For more information about the competition and the other winners, please visit this blog post on Austria’s Open Government Data website data.gv.at.

If you’re more interested in Woody’s activities, visit the official Facebook page or watch this TV spot on youtube.

(Photo: BKA Wien/Regina Aigner)

Congratulations to team “Woody”: Our HCI Seminar team won a partner prize at ZIT Content Award (ZIT article, Futurezone article) at the end of last year!

The prize: You can now see “Woody” on all public “Infoscreens” in Vienna (in subway stations, in trams, etc.) for around 20 days in April!

You can also find the video on Infoscreen’s online stream.

Florian Jungwirth, Alois Paul Spiesberger-Höckner and Christoph Wöss have participated in our HCI Seminar in summer term 2012. See this blogpost for more information.

You’ll have the opportunity to develop a prototype tablet application for a mobile platform (iOS, Android) utilizing a user-centered design process. We provide a methodological framework – you can show your creativity in the practical implementation.

If you’re interested in participating, please visit the course website for further information about the topic, schedule and registration.

We would be happy to welcome you in our seminar.

Four teams of two or three students each completed the seminar, resulting in creative and useful mobile applications and one game. The application prototypes, used for the evaluation, were all implemented for the Android platform.

Two of four teams also submitted their apps at the ZID Content Award 2012.

We proudly present the mobile application concepts of our four participating student teams:

Sportsfreund – an app that helps to find new sports partners in Vienna
Woody – an infotainment game to learn about trees in Vienna
ViennaInTime – an app to discover events in Vienna
Willkommen in Wien – an app that helps new immigrants in Vienna

Sportsfreund

Oliver Hubmer, Marcel Penz, Philipp Raich

Most people need a whole lot of motivation to start doing sports. sportsfreund, a mobile application, helps the user to find partners for doing so together. You can either create a sport event only visible for your friends, or for every other person using sportsfreund.

Creating new events and finding partners to participate at them is exhausting, especially if you are short in time. Making this process more convenient is the main goal of the application. To achieve this, users can easily subscribe to an existing event, and they get notified of invitations to them. The usage of the the open data catalogue of the city of Vienna makes it easy for users to set the meeting point to existing sport areas all over Vienna.

Visit us on http://www.sportsfreund.co.at.

Video: sportsfreund (English) on youtube, sportsfreund (German) on youtube

Woody

Florian Jungwirth, Alois Paul Spiesberger-Höckner, Christoph Wöss

Woody is a game that combines game-based learning with great gameplay and informative facts about the trees in Vienna. Woody is a wood worm who needs your assistance to survive. The special feature of this app is that you can interact with your real environment, with real trees.

You need to feed Woody with wood in order to extend his life as long as possible. The decisions you make directly change your environment and the way the game is played. Be the bad guy and chop down all the trees in your street, or follow the good path and re-plant them or let woody just have a small and innocent snack.

In addition to the interactive actions with real trees, Woody provides an informative ‘Treepedia’. This feature offers a list of all trees in Vienna with additional information.

Another very handy part of the app is the map. It gives a great overview of the surrounding trees at your current location. It’s even possible to directly navigate to a single tree shown on the map.

The varied achievements guarantee an extended longevity and will make you want to gain the „Master of the Woods” achievement.
After all Woody is an infotainment app which provides useful features besides fun gameplay and a handsome protagonist.

Download on Google Play

Video: Woody on youtube

ViennaInTime

Andreas Hengl, Matthias Wagner

ViennaInTime is an interactive Android app, that helps you find events in Vienna. With a novel concept of navigating through time it offers an easy way to find events from various categories in the coming days. Additionally, it offers an overview of the event-hotspots for each day.

Detailed overview of each individual event, distances and information about events in your neighborhood are included. A fully integrated Google map helps you quickly find your location and provide you with information on how to find the easiest way to the event.

