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”?

http://www.ubiq.com/hypertext/weiser/SciAmDraft3.html

Videos

http://www.nttdocomo.co.jp/english/corporate/future/hokusai/index.html

Other older examples from NTT Docomo– http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKchgm9Nslk– http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ae-Ssclu5A4– http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eS0P16IyXOw

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 inputGestureSpeechPerceptual UITangible UI

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/david_merrill_demos_siftables_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:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=muibPAUvOXk&feature=related

Peripheral & Ambient Displays

Digital Family Portrait

Ambient Orbhttp://www.ambientdevices.com/

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