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Entry Points into a Smart Campus Infrastructure (2001-2003)

A Research Project in Cooperation with the Distributed Systems Group

The Entry Points project is part of the ETH World initiative, whose goal is to establish a virtual campus in addition to the existing physical ETH campus. Unlike the World Wide Web, ETH World is not just a virtual space, but combines physical and virtual elements and is closely related to the physical campus environment. ETH World is designed for the well-defined user community of people tied to ETH and promotes their active participation in everyday work life.

In the Entry Points project we investigate the requirement for material entry points into a virtual campus that increase its accessibility and visibility from within the physical campus environment. A prerequisite to realize this requirement is to provide a seamless coupling of informational and physical entities on the campus, like printed documents, physical objects, and places. By embedding physical hyperlinks into the ETH campus and attaching information to physical objects, visible entry points into the information space of ETH World are created, enabling a natural interaction between physical and virtual environment and thus providing ubiquitous access to ETH World.

Within the Entry Points project, we designed the ETHOC system ("everything has online content"), which enables users to attach virtual counterparts to printed material. The system performs the creation, administration, and intermediation of online resources related to paper documents. To information providers it offers a Web-based author portal for generating unique IDs that can be printed as barcodes, and for associating online content and actions to printed material. To users it offers simple means to interact with virtual counterparts of printed documents using a variety of devices. Examples range from a WAP enabled mobile phone equipped with a tiny bar code reader or an integrated camera, a PDA with wireless connectivity, to the full fledged ETHOC browser for Java enabled PCs and laptops.

This project ended in December 2003.

Selected Publications

See the Publications of the Distributed Systems Group page for a full listing of our publications.

Related Student Projects

The following table lists corresponding student projects in our group. Note that some descriptions will be in German.

TypeTitleStudentSupervisorSemester
S Augenblickliche Personalisierung und vorübergehende Nutzung von mobilen Benutzergeräten Lukas StuckiJürgen BohnSS 04
P Recognition of 2-Dimensional Visual Codes with the Nokia 7650 Beat GfellerMichael RohsWS 03/04
D Heuristiken zur Positionsbestimmung in Gebäuden mittels Sensor-Fusion und 2D-Kartenmodell Christian SchärJürgen BohnSS 02
D Magnifying Glass Metaphor for the Interaction with Virtual Counterparts Sabine Do-ThuongMichael RohsSS 02
D Erweiterung von gedruckten Dokumenten um Online-Inhalte Nikolaos KaintantzisJürgen Bohn,
Michael Rohs
SS 01
ETH ZurichDistributed Systems Group
Last updated January 1 1970 01:00:00 AM MET ko