NSF/EU workshop in Mannheim

Mohan Kumar and Marco Conti organized an EU/NSF workshop on Future Directions in Pervasive Computing and Social Networking for Emerging Applications. They managed to get together an interesting set of people and the discussion in the break out session were very enjoyable and I got a number of ideas what really are the challenges to come.

There are the position statements on the web page and at some point the identified grand challenges will be available.

PS: blackboards are still highly effective 😉

CFP: 2nd Int. Conf. on Automotive User Interfaces and Interactive Vehicular Applications

The call for the 2nd International Conference on Automotive User Interfaces and Interactive Vehicular Applications is online – see http://auto-ui.org – AutomotiveUI’10.

The conference will be in Pittsburgh on 11-12 Nov 2010.

Do not miss the submission deadline: 02 July 2010.

The call includes a wide range of topics, including:

  • new concepts for in-car user interfaces
  • multi-modal in-car user interfaces
  • in-car speech user interfaces
  • text input and output while driving
  • multimedia interfaces and in-car entertainment
  • evaluation of in-car user interfaces
  • methods and tools for automotive user interface research
  • development tools and methods for automotive user interfaces
  • automotive user interface frameworks and toolkits
  • detecting and estimating user intentions
  • detecting user distraction and estimating cognitive load
  • user interfaces for assistive functionality
  • biometrics and physiological sensors as a user interface component
  • using sensors and context for interactive experiences in the car
  • user interfaces for information access while driving
  • user interfaces for navigation systems
  • applications and user interfaces for inter-vehicle communication
  • in-car gaming

We enjoyed last years conference in Essen 🙂 There are several posts online in my blog and we had a conference report in IEEE Pervasive Magazine [1]. Last years proceedings are online in the ACM DL and on the 2009 conference website.

The full call for papers is online at: http://auto-ui.org.

[1] Albrecht Schmidt, Wolfgang Spiessl, Dagmar Kern, “Driving Automotive User Interface Research,” IEEE Pervasive Computing, vol. 9, no. 1, pp. 85-88, Jan.-Mar. 2010, doi:10.1109/MPRV.2010.3.

Poker surface on youtube – 5000 hits in a day :-)

A video describing the poker surface is available in youtube. It is an implementation of a poker game on a combination of a multi-touch table and mobile phones, for details see [1].

It is amazing how quickly it is picked up. It gained about 5000 views in a single day and it is already features in engadget.com, gizmodo.com, ubergizmo.com and on recombu.com. But as the comments on pokerolymp.com show the real poker players are hard to impress…

This really makes me think how research, publishing, and public perception of research is changing – rapidly…

[1] Shirazi, A. S., Döring, T., Parvahan, P., Ahrens, B., and Schmidt, A. 2009. Poker surface: combining a multi-touch table and mobile phones in interactive card games. In Proceedings of the 11th international Conference on Human-Computer interaction with Mobile Devices and Services (Bonn, Germany, September 15 – 18, 2009). MobileHCI ’09. ACM, New York, NY, 1-2. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1613858.1613945

Doctoral Colloquium in Bommerholz

For the second time we organize a doctoral seminar for PhD students in CS from Bochum, Dortmund, Duisburg und Essen. The main purpose is to provide networking opportunities beyond the own subject area and to highlight to options for life after the PhD.

This year we had 4 invited speakers highlighting opportunities in academia, industry, and in SMEs:

The main take away message is be open with regard to career choices (bottom line: good students will be good and happy whatever they do after their PhD ;-). However if you are sure that you want to be in the management of a large enterprise than go for a top management consultancy job after your PhD and if you are sure academia in Germany is your only choice than go to one of the top Universities in the US as postdoc. This does not guarantee anything but puts you in the best position…

In the evening the tasks for the teams was to think 100 years ahead! This was inspired by the book “the world in 100 years” [2] and by a talk from Friedemann Mattern [2].

