Prototypes of unconventional user interfaces

In Linz the students of the course unconventional user interfaces showed their first set of functional prototypes. The topics are related to interactive mirrors, context-aware advertisement posters, healthy rear-seat entertainment, and text input while driving. The assignment was to create a system that allows creating an authentic user experience for the concept. The technical solutions were very different and ranged from a dismantled keyboard to a system using a micro-controller, from a two-way mirror with display behind to direction detection in front of an advert. Even though the prototypes were fairly simple most of them showed impressively how much of an idea a functional prototype can transport.

Visit at the University of Hamburg

Yesterday we visited the computer science department at the University of Hamburg. Prof. Oberquelle und Beckhaus had invited me at the Mensch & Computer conference to visit them and give a talk about our work.

Before the seminar we had a chance to see the lab of Steffi Beckhaus. I have tried the ChairIO – and it was fun. They sound floor creates a really interesting experience (similar to the butt-kicker just more intense). We could also play with GranulatSynthese and try the smell user interface (apple smell is absolutely convincing, not sure about some of the others).

We had some discussion on emotions and capturing physiological parameters. Thinking about emotions and senses with regard to a community sharing them opens up a lot of potential for new experiences and potentially applications. We discussed this topic to some extent some weeks ago at the Human Computer Confluence Workshop in Brussels. I really thing a small scale experience in share emotions could move us forward and provide some more insight. In Hamburg they have the NeXus-system (perhaps we should get this too and create a networked application).

In my talk (creating novel user interfaces) I focused on the PhD work of Paul Holleis (KLM for mobile phones, his CHI Paper from last year) and of Heiko Drewes (Eye-Gestures, his Interact’07 paper). The discussion was quite interesting.

Mechanicals aids for addition and subtraction

In the school museum I came across two very simple pen-based computing aids. The devices are very simple mechanical tools that help to do addition and subtraction. It was called ADDIATOR.

The utility is limited to addition and subtraction and it provides a very simple mechanism to deal with carry-over. If the number which is to be moved is white the calculation is without carry-over and one pulls it down. If the number is red then there will be a carry over one has to pull up and around the semi-circle (this is the mechanism for carry over). A carry over beyond the next position is displayed with a special sign and has to be resolved by moving the next position. The curator told me that he remembers people in shops used them and that people where very quick with them. It seems they have been popular till I was born.

Schools history, tangibles again

After my daughter started school on Saturday we visited a historic school on Sunday. Comparing teaching materials is interesting. Especially providing up to date information in geography must haven quite a costly task. Many expensive charts and maps that were printed on canvas are now freely available in digital form. It seems that instead of having a film project, a slight projector, an overhead projector and canvas displays a computer and projector with internet access will do. Similarly having stamps to reproduce maps seems like ancient history, even though it has been still in use 20 years ago.

However I wonder what we loose by make things digital and whether or not this matters. Having a database (a box with cardboard dividers and a lot of paper slips) or a typewriter (with types that are moved by pressing buttons) on your desktop gives you a very immediate impression how things work. It is remarkable to see that historically tangibility of teaching materials was very common.

I think in the digital we should make more effort to provide means that people can understand the mechanism behind the technology (basics of HCI – conceptual models :-). This is however extremely difficult for purely digital products. My generation seems very lucky to have been witnesses of this transformation for many products from the physical to the digital – providing a lot of insight to us.

Ubiquitous, Pervasive and Ambient Computing – Clarification of Terms

In the resent month the question about ubiquitous, pervasive, ambient computing came up several times. An email by Jos Van Esbroeck motivated me to write my view on it…

Clarifying the terms seems an ongoing process as various communities and individuals use each of those terms for new things they are doing.

For me the best way to discriminate the terms ubiquitous computing, pervasive computing, and ambient intelligence is by their origin, history and research communities.

The first term (ubiquitous computing, ubicomp) is linked to Mark Weiser and his vision of computing in the 21st century [1]. In the research community its is very much connected to ubiquitous and pervasive systems that have the user somewhere in the loop. The ubicomp conference [2] seems more focused on user experience than on pure technology.

