Towards Design Strategies to Deal with Spatial Uncertainty in Location-Aware Systems

Building ubiquitous applications that exploit location requires both low-level underlying infrastructure for linking sensors and managing spatial information and also high-level representation of the measured space to produce a pleasant user experience. However, the real-world constraints limiting the efficiency of locative technologies constantly challenge the coexistence of digital and physical spaces. An inherent spatial uncertainty is embedded in mobile and locative systems. This papers reports on qualitative study of spatial uncertainty in the context of a pervasive game named CatchBob! It is part of an ongoing work that aims at capturing information on user’s perceptions of uncertain spatial information in uncontrolled, real-world settings as well as defining design strategies to manage spatial uncertainty in location-aware applications.