Yesterday night I flew to
In the meeting we discussed a large number of submission made to Mensch und Computer 2008. It seems there are quite an interesting number of papers in the program which make the conference worth while. We will also run the second edition of our workshop on Automotive User Interface and Interactive Applications. The automotive workshop we ran 2007 in
Some weeks ago we had a Dr. Thomas Schönert, a journalist with Medienhaus Bauer visiting our group in Essen. We explained the idea that drives our research and showed some prototypes. Last week an article “We create our future” (“Wir bauen unsere Zukunft” in German) was published and it is interesting how well he summarized what we said and showed during 2 hours.
People take mobile devices into their cars and the amount of information people have on those devices is huge – just consider the number of songs on an MP3-Player, the address database in a navigation system and eventually the mobile web. In our work we looked at ways to design and implement search interfaces that are usable while driving [1]. For the paper we compared a categorized search and a free search. The was another paper in the session looking at practice of GPS use by Leshed et al. which was really interesting and can inform future navigation or context-aware information systems [2]. 
One interesting finding is that you loose AND at the same time create opportunities for applications and practices. In the questions she hinted some interesting observations on driving in familiar vs. driving in unfamiliar environments using GPS units. Based on these ideas there may be an interesting student project to do…
The interest in Wolfgang’s talk and into automotive user interfaces in general was unexpected high. As you see on the picture there was quite a set of people talking pictures and videos during the presentation.
[1] Graf, S., Spiessl, W., Schmidt, A., Winter, A., and Rigoll, G. 2008. In-car interaction using search-based user interfaces. In Proceeding of the Twenty-Sixth Annual SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Florence, Italy, April 05 – 10, 2008). CHI ’08. ACM, New York, NY, 1685-1688. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1357054.1357317
[2] Leshed, G., Velden, T., Rieger, O., Kot, B., and Sengers, P. 2008. In-car gps navigation: engagement with and disengagement from the environment. In Proceeding of the Twenty-Sixth Annual SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Florence, Italy, April 05 – 10, 2008). CHI ’08. ACM, New York, NY, 1675-1684. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1357054.1357316
This morning was a meeting of people interested in automotive user interfaces. It was an informal session where everyone could contribute. We had an interesting discussion anchored in the 100-Car Naturalistic Driving Study. My main arguments in the discussion were (1) that we have to take more care of context (awareness and prediction) to make smart controls and (2) that multimodality is a key concept to improve UIs.
We continued the meeting over lunch with people from BMW, Bosch and General Motors. I think everyone agrees that interactive in-car applications and hence user interfaces are a central topic that gains momentum at the moment. We discussed the option for doing a symposium next year on the topic.
The picture does not show a research prototype – it shows the actual interior of a 5-series BMW (fairly recent model). The driver (an elderly lady) adapted the UI to suit her needs. This modification includes the labeling of controls which are important, writing some instructions for more complicate controls close to them (hereby implementing one of the key ideas of embedded information [1]), an covering some to the user “useless” controls.
At first I assumed this is a prank* – but it seems to be genuine and that makes it really interesting and carries important lessons with regard to designing for drivers of 80 years and older. Having different skins (and not just GUIs more in a physical approach) as well as UI components that can be composed (e.g. based on user needs) in the embedded and tangible domain seem challenging but may new opportunities for customized UIs. Perhaps investigating ideas for personalizing physical user interfaces – and in particular car UIs – may be an interesting project.
[1] Albrecht Schmidt, Matthias Kranz, Paul Holleis. Embedded Information. UbiComp 2004, Workshop ‘Ubiquitous Display Environments’, September 2004 http://www.hcilab.org/documents/EmbeddedInformationWorkshopUbiComp2004.pdf
* will try to get more evidence that it is real 🙂