One essential reference on doing a PhD is [3] 🙂

[1] Arthur Brehmer (Herausgeber). Die Welt in 100 Jahren: Mit einer einführenden Essay “Zukunft von gestern” von Georg Ruppelt. Reprint der Auflage von 1910. (2010). ISBN-10: 3487083043.

[2] Friedemann Matter. Die Welt in 100 Jahren – Rückblick auf eine vergangene Zukunft. Kolloquium an der TU Darmstadt. 2006.

[3] PhD Comics. http://www.phdcomics.com

German Workshop on Tangible Interaction

Friday and Saturday we hosted the GI working groups on tangible interaction (GI Arbeitskreis Be-greifbare Interaction in gemischten Wirklichkeiten) for the second inventor’s workshop. We were positively surprised that more than 30 people took part. We started with a set of nice demos from our students and then Nicolas Villar presented an invited talk.

The concept of the workshop was to create ideas by looking more closely at different materials that may be used for interaction and by assessing novel interaction technologies. On Friday afternoon we had several tables with material (e.g. smart materials, conductive fabric, magnetic materials, etc.) and technologies (e.g. VoodooIO, EduWear kit, Physiological sensing based on the Nexus system). We bought a set of materials from MUTR Teaching Materials. In groups the participants create many design ideas by imagining a certain technology to be used in a specific context.

The social event was at the unperfekthaus.de in Essen – if you visit Essen this is a “must see”. The concept is unique!

On Saturday we started with an exercise to investigate the qualities of tangible UIs in comparison to traditional GUIs. For this we looked at different games (e.g. Space invaders, Super Mario, Sims, Halo) and though how we would make them more tangible and what pros and cons are there for the tangible and GUI version. In this context we also discussed the approach of exertion interfaces [1].

The rest of the morning was spent working on more concrete ideas for the concepts created on Friday afternoon – with remarkable results – see the Wiki for details.

[1] http://exertioninterfaces.com/

Invited Talk by Nicolas Villar

Nicolas visited us in Essen to give the opening talk of our German meeting on tangible interaction. In his talk he first showed some examples of the hardware and sensors group at Microsoft research in Cambridge, most notably the SenseCam (which we learned is licensed and will be soon commercially available).

In the main part of the talk Nicolas presented a modular embedded architecture that allows developers to create custom made digital systems with fairly little effort. By integrating physical development (3D printing), functional blocks and software development the approach aims at empowering developers to create entirely new devices. His examples were impressive, e.g. creating a fully functional game console in a few hours.

Assuming that electronics become really small and cheap and that displays can be directly printed I can see that this approach makes a lot of sense – the question is just how long will it take before we rather use a (nowadays) powerful ARM processor, instead of a logic circuit with 10 gates. I would imagine that from a economic perspective it will less than 20 years before this makes sense.

We talked about energy harvesting and hier is a link to a potential interesting component: LTC3108.

Cloud Computing Reading List

I recently got more often used about cloud computing and what my take on it is. So far I have not had time to write up my view but I can share at least my reading list on the topic:

Hayes, B. 2008. Cloud computing. Commun. ACM 51, 7 (Jul. 2008), 9-11. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1364782.1364786

Vaquero, L. M., Rodero-Merino, L., Caceres, J., and Lindner, M. 2008. A break in the clouds: towards a cloud definition. SIGCOMM Comput. Commun. Rev. 39, 1 (Dec. 2008), 50-55. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1496091.1496100

John Viega, “Cloud Computing and the Common Man,” Computer, vol. 42, no. 8, pp. 106-108, Aug. 2009, doi:10.1109/MC.2009.252

Lin, G., Fu, D., Zhu, J., and Dasmalchi, G. 2009. Cloud Computing: IT as a Service. IT Professional 11, 2 (Mar. 2009), 10-13. DOI= http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/MITP.2009.22

Voas, J. and Zhang, J. 2009. Cloud Computing: New Wine or Just a New Bottle?. IT Professional 11, 2 (Mar. 2009), 15-17. DOI= http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/MITP.2009.23

