AC Interview: Enkin Developers

Got a response from the Enkin guys, apparently there was a mix up so all is well.
Enkin is looking most likely to be an application that most Android users will be using in the very near future to come.
Thanks to Rafael Spring and Max Braun for taking timeout to answer a a few questions relating to Enkin and other things.

Tell Us About yourselves

We both study at the University of Koblenz-Landau in Koblenz, Germany. The course is called Computational Visualistics, which is basically Computer Science, but with an emphasis on its visual elements like computer graphics or image processing.

But it was in Japan where we started to work on Enkin. We spent six months at the University of Osaka doing robotics research. Btw: they have real androids there!

Where did the idea of Enkin come from

It actually began with the wish to enter the Google Android Developer Challenge. We looked at the different features of the SDK and pretty soon the concept of combining 3D graphics, GPS, and the orientation sensors emerged. I had been playing around with accelerometers before and had bought an iPod touch. So the notion of looking "through" a small screen and creating some kind of augmented reality was one of our very early ones.

We realized how useful such a navigation tool could be when we were looking for a club in Osaka to see a concert. It was dark and our sketched map didn't help too much since we didn't have a clue which direction we were facing. So we tried to think up the most smart mobile application that would guide us there. Maybe it was this moment when Enkin was born.

What was the reason for choosing Android as the Platform of choice for Enkin

Well, it was the only platform that came with a challenge and a potential prize from Google. Also, we didn't find all the tools we used in Enkin, like sensor interfaces, a positioning system, or an open maps application in other platforms.

How long has it been in development

We have started about five months ago. We experimented a lot, discussed the UI, implemented web-services for Enkin, made field tests. And getting all the external data into the emulator wasn't a quick thing to do as well.

Everything about Enkin seems to be very interesting, especially Live Mode. Tell us about that and some of the other important aspects of Enkin

The genuinely new thing about Enkin is not the principle behind Live mode. That has been done before, namely in a research project by NOKIA, although we didn't know about that when we came up with the idea. Our focus, however, was on how to integrate our three different modes Map, Landscape, and Live into one unified concept of visualizing basically any location-based content. Each of these modes has it's individual strengths but in the end they are just parts of a bigger concept which will, hopefully, change the way we think about LBC and navigation in general. For that reason we tried to create a simple and intuitive user interface that combinines the three modes.
Now most LBC is just simple placemarks, but there are plenty of possibilities beyond that.

Looking at Enkin right now, some might say that this application is too ambitious for a Google Android Device, how would you relate to that

We are pretty confident that there will be Android devices with the required hardware and enough computational power in the near future. Enkin is an application exclusive to mobile devices, so all that we have done with the emulator so far was trimmed to give the most accurate impression of how it would be on a real device. Sure, it will be a different thing developing for the actual devices, but we are very much looking forward to it and we can't wait to see Enkin perform the way it was designed for from the very beginning!

I admire how you guys found a way to overcome the limitations of the Android Emulator and the fact that there is no Android Hardware available with the creation of your own hardware component to simulate Enkin realistically, how did that idea came into play?

We had felt that it would have been impossible to develop what we had in mind without actually testing it. We could have just used the sensor interfaces and claimed that they should work in the end. But such an approach has serious drawbacks: First, you cannot catch people with something that *could* work in the end. They need to see it work, especially in our case, since Enkin introduces a new interface to LBC. Second, not using hardware keeps you out of touch with reality. We learned a lot about what is possible and what isn't and we already developed many solutions to practical problems that unavoidably come along with the use of hardware. Our concept, too, has surely changed in the course of the development process.

Were there any hiccups in development?

We had many problems when we updated to the current M5 SDK. They cut the possibility to easily (and performantly) overlay 2D over 3D graphics which is essential for Landscape mode. So we had to recode our whole graphics engine and do some additional tricks to achieve an acceptable framerate.
Also, the quality of the orientation data was below our expectations and our initial ideas for the demo had to be cut back as a consequence. But fortunately we have found ways to overcome or minimize errors. You can read about that in our project documentation.

What is it like developing Enkin on the Android SDK?

So far, Enkin is an Android exclusive. It's hard to imagine how it would have been developing it with another SDK.

What are your general thoughts about Google Android?

Andriod has a great potential to refresh the mobile market. The ADC was certainly the right way to catch the developer's attention. We also hope that real Android devices will be available soon.

In the future, will we see Enkin getting ported to the likes of Windows Mobile, Symbian....iPhone?

That depends on whether the Android Challenge ends well for us and also on our future experience with hardware devices. It's hard to speculate about that at the moment.

What do you hope for in the future for both yourselves and Enkin?

I hope that Enkin will be as well received by the challenge judges as it has been by the public so far. Soon, we can hopefully realize the tons of ideas that didn't make it into the current release. I hope that Enkin will become a useful application running on many Android devices in the near future. As for myself, I hope to still have enough time besides Enkin.

We heare at Android Colosseum hope Enkin will come out on top in the Android Developer Challenge, mainly because we like it so much lol Good Luck!!!

Thank's a lot.

check out the video demonstration