Video: ViennaInTime on vimeo

Willkommen in Wien

Raif Tabucic, Bruno Tunjic

Willkommen in Wien is a reminder App aimed at helping immigrants with first steps after their arrival in Vienna. Three main bureaucratic matters that one has to do (in this order) upon the arrival in Vienna are:

1. Registration in the registration office
2. Open a bank account
3. Open a social insurance

Our application is meant to be used as a reminder for when, and a guide for how-to solve these matters.

A user receives a number of predefined sub-tasks as, for example, forms and documents that one has to collect. While these are editable, there is an option to add completely new sub-tasks, since this is very often needed, because of the differences in required documents.

In addition to these sub-tasks, each matter has its editable deadline. When a task/matter is in progress or done, a user can correspondingly change its status.

A To-Do list, which is displayed initially by the application, gives an overview of all the matters, as well as their corresponding sub-tasks and deadlines.

In addition to these main features, an extras tab is available that enables users to find nearest police stations, German language courses, subway plan etc.

Video: Willkommen in Wien on youtube

You’ll have the opportunity to develop a prototype application for a mobile platform (iOS, Android, Maemo) utilizing a user-centered design process. We provide a methodological framework and you can show your creativity in the practical implementation.

If you’re interested in participating, please visit the course website for further information about the topic, schedule and registration.

We would be happy to welcome you in our seminar.

- Education & Research: How can mobile applications enhance the experience and support people in the fields of education and research?

- Green Living: How can mobile applications support and encourage people to reduce their negative environmental impact?

Seven teams of three students each completed the seminar, resulting in creative and useful mobile applications. The horizontal prototypes, used for the evaluation, were implemented with various tools, including App Inventor and Sencha Touch. However, most of the teams decided to develop native applications using the iOS and Android SDKs.

We proudly present the mobile application concepts of our seven participating student teams:

Freece – an app to support Freecycling between people
Questo! – a location-based social quiz game
Meet’n‘Eat – a cook pooling application
Time Travel – an app to go back in time and learn about the past
vRalley – an app for pupils, students and tourists to explore cities
VocAPPulary – a picture based vocabulary trainer
Tools4Rent – an app to rent tools that are not often used

Note that most screens contain static data used only for the evaluation of the prototypes. The applications are (also if stated otherwise) not available on any store at the moment.

Freece

Martin Keiblinger, Christian Kondler, Michael Schöndorfer

The Android App „Freece“ is a mobile smartphone application which supports the free exchange of no longer used goods between people, called Freecycling.

Similar to other services that support the exchange of goods between people, the main use case for this app can be described as follows:

User A has an article that is not needed anymore. Instead of throwing it away, User A uses the app to add the article to our service. User B is currently searching for such an article and applies for it. User A accepts the application and User B gets the notification that he can come by and collect it.

The app users have to register once on a central server. After registration, all use cases can be accomplished by using only the app.
The home screen of the app includes a dashboard that enables the user to directly execute the following tasks:

- Search for an article by using a Google Maps view which shows offered articles nearby using map overlays
- Discover articles by using the list search which supports dynamic filtering
- Offer an article to other users by adding photos, description etc.
- Track articles watched/offered by yourself
- Track articles which you have applied for

Some additional features:

- Get more information about an article by using the details view (user rating, article description, location, pictures)
- Search by Google Maps View also includes a list view that shows the articles nearby sorted by their distance related to your current position

The app was developed native using the Android SDK by following the official Google Design Guidelines for Android App Development. The main focus was to design a consistent user interface that is intuitive and easy to handle.

Video: Freece on vimeo

Questo!

Manuel Maly, Rudolf Mildner, Petar Petrov

Questo is a location-based social quiz game giving you the possibility to learn great things on the fly. If you are at a new place or simply passing by this beautiful old building every day on the way to work, just start Questo and take a quiz about this place.

The medieval style of the user interface provides an unique user experience and helps you dive into the world of knowledge.