Grossman, R. L. 2009. The Case for Cloud Computing. IT Professional 11, 2 (Mar. 2009), 23-27. DOI= http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/MITP.2009.40

Weinhardt, C., Anandasivam, A., Blau, B., and Stößer, J. 2009. Business Models in the Service World. IT Professional 11, 2 (Mar. 2009), 28-33. DOI= http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/MITP.2009.21

Michael Armbrust, Armando Fox, Rean Griffith, Anthony D. Joseph, Randy Katz, Andy Konwinski, Gunho Lee, David Patterson, Ariel Rabkin, Ion Stoica, and Matei Zaharia
Above the Clouds: A Berkeley View of Cloud Computing. 2009. UC Berkeley Reliable Adaptive Distributed Systems Laboratory. http://radlab.cs.berkeley.edu/publication/285

Sensor modules for acceleration, gyro, and magnetic field

I came across 2 Sensor module recently released by ST Microelectronics:

There will be in the future probably very few mobile devices without such sensors. When we worked on the project TEA in 1999 it seemed far away… What can you do with sensors on the mobile? There are a few papers to read: using them for context awareness [1], for interaction [2], [3], and for creating smart devices [4].

Last week in Finland I met Antii Takaluoma (one of the co-authors of [1]) and he works now for offcode.fi – I saw impressive Linux hardware – I expect cool stuff to come 🙂

[1] Schmidt, A., Aidoo, K. A., Takaluoma, A., Tuomela, U., Laerhoven, K. V., and Velde, W. V. 1999. Advanced Interaction in Context. In Proceedings of the 1st international Symposium on Handheld and Ubiquitous Computing (Karlsruhe, Germany, September 27 – 29, 1999). H. Gellersen, Ed. Lecture Notes In Computer Science, vol. 1707. Springer-Verlag, London, 89-101.

[2] Hinckley, K., Pierce, J., Sinclair, M., and Horvitz, E. 2000. Sensing techniques for mobile interaction. In Proceedings of the 13th Annual ACM Symposium on User interface Software and Technology (San Diego, California, United States, November 06 – 08, 2000). UIST ’00. ACM, New York, NY, 91-100. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/354401.354417

[3] Albrecht Schmidt. Implicit human computer interaction through context. Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, 4(2):191-199, June 2000

[4] A. Schmidt and K. Van Laerhoven. How to Build Smart Appliances?, IEEE Personal Communications, p.66 – 71, (2001)

Doctoral colloquium in Tampere

For the second time we organized an international doctoral colloquium on HCI – mainly with students from Germany and Finland. This year it was hosted at the University of Tampere. 10 students in different stages of their PhD presented their work and ideas. The first one was in Oulu.

Besides many scientific and technological topics we discussed the process of doing a PhD. I shared my experience of doing a PhD based on an extened version of Jakob Badram’s fish model as well as with the PI-presentation model.

The fish: basically you start with a topic and it widens over time – till at some point you have to focus – and when you have focused and found the specific contribution you have to widen again a bit to cover the things you need for making it a coherent PhD-thesis. This applies to the technical skill set of the student as well as to the research topic. Pertti added a personal sanity graph – from the beginning when you think of how difficult a PhD is, to the middle were you think you know it all and everyone else in the research community has no clue, to the (hopefully) final stage where you get a objective view on your PhD (where you realize you made a contribution you can be proud of – but it is probably not going to change the whole world). It seemed that most people who have done a PhD in CS can relate to this graph…