Pervasive Computing was pushed in the mid 1990s, more by industry and in particular by IBM. Pervasive computing seems from its origin more focused on technologies and solutions than on a particular vision. The two major conferences related to this topic: pervasive [3] and percom [4] are more systems and network focused, however always keeping some attention to the user experience perspective. Here, in particular with percom, many in the research community have their origin in the networking and distributed systems world. To me pervasive computing seems more technical than ubiquitous computing and includes systems that do no have direct human users involved.

The term ambient intelligence was introduced by the European funding agencies in the Framework 5 vision. Around the same time as the Philips Home-lab that drives the term, too. Here, similar to ubicomp, the vision of a new quality of user experience is a driving factor. The research that falls under this label by now is broad and I think it is very similar to the research in ubiquious computing. There is also a European conference on ambient intelligence [5].

Many people that are involved in ubicomp/pervasive/percom are also active in one more traditional research community. In particular many people are additionally involved in user interface research (e.g. CHI-Community), mobile computing and mobile systems, networking and distributed systems.

A very early topic related to the whole field is context-awareness as introduced by Schilit [6] who was working with Weiser. In my PhD dissertation I have looked more into the relationship between ubicomp and context-awareness – it has the title Ubiquitous Computing – Computing in Context [7]

In parallel subtopic in the above field have emerged that look at specific aspects, e.g. internet of things [8] (not necessarily a human in the loop), wearable computing (computing in cloth), smart environments (computing in buildings and furniture), tangible and embedded interaction [9] (looking at the interaction side), smart objects, … and probably many more.

There is also an interesting trend that many of the topics, if they are a bit matured, move back into the traditional communities.

[1] Mark Weiser. The Computer for the Twenty-First Century. Scientific American 265, 3 (September 1991), 94-104
[2] http://www.ubicomp.org/
[3] http://pervasive2008.org/
[4] http://www.percom.org/
[5] http://www.ami-07.org/
[6] B. Schilit, N. Adams, and R. Want. (1994). “Context-aware computing applications“. IEEE Workshop on Mobile Computing Systems and Applications (WMCSA’94), Santa Cruz, CA, US: 89-101 .
[7] Albrecht Schmidt(2003). “Ubiquitous Computing – Computing in Context“. PhD dissertation, Lancaster Univeristy.
[8] http://
www.internetofthings-2008.org
[9] http://www.tei-conf.org/

Visit at Fraunhofer IAIS in Bremen, eCultury Factory

After talking sometime ago to Monika Fleischmann I was curious about the eCultury Factory in Bremen, which is a part of Fraunhofer IAIS. Today I had the chance to visit them and see several installations, including a news browser for the public space (ENERGIE_PASSAGEN). It is a pity that I missed to see the large scale installation in Munich.

We discussed the current developments of the point screen and realized that there is an interesting link to a thesis that was done last year at my group in Munich. Raphael Wimmer looked systematically at options for capacitive sensing and created a toolkit for capacitive sensing (http://www.capsense.org/).

Monika Fleischmann, Wolfgang Strauss and their team run the digital sparks competition. The collection of projects is amazing. One can really envy Monika and Wolfgang – by running the competition they have a complete overview of the digital media scene. They also run a web page with a lot of interesting information on media art and electronic culture: http://netzspannung.org/

When looking at the projects we saw that the CabBoots by Martin Frey had featured in the digital sparks competitions and at the TEI-07 conference I chaired with Brygg Ullmer in February this year. The Paper is available in the ACM DL: Frey, M. 2007. CabBoots: shoes with integrated guidance system. In Proceedings of the 1st international Conference on Tangible and Embedded interaction (Baton Rouge, Louisiana, February 15 – 17, 2007). TEI ’07, pp 245-246. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1226969.1227019 (Foto by Matthias Kranz)

Interaction Ivrea

Pascal Bihler send me today a link to an interesting teaching/research project at Ivrea (http://courses.interaction-ivrea.it/strangely/). The assignment is to think how a common artefact can be enhanced with digital technology. The results of the exercise are quite impressive. It seems that Interaction Ivrea is now somehow integrated into the Domus Academy in Milan.

When I was at Ivrea in November 2003 for the Jamboree of the disappearing computer initiative it was amazing to see the level of creativity – from the Ivrea design institute as well as from the various European projects in the disappearing computer program.

There at Ivrea I also met a really amazing person who has greatly influenced interaction design in the last 20 year: Gillian Crampton Smith. She was the founding director of the institute in Ivrea and has moved on to Venice (IUAV).

