I Like Frank

Technical Development

One aim of I Like Frank in Adelaide was to take the experience and infrastructure of Uncle Roy All Around You and see how this could be implemented given the constraints of a mobile phone instead of a PocketPC based PDA.

The work also set out to find ways to include some of the native functionality of the phone, in this case both voice and video calling.

The work was developed over 3 months with a number of weeks preparation and research by the Mixed Reality Lab. The project also had support from two key technical partners in Adelaide. These were Internode - an Adelaide based internet service provider and mNet who run a test 3G mobile phone network in Adelaide. mNet were also able to provide handsets for development and for the Street Players to use during the event.

The team in Adelaide consisted of the 3 core artists of Blast Theory working alongside 5 Adelaide based artists and 4 members of the Mixed Reality Lab.

Phone Handset Development

The handset which Street Players were given was a Motorola a835; one of only a few handsets able to run on the test network. The map and messages which players received were displayed by a Java application (J2ME, MIDP1.0) running on the phone.

Moving from a PDA to a phone brought a number of challenges. Transferring map navigation and screen buttons from a stylus interface to the phone's 4-way key and 2 soft keys took a number of attempts to get the layout and feel right.

The reduced memory and screen-size meant stripping the map down to 4 colours and compressing the scale to something which was legible but small enough to load.

More difficult, both technically and artistically, was handling Java's lack of integration with the basic functionality of the phone.

People are often familiar with navigating their own or even other people's phones. However, using Java to create an interface organised around a map meant that the phone's standard interfaces were generally hidden to the player. This meant learning an altogether new interface, and left people less able to troubleshoot connection problems on their own.

Technically, Java's lack of access to the phone's microphone or audio encoding hardware meant developing an elaborate call recording system to be able to get audio messages from Street Players. Using Motorola's telephone api for java, the phone application would prompt a call to our control room where PCs picked up and recorded players' messages.

Jan Humble, points out a number of key issues he found as a developer, using java on mobile phones [more]

Networking

I Like Frank provided a unique opportunity to work with a mobile network provider (mNet) to understand some of the opportunites and limitations of mobile networks.

The key lesson was that connection failures are common place. mNet suggested that most commercial network providers expect rate of upto 25% connnection/call failures on their networks.

Working with a test network brought to light some of the issues of how disconnections and failed handovers are dealt with by the network's software. For example, Java's poor closing of data connections when the phones switched to voice calls meant that the limited number of network slots became used up, as failed data connection took a minimum of one hour to reset.