If you want to know something about castles from the middle ages, the Eiffel Tower or Mozart you can just take a quiz in a related location on the map and collect points for each correct answer… without standing up from your couch. Questo will give you feedback and help you find out the correct answers in a easy and fun fashion.

You know a great interesting fact about the Grand Canyon? Just find it on the map and create a new question for other users to try.

If you want to show your friends how much you’ve learned, just invite them to Questo and challenge them to a tournament to see who knows it all.

Don’t believe us, try it yourself!

Video: Questo! on youtube

Meet’n‘Eat

Alexander Bachinger, Bernhard Efler, Gerhard Lamprecht

Do you sometimes experience any of these situations:

Emptying your fridge and throwing food that’s past its expiration date into the garbage?

Coming home late and realizing there’s no real food at home when shops are already closed? (even worse on weekends)
Realizing that while that lasagna (or any other food, really) was really tasty when you made it, but isn’t so grand if you eat left-overs 3 days in a row?

Well, there’s help for you: Meet’n’Eat, a cook pooling application, brings people together.

Find someone to eat with any time, any place; invite friends for free or strangers for monetary compensation; and get invited in return.
It’s easy to use, give it a try, whether you are searching for vegetarian food near your place of residence or a blind date near your workplace, you can’t go wrong with Meet’n’Eat.

Hosting a meal is just as simple, set the time, number of guests and give it a title, and optionally invite friends, turn it into a private event, set a price or write a description.

Accept or decline invitations and applications, who is visiting you or where you go to is yours to decide. Rate people afterwards to tell the world what a great/awful host/guest others are.

Use Meet’n’Eat to find a meal after working late again, or to organize a picknick among friends. Meet a lonely stranger or find someone to share lactose-free recipes with.

Download today, free to use, nothing to lose. Meet’n’Eat, bringing people together since 2011.

Video: Meet’n‘Eat on vimeo

Time Travel

Oliver Erhart, Michael Franzl, Alexander Mänchen

Have you ever wondered what happened in the past, on a location you were wandering by? Like at the Stephansdom or the Parlament? Now it’s possible!

With the Time Travel app you can go back in time and learn about the past.
On the map you can see all important spots where you can travel back in time. You don’t need a tourist guide for finding interesting locations anymore – the Time Travel app does this for you.

If you’re out of range from one of these spots you can see the details of this spot, the count of its events, as well its ratings from other users. With this information in mind, you know if this location is worth a visit.

Once you decide to go back in time, you can easily slide and swipe between historical events represented as images. If you find an interesting entry, just tap on it to see the most important information about it. After your brain is full of information be sure to rate that location.

Never ever sitting at home and learning history on the internet through Wikipedia & co. Take a trip and have a view through your iPhone at the distant past of dozens of locations. Your body will thank you for that.

Video: Time Travel on youtube

vRalley

Stefan Csizmazia, Johannes Hartl, Thomas Seif

vRalley is a fully interactive Android App supporting custom scavenger hunts for pupils, students, tourists and whoever likes to explore cities in an exciting and modern way. Forget boring hours of guided walks following an umbrella! Let vRalley show you new places and use it for learning new stuff about them. Every rally contains multiple exercises that you solve by visiting a specified place. Once you arrive at a place, try to answer the questions each exercise may ask you. For every exercise you can take notes, make pictures and record video and audio clips – all in one place, so you can find it easily afterwards. Distance and direction indicators as well as fully integrated Google Maps help you navigating wherever you are.

Video: vRalley on vimeo

VocAPPulary

Vanja Bisanovic, Simon Ludwig, George Sabau

vocAPPulary is one of the first (or maybe even better) picture based vocabulary trainer for elementary school kids and newbies of all ages. Try to think back and remember of your own childhood and time at the elementary when you had your first contact with a foreign language. How horrible it was when the teacher put you write down masses of vocabulary in senseless-seeming pairs of words with its translations and so on.

