Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

The physical disappearance of the computer, associated with Ubicomp, has led to a number of interaction challenges. Due to the lack of an interface users are losing control over applications running in Ubicomp environments. Furthermore, the limited ability for these applications to provide feedback makes it difficult for users to understand their workings and dependencies. We investigate whether an interaction paradigm, based on the visualising location-aware applications on a head-mounted display, is feasible and whether it has the potential to improve the user experience in the same way graphical user interfaces did for the desktop. We show the feasibility of the idea by building an Augmented Reality interface to a location-aware environment. Initial user trials indicate that the user experience can be improved through in-situ visualisation.

In May 2005 Nokia Sensor application (www.nokia.com/sensor) was launched, allowing mobile phone users to create digital identity expressions, seen by other users within Bluetooth range. This paper describes the design and mass-scale longitudinal field trial of a precursor prototype called DigiDress. 618 participants voluntarily used the application for an average of 25 days. The identity expressions created were both serious and playful, revealing and non-revealing. Factors influencing the identity expression included strategies for personal impression management, privacy concerns, and social feedback. The application was used with both acquainted and unacquainted people, and viewing the identity expression of people nearby was one major motivation for continued use. Direct communication features such as Bluetooth messages were not commonly adopted. DigiDress acted as a facilitator for ’real’ social interaction between previously unacquainted users. Privacy concerns and their alleviations, as well as use barriers, were identified.

We report on a two-week deployment of a peer-to-peer, mobile, location-enhanced messaging service. This study is specifically aimed at investigating the need for and effectiveness of automatic location disclosure mechanisms, the emerging strategies to achieve plausible deniability, and at understanding how place and activity are used to communicate plans, intentions and provide awareness. We outline the research that motivated this study, briefly describe the application we designed, and provide details of the evaluation process. The results show a lack of value of automatic messaging functions, confirm the need for supporting plausible deniability in communications, and highlight the prominent use of activity instead of place to indicate one’s location. Finally, we offer suggestions for the development of social mobile applications.

Context-awareness can improve the usefulness of automated reminders. However, context-aware reminder applications have yet to be evaluated throughout a person’s daily life. Mobile phones provide a potentially convenient and truly ubiquitous platform for the detection of personal context such as location, as well as the delivery of reminders. We designed Place-Its, a location-based reminder application that runs on mobile phones, to study people using location-aware reminders throughout their daily lives. We describe the de-sign of Place-Its and a two-week exploratory user study. The study reveals that location-based reminders are useful, in large part because people use location in nuanced ways.

Our goal in this paper is to clearly delineate how households currently manage communication and coordination information; this will provide practitioners and designers with a more complete view of information in the home, and how technology embedded within the home can augment communication and coordination of home inhabitants. Through contextual interviews, we identify five types of communicative information: reminders and alerts, awareness and scheduling, notices, visual displays, and resource coordination. These information types are created and understood by home inhabitants as a function of within the home. The choice of location is important to the functioning of the home, and is highly nuanced. Location helps home inhabitants understand : when others need to interact with that information, as well as : who this information belongs to and who should receive it. It also provides them with awareness of the actions and locations of others. These findings resonate and further elaborate on work by other researchers.

Using ethnographic methods, 28 young professionals across the global cities of London, Los Angeles, and Tokyo were studied to understand in some detail what items they carried with them (their mobile kits) and how they used these items to access people, places, and services (through various urban interfaces). The findings are analyzed in terms of these cities as existing sites of ubiquitous information and communication technology (ICT) use. More specifically, findings are considered with respect to the prospects in these cities for ubicomp as a paradigm of trusted, environmentally embedded computing, as opposed to a wearable computing paradigm of individual self-sufficiency. Overall, at least for the young professional class studied, practices of urban interfacing were remarkably similar across all three cities studied, suggesting that ubicomp systems might be developed to address the range of urban concerns and to unburden and empower urbanites.

When computation moves off the desktop, how will it transform the new spaces that it comes to occupy? How will people encounter and understand these spaces, and how will they interact with each other through the augmented capabilities of such spaces? We have been exploring these questions through a prototype system in which augmented objects are used to control a complex audio ’soundscape.’ The system involves a range of objects distributed through a space, supporting simultaneous use by many participants. We have deployed this system at a number of settings in which groups of people have explored it collaboratively. Our initial explorations of the use of this system reveal a number of important considerations for how we design for the interrelationships between people, objects, and spaces.

We describe the results of a field deployment of the AURA system which links online content to physical objects through machine readable tags. AURA runs on commercially available pocket computers using integrated bar-code scanners, wireless networks, and web services. We conducted a real world deployment with twenty participants over five weeks. The results from our field study illustrate the importance of moving beyond demonstrations and testing system design assumptions in the real world, as our field study highlighted several places that our seemingly reasonable design assumption did not match with real usage. Our experience deploying AURA highlighted several key features for mobile object triggered information systems including handling groups of items and a robust offline experience.

We present an example of an automated capture application which provides access to details of discrete trial training, a highly structured intervention therapy often used with developmentally disabled children. This domain presents an interesting case study for capture technology, because of the well-defined practices and the tradition of manual recording and review of materials. There is a strong motivation for therapists to review the rich record of therapy sessions that is made possible by recorded video, but acceptance hinges on minimal intrusion upon the human activities. To achieve that, we leverage several perception technologies that fit with the natural activities of the live experience and allow the creation of meaningful indices. We also critically explore the contribution various perception technologies have on the overall utility of the capture system.

A is a display with no perceptible boundaries; it appears to be embodied in the physical world. Frameless displays are created by projecting visual elements on a black background into a physical environment. By considering visual arts and design theory together with our own experience building about a dozen applications, we argue the importance of this technique in creating ubiquitous computer applications that are truly contextualized in the physical world. Nine different examples using frameless displays are described, providing the background for a systematization of frameless displays pros and cons, together with a basic set of usage guidelines. The paper also discusses the differences and constraints on user interaction with visual elements in a frameless display.