1. Ubiquitous Computing
Computers everywhere

2. 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, …

3. Ubicomp Notions Computing capabilities, any time, any place
“Invisible” resources
Machines sense users’ presence and act accordingly

4. Marc Weiser: The father of ubicomp
Chief Technologist Xerox PARC
Began Ubiquitous Computing Project in 1988
1991 Scientific American article got the ball rolling

5. Not an interface problem?
“The most profound technologies are those that disappear”
HCI: new focus on unobtrusiveness, invisibility
How do we make technology “vanish”?

6. What makes technology disappear?
Psychological effect of learning
Distribution of technology
Physical invisibility
Location and scale
Context awareness/automated functions

7. Ubicomp is ... Related to: In contrast with: mobile computing
wearable computing
augmented reality
In contrast with:
virtual reality (augmented virtuality)

8. HCI Themes in Ubicomp Some of the themes: Natural interaction
Context-aware computing
Automated capture and access
Everyday computing

9. Natural Interaction How do input and output change? Input Output
Different form factors, more devices
Input
Towards implicit information
Feeds context-aware computing (later)
Output
Towards distributed, peripheral and ambient displays

10. Natural / implicit input
Integrate into human life
Pen input
Gesture
Speech
Perceptual UI
Tangible UI

11. Device scales Inch PDAs Blackberry Voice Recorders smart phones OQO
5.5”
3.1”
OQO

12. Device scales
Foot
notebooks
tablets
digital paper
Ultra mobile PC

13. Device scales Yard electronic whiteboards plasma displays
smart bulletin boards

14. Another take on scales Based on ownership and location body desk room
building
From the GMD Darmstadt web site on I-Land

15. Distributed Displays The Everywhere Display Project at IBM
Dynamic Shader Lamps – virtual painting on real objects

16. Ambient Displays The Information Percolator Ambient Orb
Ambient Orb

17. Peripheral Displays
Kimura
Digital Family Portrait

18. 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
General defn, focus is on particular kind of context, important to ubicomp

19. Example: Location services
Outdoor
Global Positioning Satellites (GPS)
wireless/cellular networks
Indoor
active badges, electronic tags
vision
motion detectors, keyboard activity

20. 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 ?

21. 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
And there has been a number of researchers motivated by those scenarios. We refer to their work as automated capture and access…which in 2000, abowd & mynatt characterized as….
Work in this area must take several points into consideration:
The first is how to make capture natural, where information can be recorded automatically without disrupting the user’s activity or as part of the task the user is already performing
The second is that point of these systems is for information to be captured so that it is later accessed by a human user.
And finally, a lot of the work in this area record details of an experience as streams of information that allows the user to index into any point of the experience for more detail…what that means is, it’s more than just a snap shot at the end of the experience.

22. Capture & access applications
Compelling applications
Design records
Elephant box
Everyday communication
Annotations
Fusion, indexing, summarization

23. Example: Personal Audio Loop

24. 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

25. Technical Challenges Connectivity – almost constant Sensing
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

26. Challenge of Evaluation
Bleeding edge technology
Novelty
Unanticipated uses
Quantitative metrics
Variety of social implications/issues

27. 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…

28. Conclusions Just scratched the surface Scale … hard to imagine
Real life interaction … noisy, erroneous
Continuous interaction … time sensitive
Evaluation