handshake process improved the devices discovery reliability. Improvements on PDAs and Bluetooth technology were proposed to support future developments of such automatic interpersonal communicators.