The first real world installation of the IRREAL system took place at the German computer fair CeBIT 2000 in Hannover. We installed 20 senders throughout an exhibition booth of and augmented the exhibits by short and long descriptions in German and English and contact information for the products on display as well as floor plans and simple annotated 3D graphics of what people would roughly see from their current positions. People arriving with their own devices received a 26Kbyte PalmOS application at the information desk within a few seconds and could thereby use the information system with their own devices. They initially chose a language and a level of detail for informational texts which set the mobile device to filter out only content for a certain user group ID internally. Information received in certain locations could then be saved locally on the device and taken home while all other data was deleted when they left the booth. Changes in the booth staff could immediately be reflected in the broadcast data, so visitors would always take home the contact information of the people they actually were talking to at the exhibits. Within a month after CeBIT we installed senders on our floor and at central locations of the Computer Science building of Saarbruecken University. These senders provide services such as the (daily changing) menu of the University restaurant or the bus schedule from the bus stop in front of the building for the next 30 minutes. This information is fetched from existing web pages, converted and updated in the infrared data streams automatically. People can conveniently walk through these areas without even having to stop and review the received information on their way to the restaurant or bus stop. We are currently working on finer grained information services such as information of the operational status of computers in different rooms, office hours of room inhabitants or navigation information. Eventually visitors will be able to select the name of a person they want to see from a list upon entering the building and then just follow the arrows and plans displayed on their device to be guided to that person's room.
The client program for all these services is our own hyperdocument browser BrowsIR, which can eventually be replaced by more standardized tools such as WWW or WAP browsers for the Palm Pilot. Every user only has to install the client program once, since all the content is broadcast dynamically. The current implementation has been tested on all the PalmOS PDAs that incorporate an infrared port. This includes the Palm Models III, IIIx, IIIc, V, Vx, VII, all the IBM Workpads and the Handspring Visor.