Lessons Learned from Context Aware Service Experiences in the Real World

Context-aware services are one of the most typical services of pervasive computing, which seamlessly connect real and cyber worlds. There have been many laboratory-level attempts to provide context-aware services. However, there has been a gap between experimental and real spaces. In fact, context-aware services in real spaces suffer from a variety of problems, which have not been discussed in academic research. This paper addresses such problems. It describes experiences learned from our experiments on context-aware services in real public spaces, e.g., museums, and proposes solutions to them. Most of the problems are common to context-aware services.