This software is part of my master's thesis. You can download my thesis here:

http://sam.iai.uni-bonn.de/people/PascalBihler/paper/MA_Udelhoven.pdf

Abstract:

Location-aware applications are much more difficult to evaluate than conventional non- pervasive applications. Usually, it is not possible to restrict the evaluation environment to make the experiments predictable and controllable, but still realistic enough to provide significant results. In addition, the evaluation can be very exhausting and time consuming. For this thesis, a special laboratory setup for the evaluation of location-aware applications was developed, which maintains the scalability of a field evaluation while keeping the op- tions and the convenience of a laboratory. The system simulates the geographic location of study participants by tracking the movement of small toy figures in a model landscape. The system is a tangible user interface, called Presence Simulator. The simulated presence is transfered to android smartphones, on which the geographic location, stored in the de- vice’s operating system, is mocked accordingly. As a result, the evaluated applications are working with the mocked location data.

To determine the effect of the test environment, the system was evaluated in a comparative study. In the study, a location-aware task reminder was compared to a conventional to-do- list. Half of the participants attended to field experiments. The other half used the Presence Simulator. Both groups where split again into a group that used the location-aware task reminder and a group that used the todo-list to complete the same tasks. There was no significant difference in the number of forgotten tasks between the groups in the field study and the corresponding groups in the Presence Simulator based study.