Now we’ve got the right thing/APP for all those people out there trying to learn a foreign language (e.g. English). All you need now is an Android Smartphone and our APP called vocAPPulary. We built our APP true to the motto “a picture paints a thousand words”. Our lections are built and work on this principle. Every word/term is represented by a picture showing and representing it’s meaning.

Download the latest and most recent lectures or even better create your own lecture with words you might need for tomorrows English class repetition. If you want to go for something more social just scroll through your phone’s contact list and challenge one of your class mates on a special subject. Is this still not comfortable enough for you? Well, if you don’t like typing use speech recognition for completing the small lection quizzes.

There are so many possibilities although learning shouldn’t be this fun! But … what if?

Video: VocAPPulary on vimeo

Tools4Rent

Bartosz Dobosz, Tomasz Irla, Kamil Sierzant

With the Tools4Rent app you can browse, rent and easily put your tools that are not often used. You can manage your tools4rent account and check the state of your tools where ever you are. Simple, convenient and easy to use tools sharing app.

Key features:
- Search, watch and rent a tool.
- Review Item details
- Rate the users
- Save your money and time
- View tools history for re-rent tools.

Tools are divided into 6 categories:
- Garden
- House-Tools
- Event
- Computer
- Electronic
- Other

The goal of the app is optimal use of resources (packaging, consumption) to reduce production and save environment. There is a lot of tools which are use very rarely. The production of such Tools cost a lot of money and is not environment friendly. This app should also help people to put that Tools which they are not use very often and be fair with environment. Other people can find rent the tools. An important benefit is that the app show the search results on a map and give a approximate distance between your location and the tool that you are searching for.

Video: Tools4Rent on youtube

We have just launched an online study on measuring the effect of aesthetics in data visualization. The study is part of a collaborative research project between K.U. Leuven, Vienna University of Technology, and the University of Sydney.

If you have about 10-20 minutes of uninterrupted time please help us by completing the study at Aesthetic Impact. The main task that will be expected from you, is to interact with a visualization, and to describe what you have learned from it.

Please pass around the URL to any person who might be interested in participating. The only thing you need to know is that the study is less about usability, utility or usefulness, and more about measuring what non-trivial and unexpected insights you actually ‘get’ from interacting with a specific data representation.

Should you have any questions about the study, please don’t hesitate to contact us at study@aesthetic-impact.com.

We proudly present the mobile application concepts of our five participating student teams. Note that most screens contain static data used only for the evaluation of the prototypes. The applications are (also if stated otherwise) not available on any store at the moment.

Team AAA_Team: RegioBioFood

Aleksandar Djordjevic, Alex Brandner, Andreas Hörmann

RegioBioFood is an application which helps people to find bio products in an easier way, only by few clicks on their android smart phone. People who prefer health nutrition can find out how near is the closest shop, where their favorite bio product is on the shelf, waiting to be bought.

All necessary information about shops is listed, so the users can directly contact the bio shop or check the opening hours.

If the user doesn’t know exactly which product to buy, but still wants one, there are local delicacies containing the list of products that are typical for a selected region.

The application also provides tips and recipes for healthy food and dishes, so the users can inform themselves and learn something new at the same time. In such way the users’ affinity to application becomes more intensive.

Another feature makes possible to save the favorite shops users interact at most with. The application is built by adhering to the android guidelines. Testing with non smart phone users has proved that the application flow is logical and intuitional.

Video: BioRegioFood on youtube

Team CNM Studios: ParkingApp

Christoph Derndorfer, Nemanja Dubravac, Michael Smolle

Parking App is the result of CNM Studios’ project undertaken during the HCI Seminar course in the winter-term 2010. The task of the course was to develop a horizontal prototype of a mobile application which made use of publicly available data (so-called open data). The focus was firmly set on the interaction design – rather than the functionality – of the app. In order to ensure obtaining a result with a high usability a user-centered design approach was applied throughout the development process.