Creativity Workshop at NRC Tampere

Creativity is a key issue of creating novel applications and interaction methods and techniques. Over two days we ran a hands on prototyping workshop on physical user interaction. We setup teams of 3 people, each team including at least one person with design and one with programming skills. Within about 5 hours the teams had to create a multiplayer interactive game – using a mouse or several mice as basic sensors. We discussed how novelty and the learning curve of interaction technologies relate to physical interaction. The results of the workshop were most impressive… and I think some of them could be really pushed further.
In 2008 there was an interesting issue of Interactions Magazine on innovation. The cover article by Dubberly provides a good conceptual models of innovation [1]. In my lecture on HCI I tyically also introduce the TRIZ (“The theory of solving inventor’s problems”) methodology, introduced by the Soviet engineer and researcher Genrich Altshuller. TRIZ is interesting to me, as it is in contrast to many other creativity approaches,a systemtic (algorithmic) approach for generating innovative ideas and solutions for problem solving. However I am not sure how well it works in the real world…
During the workshop our approach was very practical. We did also a speed invention exercise – the task was to create 3 game concepts (related to physical penny games) within 10 minutes. The results were pretty impressive – perhaps someone has the time to implement them.

And being in Finland we got the real sauna experience – inside +79°C and then outside into the snow -23° – this is cool (in the very literal sense!).

[1] Dubberly, H. 2008. Toward a model of innovation. interactions 15, 1 (Jan. 2008), 28-36. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/133

Talk at demola, Finnish Ubicomp program

Jari Ikonen from the Finnish Ubicomp program contacted me last week – interestingly because I shared on this blog the information that I will be in Tampere – and it worked out that we met.

He showed and explained me the demola approach. I find this concept of teaching, training and innovation very exciting. In short demola offers space for students to work on challenging problems that are real and creates opportunities opportunities. Basically companies offer tasks/project to works on. Teams of students (potentially from different universities and fields) will work together to solve it as part of their studies – but the students also will own the IPR. I think that creates interesting teams in realistic settings and has probably a great potential for creating start-ups. Perhaps we should look at this model closer and see how we could create something similar…

As always when meeting interesting people time was too short… I gave an ad-hoc talk based on previous slides on “Mobile & Ubiquitous Computing and Beyond: Mobile Communication changed the world – what else do we need?” and we had a short but very interesting discussion.

Finally a simple explanation of social software

Social software and media is getting hugely popular and there are many longer explanations in CSCW and CHI why this works and what are the basic drivers. I saw a t-shirt that explains it in a single picture 🙂

It may over generalize but there is some truth in it – and given the recent figures on the prevalence of ADHA it seems to be a driving business in the future…

More on Embedded Development Tools, Watch to program

In my digital systems design class we have used the eZ430-F2013 development kits – they are cheap (about 20 €) and most students get it working 🙂

I have seen TI has a new development kit which is really interesting: “eZ430-Chronos Wireless Watch Development Tool” – Could be an useful basis for wearable computing projects – perhaps we should get them for the class on pervasive computing next term?

The TI commercial is on youtube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDJIBydJvoM

Some years back IBM had a Linux watch as research platform. Gábor Blaskó published some concepts and protoytpes on how to interact with a watch computer, e.g. with strokes [1] or with a string [2].

[1] Gábor Blaskó and Steven Feiner. An Interaction System for Watch Computers Using Tactile Guidance and Bidirectional Segmented Strokes. Proc. 8th IEEE International Symposium on Wearable Computers (ISWC 2004), Arlington, VA, USA, 31 October – 3 November, 2004. pp.120-123.

[2] Gábor Blaskó, Chandra Narayanaswami, Steven Feiner. Prototyping Retractable String-Based Interaction Techniques for Dual-Display Mobile Devices. Proc. ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2006), Montreal, Québec, Canada, 22 – 27 April, 2006. pp.369-372.

Why do we need to teach children binary coding?

I am very much in favor of teaching children more than one number system (e.g. binary additional to the decimal system). To me this gives children a better understanding of the nature of numbers – I know that this seems not to be widely shared 😉


Now I found a further reason why it essential to know binary codes – How else would you decode this best before date on this chocolate bar if you would not know it!

Talk at Java User Group Meeting in Essen, Embedded Development

This month at the Java User Group meeting some groups of the University presented their research. First I considered to talk about JAVA on mobile phones (e.g. the tutorials we do with teachers on JAVA ME or JAVA on Android) but then decided to talk more about the ubicomp vision and about how I think computing will change and is already changing the world 🙂 My talk “Ubiquitous Computing and Beyond – Mobile Communication changed the world – what else do we need?” was aimed at opening a discussion what will be the challenge after mobile computing is becoming main stream.

