Ubiquitous Computing

Computers everywhere

Ubiquitous Computing (Ubicomp)

Move beyond desktop machine

Computing is embedded everywhere in the environment

A new paradigm?? “everyware”, “off the desktop”, “out of the

box”, pervasive, invisible, wearable, calm, anytime/anywhere/any place, …

Ubicomp Notions

Computing capabilities, any time, any place

“Invisible” resources

Machines sense users’ presence and act accordingly

Marc Weiser: The father of ubicomp

Chief Technologist Xerox PARC

Began Ubiquitous Computing Project in 1988

1991 Scientific American article got the ball rolling

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

Not an interface problem?

“The most profound technologies are those that disappear”

HCI: new focus on unobtrusiveness, invisibility How do we make technology “vanish”?

What makes technology disappear?

Psychological effect of learning Distribution of technology Physical invisibility Location and scale Context awareness/automated

functions

Ubicomp is ...

Related to: mobile computing wearable computing augmented reality

In contrast with: virtual reality (augmented virtuality)

HCI Themes in Ubicomp

Some of the themes: 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://tangible.media.mit.edu/

Device scales

Inch PDAs Blackberry Voice Recorders smart phones

OQO

5.5”

3.1”

Device scales

Foot notebooks tablets digital paper

Ultra mobile PC

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

Dynamic Shader Lamps – virtual painting on real objectshttp://www.cs.unc.edu/~raskar/Shaderlamps/

Ambient Displays

The Information Percolator http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~hudson/bubbles/

Ambient Orb http://www.ambientdevices.com/

Peripheral Displays

Kimura

Digital Family Portrait

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 active badges, electronic tags 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

To show an action that use can choose Want to phone the number in this

email?

Automated capture and access

Use of computers to preserve records of the live experience for future use (Abowd & Mynatt 2000)

Points of consideration: capture needs to be natural user access is important details of an experience is recorded as

streams of information

Capture & access applications

Compelling applications Design records Elephant box Everyday communication

Annotations Fusion, indexing, summarization

Example: Personal Audio Loop

Designing for Everyday Activities

No clear beginning or end Closure vs. flexibility and simplicity

Interruption is expected Design for resumption

Concurrent activities Monitoring for opportunity

Time is important discriminator Interpret events

Associative models needed Reacquire information from multiple pts of

view

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

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

Just scratched the surface Scale … hard to imagine Real life interaction … noisy,

erroneous Continuous interaction … time

sensitive Evaluation