u-Photo: Interacting with pervasive services using digital still images

This paper presents u-Photo which is an interactive digital still image including information of pervasive services associated with networked appliances and sensors in pervasive computing environment. U-Photo Tools can generate a u-Photo and provide methods for discovering contextual information about these pervasive services. Users can easily find out this information through the metaphor of 'taking a photograph'; the users use u-Photo by clicking on a physical entity in a digital still image. In addition, u-Photo makes managing information more efficient because the still image has embedded visual information. Using u-Photo and u-Photo Tools, we conducted various demonstrations and performed usability tests. The results of these tests show that u-Photo Tools are easy to learn. We also present that the time that expert u-Photo users take to find the object in piles of u-Photos is shorter than the time it take to find the object in piles of text-based descriptions.