Right now is the tutorial on interaction and ubiquitous computing presented by Tom Rodden of the University of Nottingham. Tom is talking about how do we achieve Mark Weiser's vision? Technology is vanishing into smaller and smaller devices which we don't now even think about, like USB keys and iPods. What are the key issues of ubiquitous computing? First is natural interfaces and an example of this is Stanford's iRoom which is a smart room environment where there are wall-mounted displays and controllers are used to transfer files to the display and to interact with the tabletop display. The real challenge for HCI is how may these things be used in real life. The second part is context, how to use context to provide awareness? We need to ask these questions when we measure and use context: who, what, where, when and why. The challenges of context-awareness to add more context or to fuse data to infer context.
Digital information is being augmented in the physical world, actions on physical objects have meaning in the virtual world and vice versa.
One of the issues that start to emerge is that will each object have a little instruction manual? One of the general theme of this tutorial is that we design interaction in ubicomp, but will they actually be used in everyday life. Tom showed some really neat videos, one with a weight table and key table, that based on weight, the image moves faster or the picture tilts more. Attendees in the audience laughed, because would you have that kind of device in your home? Nonetheless, a great talk, I thoroughly enjoyed it.
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