How to keep up with all the developments in mobile communication?

Recently I get this question more often - especially how to keep up with developments outside the scientific community. Some tell this is not important if you do research, however to me the actual uses are a very important inspirations.

There is no single source but an interesting address in the WWW is textually.org – it is very international and covers much more than technology!

Workshop on User Experience at Nokia

Together with Jonna Hakkila’s group (currently run by Jani Mantyjarvi) we had a two day workshop at Nokia in Oulu discussion the next big thing* ;-)
* motto on the Nokia research centers web page

It seems that many people share the observation that emotions and culture play a more and more important role in the design of services and applications – even outside the research labs. One evening we looked for the Finnish experience… (photo by Paul)

Overall the workshop showed again how many ideas can be created in a very short time – hopefully we can follow up some of them and create some new means for communication. We plan to meet again towards the end of the year in Essen.

PS: Kiss the phone – some take it literarily: http://tech.uk.msn.com/news/article.aspx?cp-documentid=7770403

PPS: we talked about unanticipated use (some call it misuse) of technology, e.g. using the camera on the phone to take a picture of the inside of your fridge instead of writing a shopping list. Alternative uses is not restricted to mobile phones - see for yourself what you dishwasher may be good for.... http://www.salon.com/nov96/salmon961118.html

HCI Doctoral Consortium at VTT Oulu

Jonna Hakkila (Nokia), Jani Mantyjarvi (Nokia & VTT), and I discussed last year how we can improve the doctoral studies of our students and we decided to organize a small workshop to discuss PhD topics.

As Jonna is currently on maternity leave and officially not working we ran the workshop at VTT in Oulu.

The topics varied widely from basic user experience to user interface related security. There was very interesting work the participants did and published. I have selected the following 2 as reading suggestions: [1] by Elina Vartiainen and [2] by Anne Kaikkonen.

We hope we gave some advise – can resist to repeat the most important thing to remember:

• a PhD thesis is not require to solve all problems in a domain
• doing a PhD is yet another exam – not more and not less
• finding/inventing/unterstanding something that makes a real difference to even a small part of the world is a great achievement (an not common in most PhD research)
• do not start with thinking hard - start with doing your research

A good discussion on doing a PhD in computer science by Jakob Bardram can be found at [3].

[1] Roto, V., Popescu, A., Koivisto, A., and Vartiainen, E. 2006. Minimap: a web page visualization method for mobile phones. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Montréal, Québec, Canada, April 22 - 27, 2006). CHI '06. ACM, New York, NY, 35-44. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1124772.1124779

[2] Lehikoinen, J. T. and Kaikkonen, A. 2006. PePe field study: constructing meanings for locations in the context of mobile presence. In Proceedings of the 8th Conference on Human-Computer interaction with Mobile Devices and Services (Helsinki, Finland, September 12 - 15, 2006). MobileHCI '06, vol. 159. ACM, New York, NY, 53-60. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1152215.1152228

[3] http://www.itu.dk/people/bardram/pmwiki/pmwiki.php?n=Main.ArtPhD

Christian Kray visits our Lab

Christian Kray and I were colleagues in Lancaster for a very short time – he just joined the university when I left for Munich. After his post-doc in Lancaster he moved to a position in Newcastle.

His work at the cross roads of mobile interaction and public displays is very exciting. In particular he investigates interesting concepts related to visual codes – some aspects to these ideas are discussed in “Swiss Army Knife meets Camera Phone” [1]. His new prototypes are really cool and I look forward to see/read more about them.

We realized that there are many areas where we have common interests. Perhaps there is a chance in the future to work together on some of the ideas discussed!

[1] Swiss Army Knife meets Camera Phone: Tool Selection and Interaction using Visual Markers. C. Kray and M. Rohs. (2007) In "Workshop on Mobile Interaction with the Real World at Mobile HCI 2007". Singapore, September 9, 2007.

Matthias Kranz defended his PhD

Today Matthias Kranz defended his PhD thesis „Engineering Perceptive User Interfaces“ successfully at the University of Munich! Congratulations… and remember "Training to become a Jedi is not an easy challenge. And even if you succeed, it's a hard life." (Qui-Gon Jinn, Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace)

After Enrico Rukzio Matthias is the second of my PhD students who worked with me in Munich to finish. He is now with the German Aerospace center (DLR).

Matthias worked on the DFG project “Embedded Interaction” and has created and published an impressive set of prototypes and studies in pervasive computing over the last 4 years. See his homepage for details. If you only have time to read 2 pages – here is my suggestion: Context-aware kitchen utilities [1].

The personalized doctoral hat is a German tradition –and Matthias got a fully functional prototype of a perceptive doctoral hat (following the modification and restriction approach suggested in his thesis, but created without end-user involvement to keep the surprise ;-)

Insider hint: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microfilm - just don’t!

[1] Kranz, M., Schmidt, A., Maldonado, A., Rusu, R. B., Beetz, M., Hörnler, B., and Rigoll, G. 2007. Context-aware kitchen utilities. In Proceedings of the 1st international Conference on Tangible and Embedded interaction (Baton Rouge, Louisiana, February 15 - 17, 2007). TEI '07. ACM, New York, NY, 213-214. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1226969.1227013

Nicolas Villar visiting

Nicolas, who was the first BSc student I worked with in Lancaster, is now after finishing his PhD with Microsoft Research in Cambridge, UK. He came on Friday to Essen to see the lab and he brought us a Voodoo I/O box [1] – we are really excited!

He stayed for the weekend and I learned a lot about interesting technologies and ideas. Looking at his iREX ebook and Vivien's new USB Microscope (30€ from Aldi ;-) we had to do some research into the screen quality of different devices. It is interesting to see that e-Ink moves closer to newspaper and that in comparison to it an iPhone screen is pretty coarse.

Some references to remember:

• Energy harvest module at Farnell (order No. 1439949, EH301A)
• DIY 3D Priniting - http://fabathome.org/
• Hi-End 3D Printing - http://www.objet.com/
• Interesting web shop - http://www.grand-illusions.com/

[1] Spiessl, W., Villar, N., Gellersen, H., and Schmidt, A. 2007. VoodooFlash: authoring across physical and digital form. In Proceedings of the 1st international Conference on Tangible and Embedded interaction (Baton Rouge, Louisiana, February 15 - 17, 2007). TEI '07. ACM, New York, NY, 97-100. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1226969.1226989