One of the questions was: what are useful platforms to start for with embedded development? Here are a few suggestions:

Breakfast reading: tabgible UIs, brands, and user centred design

The current issue interactions (http://interactions.acm.org) features some interesting articles – at least scanning through it and reading some of them prolonged my breakfast today considerably 😉

The cover story gives an already in its title a very interesting definition of tangible interaction (Tangible Interaction = Form + Computing) [1]. Their view is very much from a design perspective, but provides a good introduction to the topic.

The article by Jay Chaeyong Yi on a success story from Korea is a very good case study of how to apply UI research [2]. It shows (1) a comprehensive example of user driven research and (2) the value and importance it contributes to a product/service. Even though the article describes a project from 2005 I find the topic of messaging on phone still exciting and the example of IM vs. SMS can still tell a lot. Personally I am really interested in where messaging on the phone goes – perhaps there is some time next week in Tampere to discuss this.

Not central on user interfaces but still quite interesting is the article on operationalizing brands with Web 2.0 technologies [3]. The example of eBags.com shows interestingly what is currently possible. Thinking and imagine a bit further and considering the opportunities that arise from the web/internet of things (e.g. where you know from the bag how it is used and can communicate this) some real change will be ahead. And some companies are slowly getting to the point of bringing first products that go into this direction (Ali pointed me to http://greengoose.com).

After setting up some IKEA furniture with my daughter (model BENNO as bookshelf for paper backs and not for CD/DVDs) I found Don Norman’s article where he discusses the issue consuming vs. producing or spectator vs. creator quite interesting [4].

[1] Baskinger, M. and Gross, M. 2010. Tangible interaction = form + computing. interactions 17, 1 (Jan. 2010), 6-11. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1649475.1649477

[2] Yi, J. C. 2010. User-research-driven mobile user interface innovation: a success story from Seoul. interactions 17, 1 (Jan. 2010), 48-51. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1649475.1649487

[3] Yohn, D. L. 2010. Operationalizing brands with new technologies. interactions 17, 1 (Jan. 2010), 24-27. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1649475.1649481

[4] Norman, D. A. 2010. The transmedia design challenge: technology that is pleasurable and satisfying. interactions 17, 1 (Jan. 2010), 12-15. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1649475.1649478

Ubiquitous Computing – Ever wondered if we are there yet?

Given the technologies around us I sometimes wonder how close we are to a vision of ubiquitous computing. In this month IEEE Computer Invisible Computing column I had the pleasure to ask this question and share my view on it.

The short answer is: many technologies are ubiquitous but there is a lot more to come. In particular we see that many technologies (public displays, people centric sensing, and personal memory devices) are just around the corner and that they may have a large impact on how we perceive computing. For the long answer have a look at my article: ubiquitous computing – are we there yet? [1]. I have taken over responsibility for the invisible computing column from Bill Schilit who introduced the Invisible Computing column in 2003 [2].

Some years ago in 2006 Yvonne Rogers presented her view on how Ubicomp is going forward [3] contrasting it to Weiser’s Vision of calm computing. In her paper she introduces an alternative agenda that argue that we should engage people by ubicomp technologies rather than to make life easy, convenient and calm. Yvonne’s paper is an interesting starting point for getting students into this topic.

[1] Schmidt, A. 2010. Ubiquitous Computing: Are We There Yet? Computer 43, 2 (Feb. 2010), 95-97. DOI= http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/MC.2010.54

[2] Schilit, B. N. 2003. Mega-Utilities Drive Invisible Technologies. Computer 36, 2 (Feb. 2003), 97-99. DOI= http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/MC.2003.1178056

[3] Yvonne Rogers: Moving on from Weiser’s Vision of Calm Computing: Engaging UbiComp Experiences. Ubicomp 2006: 404-421

Viral Advertising – simple and effective?