Parking App itself focuses on providing users with context-relevant information about parking zones, parking garages, tariffs, and related details for Austrian cities. The goal is to provide and present this information in an easily and quickly accessible design, especially considering that users, such as co-drivers, are likely to use the app in a car.

As a result the most important use-cases can be completed with a few simple taps. For example finding the nearest free-parking zone can be accomplished with two taps and the closest parking garage and its information is accessible with three taps. Additional functionality includes a search for parking zones at specific addresses, optional layers to present extra information as a map overlay, and the option to use externally installed navigation apps for guidance.

To conclude: Finding relevant information about where to park your car in Austria right from your smartphone has never been easier.

Video: ParkingApp on youtube

Team hci_g3: Trümmerl-Tracker

Christoph Ambichl, Attila Lazar, Daniel Lazar

There are hundreds of thousands dogs in Vienna producing tons of excrement daily – most of it on the sidewalk. Now you can fight back! The “Trümmerl-Tracker” (Trümmerl: Viennese for dog dirt) application allows you to report “Trümmerl” you see lying around in streets and parks anywhere in Vienna. The reported positions are stored together with reports from other users and help to calculate an accurate estimate of pollutions made by dogs. Different grades of pollution are displayed as colors on the map.

If you want to get more involved, you can keep watching for dog owners and report them if they are not picking up the dirt of their dogs. All you have to do is take a picture of the sinner and optionally write a comment about the incident. You send your current position, the picture and your comment to us and you are done. Now everybody can see the sinner on the map.

Features:

• report dog’s mess found at your current position with just one touch
• denounce their guilty masters with picture and commentary
• display pollution in your neighborhood
• watch and identify caught dog owners on photographs
• manage your favorite locations like ‘home’ and ‘work’ for quick access.

The Application is still in development. In the meantime take a look at our video! Keep it Clean!

Video: Trümmerl-Tracker on youtube

Team ice_cr34m: Sightguider

Georg Anker, Ajmal Said, Thomas Teufel

The core function of our app „Sightguider“ is to provide its user proposals about the best sights in a defined city. These sights get combined to a trip, for which the user is able to define additional settings like the amount of money he has for it or the time available or how big the group is he has to pay for.
Of course such a trip can be modified if some sights are disliked or too expensive or some others are wished getting added because of personal interests.

Additionally there is a Google-Maps-integration, which shows either the city with all of its sights and points of interests or just the map with the sights that are added to the trip.

Another main function provides information about every sight saved in the app and a search-function to take a look at a specific one as fast as possible.

Unfortunately there are no open data available regarding this topic, so we had to „fake“ some. For this purpose we decided to define 2 cities with 10 sights each, just to use our prototype in a useful way.

Video: Sightduider on vimeo

Team MAP: Montius

David Griedl, Florian Walcher, Wolfgang Weltler

The mobile-app Montius is an application developed for smart phones to avoid inspections by employees of the Vienna transport services. To enable this service users of Montius should report inspections if they notice them. Other users receive the reports and have the chance to change the tube, bus or tram to escape the inspectors.

On the home screen the reports are displayed in a table to enable the operator a quick overview. The map screen shows the reported inspections on their real location on the map. The map also includes details of the inspections when the alert icon is clicked. On the settings screen the user has the possibility to personalize the map. Moreover, single lines can also be hidden in order to make the map less confusing. The last screen is the report screen where inspections are sent to the server. On that view, the user can post both whether inspections are carried out in an underground station/bus stop/tram stop and in one of Vienna’s means of public transport. In the first case, the station is selected by the GPS coordinates computed by the smartphone or from the user directly by name. In the second case, only the line on which the inspection took place is reported.

In conclusion, the application informs the operator about inspections of the Vienna transportation services but it is not intended to lead to criminal behaviour.

Video: Montius on youtube