Interaction on the move
Advances in Wearable User Interfaces - Interaction with IOT

Over the last 20 years computer scientists have made real progress in engineering interactive software for desktop computers. When looking at wearable computing it is important to consider the very basic issues in human computer interaction. The talk discusses the terms utility, usability, likeability, and user experience in the context of pervasive and wearable computing and related the challenges to the basic quality components of interactive systems, namely learnability, efficiency, memorability, errors, and satisfaction.

Looking back at how many processes worked 20 years ago and how Mark Weiser envisioned the computer back then, the talk illustrates the fast pace of technology development and technology uptake by end-users. As ubiquitous computing is becoming reality, using mobile phones, operating household appliances, watching television, and driving a car have essentially become human-computer interaction tasks. It can be expected that advances we see will impact the way we interact with pervasive systems and wearable computing alike. Interacting with our environment eventually will become interaction with the internet of things that is embedded ubiquitously into the world [1].

Looking at different projects and case studies the talk highlights several challenges in creating novel interactive systems. In the European project pd-net [2, 3, 4] we investigate the user of interactive networked public displays as a new communication media. In this example it becomes very clear that understanding utility and interaction opportunities as well as the concerns of stakeholders is vital for the success of a system. A second example is the design of user interfaces in cars, where we have explored new modalities, such as eye-tracking. We show that when designing systems that are used in cases where attention is divided (e.g. while driving between application in the car and the street, or while walking between the surrounding and the mobile application) it is essential to support the transition of the attention [5].

The talk introduces the vision of communication systems of the future. As information sensing is ubiquitous and communication is global and instantaneous humans have unprecedented access to vast amounts of information virtually instantaneous. Perception is not longer limited to the here and now [6]. Technologies that have been created over the last 20 years, in particular communication systems and platforms for information sharing, will inevitably revolutionize the way people perceive the world, interact with each other, and act upon what they perceive.

The central challenge for the future is to create platforms that enable human perception that is not limited by space and time in an acceptable way. Allowing random access across space and time, providing means to virtually be in any other place (or multiple places at the same time) on the planet and going back in time to access information is the central function of these systems. The value of such technology is, that without prior effort, access to things experienced before can be provided and shared.

The second vision discusses the opportunities that arise from the large number of people that will be connected to the internet over the next years. Around the world, especially in developing countries, there are many opportunities arising from wide availability of mobile devices and access to mobile devices. In our research we had looked especially at how education can be improved using mobile multimedia devices [7].

References

[1] Matthias Kranz, Paul Holleis, Albrecht Schmidt Embedded Interaction - Interacting with the Internet of Things IEEE Internet Computing, vol. 14, no. 2, pp. 46-53, Mar./Apr. 2010, doi:10.1109/MIC.2009.141, ISSN 1089-7801. 2010.

[2] F. Alt, N. Memarovic, I. Elhart, D. Bial, A. Schmidt, M. Langheinrich, G. Harboe, E. Huang, and M. P. Scipioni, "Designing Shared Public Display Networks — Implications from Today’s Paper-Based Notice Areas," in Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Pervasive Computing, 2011.

[3] pd-net - Towards Future Pervasive Display Networks. Funded by the European Union Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement no. 244011. http://pd-net.org

[4] J. Müller, F. Alt, D. Michelis, and A. Schmidt, "Requirements and Design Space for Interactive Public Displays," in Proceedings of the 18th annual ACM international conference on Multimedia (Multimedia 2010), 2010.

[5] Dagmar Kern, Paul Marshall, and Albrecht Schmidt. 2010. Gazemarks: gaze-based visual placeholders to ease attention switching. In Proceedings of the 28th international conference on Human factors in computing systems (CHI '10). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2093-2102. DOI=10.1145/1753326.1753646 http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1753326.1753646

[6] Albrecht Schmidt, Marc Langheinrich, and Kritian Kersting. 2011. Perception beyond the Here and Now. Computer 44, 2 (February 2011), 86-88. DOI=10.1109/MC.2011.54 http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/MC.2011.54

[7] Elba del Carmen Valderrama Bahamondez, Christian Winkler, and Albrecht Schmidt. 2011. Utilizing multimedia capabilities of mobile phones to support teaching in schools in rural panama. In

-> Download presentation