Having a professional interest in advertising I really liked the link my colleague Bruno Müller-Clostermann sent to me. I obviously had to try it with my picture 🙂

My hero movie: http://en.tackfilm.se/?id=1265980862962RA40

The example of the personalized video shows that it is intriguing and that it is potentially viral – but I am not sure if it is effective (or did you get what the advert is for?).

In general the concept to make someone a part of an advert is very powerful. At Mensch&Computer 2008 we published a paper that explores this idea in the context of public displays [1]. The public display project was part of a student assignment in a course I gave in Linz.

[1] Johannes Schönböck, Florian König, Gabriele Kotsis, Dominik Gruber, Emre Zaim, Albrecht Schmidt. MirrorBoard – An Interactive Billboard. Mensch und Computer 2008. Lübeck. Oldenbourg Verlag, 2008, p 207-216.

Visit to TU Dortmund: Impressive Demos on Vision and Audio

After several tries we finally managed to travel to Dortmund (half an hour on the S-Train) to visit Gernot A. Fink‘s group at the Technical University Dortmund. Bastian Pfleging did with this group his master thesis before he joined us. The research focus of the group is on signal processing and computer vision. They also follow an experimental approach – building systems that work (which we saw in the demos). In their lab space they have setup a building (basically a house inside a house – impressive!).

I have learned about a new location technology based on passive infrared sensors. The idea is to pick heat emitted from people and combine the output from several sensors to localize the person. The technology is very simple, potentially cheap, and privacy preserving. Sometime back we thought of a project topic using thermal imaging (not really cheap or privacy preserving) for context-awarenes – but so far there was no student who wanted to do it. Perhaps we should try again to find a student.

The other demos were situated in a meeting room that is equipped with several cameras and microphones. It was interesting to see how robust several of the vision prototypes managed to track people in the room and to detect pointing actions. One basic mechanism the use to detect interesting regions in an image is saliency based on different features – and it works well.

The audio demo used two arrays of 8 microphones each; the arrays are nicely integrated in a ceiling panel. Using these signals they can calculate the energy that originates from a certain spatial region in the room. Looking at the complexity of the hardware and software for sound localization it appears not in the far future that this could become ubiquitous. We talked about the work James Scott did on sound localization (snipping on a light switch) – here is the reference [1].

The room is equipped with sensors, lights, switches and a UI panel that are linked over a commercial bus system (KNX). Sometime ago we had a bachelor project in Essen that looked at EnOcean (another home networking technology). We discussed how well these systems are positioned in comparison to web technologies.

I personally think medium term we will move – at least on a control and user interface level – to web protocols. The moment you use web protocols it is so much easier to create user interfaces (e.g. using a Web browser as frontend) and it is simple integrate with existing systems (e.g. facebook). It would be interesting to assess how easy it is to use RESTful services to replicate some of the features of home automation systems. Sounds like an interesting project topic. There is a workshop on the Web of Things at PerCom in Mannheim – I am curious what is coming up there.

[1] James Scott, Boris Dragovic: Audio Location: Accurate Low-Cost Location Sensing. Pervasive Computing: Third International Conference, PERVASIVE 2005, Munich, Germany, May 8-13, 2005. Springer LNCS 3468/2005. pp 1-18. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/11428572_1

Will it be possible to keep data secret in the future?

At the moment there is an interesting discussion in Germany: should the state buy data (leaked out of a Swiss bank) that give details on people who have not paid their taxes in Germany. I will not add to the political discussion on that as there have been many arguments – some interesting and others funny. I am only amused about a small party that is very much against it. But one has to be fair – this is after all an indicator that democracy works 😉 parties represent the interests of their voters…

I think on a more general scale this incident and similar current cases could be an indicator of a future where everything that is on (electronic) file is likely to become public, given that there is an interest. One hundred years ago it was pretty difficult to steal or copy a few thousand data sets. You would have needed access to the archives for many nights and copying would have taken days. 30 years ago it would have been still hard – e.g. copying stacks of paper on a Xerox or using several large magnetic disks. Over recent years it has become much easier – a memory card is fairly small and a digital camera to copy documents is in many current mobile phones. It seems that if someone has rightful access to data (at a certain point in time) it may proof very hard to keep them from making a copy – may it be by copying the data digitally or by capturing electronically what they see. And hiding a SD-card is much more trivial than a car load of paper.

