Creating and Experiencing Ubimedia

hypermedia, multimedia, ubiquitous computing, mobility In this position paper we describe an emerging area of research that we believe will have significant impact in the areas of personal mobility and digital media. Our term for this research area is “ubimedia”, a concatenation of ‘ubiquitous computing’, and ‘physicallylinked hypermedia’. We note that the structure of media is evolving from standalone media objects (photographs, audio tracks, books) to collections of semantically related media objects connected by hyperlinks. These hyperlinks may bridge digital and physical objects as well, thus the term ‘physicallylinked hypermedia’. Also, we observe that the rapid advance of computing and communication technologies into the realm of everyday life is enabling ubiquitous computing (‘ubicomp’), widely thought to be one of the next major waves of computing. Ubimedia research seeks to understand how to design ubicomp systems to support interconnected physical and digital media.