Wednesday was the second thesis presentation. The purpose was to talk about the usability testing performed with a first prototype of the application. The slides of the talk can be found here (PDF).

The created prototype for the usability test was a basic and lightweight tunify player. The pencil & paper sketches can be found here. However, the current version of the application is too much of a standard iTunes application, with the typical playlist, song and library features such as creating playlists, browsing and adding songs, etc. So the task for the coming weeks is to come up with a few more interesting ideas and make the application revolve around these ideas.

A few thoughts for ideas are:

• Use the iPhone GPS functionality to get the current position of the user. Present him a map showing the pubs using Tunify in his current neighbourhood. The user can then select a pub and listen to the music playing there in real-time. He could also ask for directions.
• Annotate the world with music. User A could be taking a walk in a park and suddenly think about some song which he thinks fits with the environment. He could then take out his iPhone, and 'annotate' the location with that song. The song will then be coupled to his GPS location. Later, user B might walk near that same spot while listening to the iPhone application. When passing the same location as user A, the song user A annotated will start playing. A location can be annotated with multiple songs. Users could for example configure the application to play only classical songs annotated with locations. The songs could be coupled with google maps, so you can 'see' the music of a certain location and maybe even pick the path you'll walk based on the music you'll pass.
• Use the GPS to get the current location of the user. Then gather information about all the artists within a certain radius. The application could then show a 3D sphere with the latest songs or albums of these artists, each placed in the general direction of the artist's location. The user is positioned inside the sphere and while rotating in the real world, the sphere rotates around him and shows the work of the artist located in the same direction the user is facing. This information could be overlayed on images of the user's environment made with the camera.