And as we know technology is progressing – perhaps we will get laws that restrict how small the physical size of a memory device can be 😉 And there is always a party who will lobby for it…

Visiting TU-Berlin and T-Labs

We have a number of student projects that look at novel applications and novel application platforms on mobile phones. As Michael Rohs from T-Labs is also teaching a course on mobile HCI we thought it would be a good opportunity to meet and discuss some application ideas.

I gave a talk in Michael’s lecture discussing the concept of user interfaces beyond the desktop, context as enabling technology, and future applications in mobile, wearable and ubiquitous computing. We had an interesting discussion – and in the end it always comes down to privacy and impact on society. I see this as a very positive development as it shows that the students are not just techies but that they see the bigger picture – and the impact (be it good or bad) they may have with their developments. I mentioned to books that are interesting to read: the transparent society [1] and total recall [2].

In the afternoon we discussed two specific projects. One was an application for informal social while watching TV (based on a set iconic communication elements) that can be used to generate meta data on the program shown. The other is a platform that allows web developers to create distributed mobile applications making use of all the sensors on mobile phones. It is essential a platform an API that provides access to all functions on the phones available in S60 phones over a RESTful API, e.g. you can use a HTTP call to make a photo on someone’s phone. We hope to release some of the software soon.

In the coffee area at T-labs was a printout with the 10+1 innovation principles – could not resist to take a photo 😉 Seems innovation is really trival – just follow the 11 rules and you are there 😉

[1] David Brin. The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force Us to Choose Between Privacy and Freedom. Basic Books. 1999. ISBN-13: 978-0738201443. Amazon-link. Webpage: http://www.davidbrin.com/transparent.htm

[2] Gordon Bell, Jim Gemmell. Total Recall: How the E-Memory Revolution Will Change Everything. Dutton Adult. 2009. ISBN-13: 978-0525951346. Amazon-link. Webpage: http://totalrecallbook.com/

Ephemeral User Interfaces – nothing lasts forever and somethings even shorter

Robustness and durability are typical qualities that we aim for when building interactive prototypes and systems. Tanja and Axel explored what user experience we can create when we deliberately design something in a way that is ephemeral (=not lasting, there is a good German word “vergänglich”). Ephemeral User Interfaces are user interface elements and technologies that are designed to be engaging but fragile [1]. In the prototype that we showed at TEI 2010 in Cambridge the user can interact with soap bubbles to control a computer. Axel has some additional photos on his web page.


There is a short video of the installation on the technology review blog: http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/editors/24729

[1] Sylvester, A., Döring, T., and Schmidt, A. 2010. Liquids, smoke, and soap bubbles: reflections on materials for ephemeral user interfaces. In Proceedings of the Fourth international Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied interaction(Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, January 24 – 27, 2010). TEI ’10. ACM, New York, NY, 269-270. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1709886.1709941

AmbiViz Project Presentation at DoCoMo Eurolabs in Munich

In the AmbiViz project we investigate how context information (explicitly or implicitly collected) can be provided to the user. The aim is that the display of context is meaningful to the user but at the same time abstract and privacy preserving. For context collection we integrated the IYOUIT platform as well as an application that runs as an app in facebook. Examples of abstract presentations are implemented for the Nabaztag and for digital picture frames. More details will be available soon in a WIP paper at Percom 2010. Currently we run a longer term study and are already curious about the results.