Visiting the pervasive computing labs @ Johannes Kepler University in Linz


It is always great to visit the pervasive computing labs in Linz – always new and cool research to see. Looking at my my Google News-Alert it seems that the term “pervasive” is dominate by Alois 🙂

Alois Ferscha showed me their interaction cube. It is a really interesting piece of research and the background and argument of the cinematic of the hand shows a deep insight. There are some slides on the Telekom Austria Cube that are worthwhile to look at. It is interesting that he has gone successfully the full cycle from concept to product (image is taken from the slide show).

We talked about location systems and what options are available on the market. In Linz they have one room where they have high accuracy tracking based on an array of InterSense systems. Our experience in Bonn with the ubisense system has been mixed so far. Perhaps there are different technologies to come (or we have to develop them).

Workshop dinner, illuminated faucet, smart sink

I first saw a paper about a context-aware sink at CHI 2005 (Bonanni, L., Lee, C.H., and Selker, T. “Smart Sinks: Real World Opportunities for Context-Aware Interaction.” Short paper in proceedings of Computer Human Interfaction (CHI) 2005, Portland OR).

Yesterday I saw a illuminated faucet in the wild – one which looked in terms of design really great (in the restaurant they even had flyers advertising the product). But after using it I was really disappointed. It uses the concept of color-illumination of the water based on temperature (red hot, blue cold).

The main issue I see with the user experience is that the visualization is not based on the real temperature using sensor but on the setting of the tap. Hence at the beginning when you switch on hot the visualization is immediately red – even though it is initially cold :-(

Conclusion: nice research idea some time ago, a business person saved a few cents for the senor and wiring, created a product with great aesthetics and a poor user experience; hence I left the leaflet with the ordering address there, don’t want to have it.

3 months have passed very quickly

Nigel, Oliver, Mike, and Andre from Lancaster University have been our colleagues at B-IT for the last 3 months. The time has passed very quickly but it was very inspiring to work together.

We worked together on a project using Bluetooth to enable implicit interaction in public spaces. We have created together an interesting demonstrator in the domain of advertising and in particular exploring the implications for targeting public adverts to customers.

Today was the last day for Mike and Andre in Bonn (so far) and we went for dinner together. Nigel will move on for the second half of his sabbatical to ETH Zurich.

To keep us challenged and busy Nigel’s son asked some of us to convert his transformer from robot to car, and as one can see on the picture this is even for Dagmar not a trivial task 😉

Nothing Matches Real Experience

During our strategy meeting there was time for a canoe adventure and some late night reflections. To get the full experience we chose the rainy afternoon for our trip on the river Lahn. Even though we were pretty wet after the trip (some more some less 😉 it was a great experience.

When comparing real experience vs. virtual experience (e.g. second life) it becomes clear that the central issue is, that the virtual is risk-free with regard to our immediate physical well-being. This sounds great in the first place. But what does it lead to when we live in a risk free environment in the long term? How will it shape our perception in the further?

Enjoying the real experience inspired some ideas for mobile adventure games that take place in the real world with real experience but including virtual aspects. A central design goal would be to create a game, where the technology becomes invisible and the user only realises his or her activity in the real world.

Ensuring Privacy – trust in the physical


After having a really interesting discussion on privacy with a student at CDTM with regard to implicit interaction I saw the depicted privacy solution on the train back to Bonn. The woman had her notebook camera disabled – not in software – but physically with a scotch tape and a piece of paper. Such solutions are not uncommon and remind one impressively that people want tangible control over their privacy. It seems that people trust in the physical much more than the virtual – and for a good reason.

I reduced the size of the picture as she was preparing an exam paper (school, 7th grade math) and in full resolution details are readable – so much about privacy. One could make that mental note not to edit/view any private document on the train even in small print as it is very quick to talk a phone (even with a phone) and read it afterwards 😉

Tangible and Embedded Interaction 2007

Just a little more than week before the Tangible and Embedded Interaction 2007 starts in Baton Rouge (http://www.tei-conf.org/).

The program looks really exciting – a mixture of computer science, HCI, design, and art. I would expect that the conference sparks a lot of new ideas. Brygg Ullmer did the cover for the proceedings and it looks really cool.

Having seen the program of TEI’07 we have decided to put in a proposal to run the conference next year in Bonn. Hope we get it…