Ubiquitous Computing Computers everywhere

Where are we going? What happens when the input is your car pulls into the garage, and the output is the heat is turned up in the house, the hallway light is turned on, and the door is unlocked? How would you design this? What are the usability metrics? How can you prototype and evaluate?

Ubiquitous Computing (Ubicomp) Move beyond desktop machine Computing is embedded everywhere in the environment – Computing capabilities at any time, any place – Machines sense users presence and act accordingly A new paradigm?? – “everyware”, “off the desktop”, “out of the box”, pervasive, invisible, calm, anytime/anywhere/any place, …

Computers become invisible “The most profound technologies are those that disappear” – Mark Weiser HCI: new focus on unobtrusiveness, invisibility – How do we make technology “vanish”?

Videos hokusai/index.html hokusai/index.html Other older examples from NTT Docomo – – – What interfaces did you see? How did users interact? What do you think of this vision?

Ubicomp is... Related to: – mobile computing – wearable computing – augmented reality In contrast with: – virtual reality (augmented virtuality)

HCI Themes in Ubicomp Natural interaction Context-aware computing Automated capture and access Everyday computing

Natural Interaction How do input and output change? – Different form factors, more devices Input – Towards implicit information – Feeds context-aware computing (later) Output – Towards distributed, peripheral and ambient displays

Natural / implicit input Integrate into human life Pen input Gesture Speech Perceptual UI Tangible UI tables_the_smart_blocks.html

Device scales Inch – PDAs – Blackberry & iPhone – Voice Recorders – GPS devices OQO

Device scales Foot – notebooks – tablets – digital paper

Device scales Yard – electronic whiteboards – plasma displays – smart bulletin boards

Another take on scales Based on ownership and location body desk room building From the GMD Darmstadt web site on I-Land

Distributed Displays The Everywhere Display Project at IBM Microsoft Research Play Anywhere:

Peripheral & Ambient Displays Digital Family Portrait Ambient Orb

What is Context? Any information that can be used to characterize the situation of an entity Who, what, where, when Why is it important? – information, usually implicit, that applications do not have access to – It’s input that you don’t get in a GUI

Example: Location services Outdoor – Global Positioning Satellites (GPS) – wireless/cellular networks Indoor – electronic tags, RFID – vision – motion detectors, keyboard activity

How to Use Context To present relevant information to someone – Mobile tour guide To perform an action automatically – Print to nearest printer, unlock the right door To show an action that user can choose – Chat with nearby friends, find comparable products

(A few) Context-aware scenarios Walk into room, lights, audio, etc. adjust to the presence of people Security, emergency calls based on people in the home, health monitoring Tracking and finding items in warehouse, alerting when inventory is low (or you need more milk), etc.

Automated capture and access Use of computers to preserve records of the live experience for future use (Abowd & Mynatt 2000) Compelling applications – Design records – Health care monitoring and therapies – Family memories

Technical Challenges Connectivity – almost constant – How to gracefully handle changes? Sensing – How to gather useful info? (i.e. location?) Integration and analysis of data – How to recognize activity and recover when incorrect? – How to function at acceptable speeds? Scale – both in information and size of displays

Challenge of Evaluation Bleeding edge technology Novelty Unanticipated uses Error recovery Quantitative metrics Variety of social implications/issues

Social issues Privacy – who has access to data? How do we make users aware of what technology is present? Differing perspectives and opinions – Jane likes that the environment is aware she is present, but John doesn’t…

Conclusions Interfaces and interactions moving into the world Real life interaction … noisy, erroneous Continuous interaction … time sensitive Design and evaluation get more complex