Recently launched TVs with Web browsing capabilities include special widgets for certain services (e.g. Philips Net TV offers widgets for youtube, ebay, etc.). This is a first step in the market towards the switch-over of traditional TV we discussed some time ago in Seoul. I wonder what other information services may become hype as widgets or Web channels on TVs.

Book chapter on Teaching Beyond the Classroom

Kati Mäkitalo-Siegl, Jan Zottmann, Frederic Kaplan and Frank Fischer organized a workshop that resulted in the book: Classroom of the Future. The book gives a very good overview and is in my view very well suited to run a seminar

We have one chapter in the book that talks about teaching beyond the classroom and outside a typical classroom using pervasive computing technologies [1]. Our chapter includes some of the work on tangible interaction we did in Munich, e.g. [2] and earlier experience where we did a school garden blog (in German only http://www.hcilab.org/albrecht/flachs-web/).

Details about the book and a free preview are available at the publisher’s side. The free preview includes an article on the classroom of the past – which I found quite interesting. If you are interested in our article, drop me a mail and I may find the draft.

[1] Paul Holleis, Albrecht Schmidt, Heiko Drewes, Richard Atterer, Petra Dollinger. Teaching Beyond the Classroom: Pervasive Computing Technologies for the Classroom of the Future. Classroom of the future. SensePublisher 2010, pp 63-85. ISBN:978-9460911026 (book at amazon)

[2] Terrenghi, L., Kranz, M., Holleis, P., and Schmidt, A. 2006. A cube to learn: a tangible user interface for the design of a learning appliance. Personal Ubiquitous Comput. 10, 2-3 (Jan. 2006), 153-158. DOI= http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00779-005-0025-8

Multi-touch on Ice

I thought I have seen all possible multi-touch installations 😉 but here is a new one: Ubice installation.

Jonna and her group at NRC in Finland have built a multi-touch wall made from ice (frozen water – they seem to have plenty of it up there).

Even though it is on youtube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bbtrI6GjBsk) we still hope to see a paper on this project – do the user study before it melts 😉

The Interactive Tabletops and Surfaces 2010 conference is this year in Germany in November 2010: http://www.its2010.org/

Energy Harvesting – wireless power?

Since a wireless charger (RCA Airnergy) was announces at CES that harvests energy from wifi signals that are around the topic is everywhere in the (tech) news. It is an exciting prospective to imagine mobile devices that will recharge themselves from the environment they are in. However I am not sure how well harvesting energy from RF will worked in regular environments – not saturated with radio signals.

The topic is really exciting – and in the end people probably do not care much if the energy is harvested from their movement, from light, temperature or RF – as long as it works. There is a introductory article to energy harvesting by Joe Paradiso and Thad Starner [1] which is worthwhile to read.

[1] Joseph A. Paradiso, Thad Starner, “Energy Scavenging for Mobile and Wireless Electronics,” IEEE Pervasive Computing, vol. 4, no. 1, pp. 18-27, Jan.-Mar. 2005, doi:10.1109/MPRV.2005.9

Article on Driving Automotive User Interface Research in IEEE Pervasive

We wrote an article on the automotive user interface conference that took place in Essen in September 2009. In the current issue of the IEEE Pervasive Computing Magazine this paper is published and gives an overview of the conference [1]. We hope our article highlights the key ideas that were presented at the conference.

Abstract. Cars offer an interesting but challenging microcosm for pervasive computing research and, in particular, for interaction with pervasive computing systems. Increasingly, researchers are looking at interactive applications in the car and investigating human-car interaction from a computer science-rather than an ergonomics or mechanical engineering-perspective. This article reports on the International Conference on Automotive User Interfaces and Interactive Vehicular Applications, wherein participants shared presentations on topics such as aesthetics, user interaction and distraction, safety, and driver monitoring.

[1] Albrecht Schmidt, Wolfgang Spiessl, Dagmar Kern, “Driving Automotive User Interface Research,” IEEE Pervasive Computing, vol. 9, no. 1, pp. 85-88, Jan.-Mar. 2010, doi:10.1109/MPRV.2010.3.