Interesting interaction devices

Looking at interesting and novel interaction devices that would be challenging for students to classify (e.g. in the table suggested by Card et al 1991 [1]) I can across some pretty unusual device. Probably not really useful for an exam but perhaps next year for discussion in class…

Ever wanted to rearrange the keys on your keyboard? ErgoDex DX1 is a set of 25 keys that can be arranged on a surface to create a specific input device. It would be cool if the device could also sense which key is where – would make re-arranging part of the interaction process. In some sense it is similar to Nic Villar's Voodoo I/O [2].

Wearable computing is not dead – here is some proof ;-) JennyLC Chowdhury presents intimate controllers – basically touch sensitive underwear (a bra and briefs). Have a look at the web page or the video on youtube.

What are keyboards of the future? Each key is a display? Or is the whole keyboard a screen? I think there is too much focus on the visual und to less on the haptic – perhaps it could be interesting to have keys that change shape and where the tactile properties can be programmed… 

[1] Card, S. K., Mackinlay, J. D., and Robertson, G. G. 1991. A morphological analysis of the design space of input devices. ACM Trans. Inf. Syst. 9, 2 (Apr. 1991), 99-122. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/123078.128726 

[2] VILLAR, N., GILLEADE, K. M., RAMDUNYELLIS, D., and GELLERSEN, H. 2007. The VoodooIO gaming kit: a real-time adaptable gaming controller. Comput. Entertain. 5, 3 (Jul. 2007), 7. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1316511.1316518

Ranking Conferences and Journals - A Down-Under perspective

As many of us I am skeptical of rankings (as long as I was not involved in making them ;-) Nevertheless sometimes they are interesting and helpful in assessing where to publish or what better not to read...

This morning we discussed where to publish some interesting work related to web technology (a follow-up of the UsaProx) and for the discussion such a list may have been helpful. 

A colleague from Munich sent me the link to an Australian conference ranking and obviously they also have ranked Journals, too. They use A+, A, B, L, and C as tiers.

•  conference ranking (alphabetical order)
  
•  conference ranking (by tier)
  
•  journal (alphabetical order)
  
•  journal (by tier)
  

... and as we always knew you cannot be wrong when publishing in Pervasive, Percom, Ubicomp, and CHI :-)

Technology Review with a Focus on User Interfaces

The February 2009 edition of technology review (German version) has its focus on new user interfaces and titles "Streicheln erwünscht" (translates to stroking/caressing/fondling welcome). It has a set of articles talking about new way of interacting multimodality, including tangible user interfaces and tactile communication. In the article "Feel me, touch me" by Gordon Bolduan on page 74 a photo of Dagmar's prototype of tactile steering wheel is depicted. The full paper on the study will be published at Pervasive in May 2009 (so you have to be patient to get the details - or come and visit our lab ;-)

In the blog entry of technology review  introducing the current issue there is a nice anecdote mentioned about a literature search on haptic/tactile remote communication (while I was still in Munich) - the final version of the seminar paper (now not X-rated anymore) is "Neue Formen der entfernten Kommunikation" by Martin Schrittenloher. He continued in his MSc Project on the topic and worked with Morten Fjeld  on sliders that give remote feedback, see [1].

Another topic closely related is to new forms of communication are exertion interfaces (we looked at the 2002/2003 work Florian 'Floyd' Mueller in the UIE lecture yesterday - even with the Nintendo Wii around the work is highly inspiring and impressive, see [2]). The communication example given in Breakout for Two is showing the potential of including the whole body in communication tasks. Watching the video  is really to recommend :-)

[1] Jenaro, J., Shahrokni, A., Schrittenloher, and M., Fjeld, M. 2007. One-Dimensional Force Feedback Slider: Digital platform. In Proc. Workshop at the IEEE Virtual Reality 2007 Conference: Mixed Reality User Interfaces: Specification, Authoring, Adaptation (MRUI07), 47-51

[2] Mueller, F., Agamanolis, S., and Picard, R. 2003. Exertion interfaces: sports over a distance for social bonding and fun. InProceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, USA, April 05 - 10, 2003). CHI '03. ACM, New York, NY, 561-568. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/642611.642709  

Why can I not rotate my windows on my Vista Desktop?

In the User Interface Engineering lecture we discussed today input devices, especially to interact with 3D environments. In 3D environments having 6 degrees of freedom (3 directions in translation and 3 options for rotation) appears very natural. Looking back at 2D user interfaces with this in mind one has to ask why are we happy (an now for more than 25 years) with translation (in 2D) only and more specifically why is it not possible to rotate my application windows in Vista (or perhaps it is and I just dont know it). At first this questions seems like a joke but if you think more of it there could be interesting implication (perhaps with a little more thinking

 than this sketch ;-)

Obviously people have implemented desktops with more than 2D and here is the link to the video on project looking glass - discussed in the lecture. (if you are bored with the sun sales story just move to 2:20): http://de.youtube.com/watch?v=JXv8VlpoK_g

It seems you can have it on Ubuntu, too: http://de.youtube.com/watch?v=EjQ4Nza34ak

Desktop Video Conference - Setup time 5 Seconds

Earlier I had a tele-conference with Christian Becker and Gregor Schiele (we still try to write a book ;-) and I tryed MeBeam.com for the video. And to my great suprise it work instandly and well and the conference setup took about 5 seconds - open website, chose a name for the conference, distribute the link over skype. And as one can see video adds another quality to the conversation :-)

Rating your professor, teacher, doctor, or fellow students?

This morning I was coming back from Munich* on the train I got a phone call from a journalist from Radio Essen (http://www.102.2radioessen.de/). As their studio is very close to the railways station in Essen I went there spontaneously before going back to University. 

We talked a little about web services for students to rate their profs (e.g. meinProf.de). The numbers of ratings most professors have received so far is extremely small (in comparison to the number of students we teach) and hence you get interesting effects that are far from representative or in many cases even meaningful. Last term I registered my course and we sent proactively a mail to all students who complete the course with the request to rate the lectures. This seems to be a good way to generate a positive selection :-)

There are many of these services out - rating teachers, doctors, shops, etc. Thinking a little more about the whole concept of rating others one could image many interesting services - all of them creating a clear benefit (for someone) and a massive reduced privacy for others. 

To make it more specific I offer you one idea: Rate your fellow students' professonal capabilities and academic performance. Students have typically a very good insight into the real qualities of their peers (e.g. technical skills, social compatibility, creativity, mental resilience, ability to cope with workload, diligence, honesty etc.). Having this information combined with the official degree (and the transcript the university offers) a potential employer would get a really interesting picture… We discussed this with students last term an the reactions were quite diverse - as one can image.>

Obviously such a service would create a lot of criticism (which lowers the cost of marketing) and one would have to carefully think in which countries it would be legal to run it. An interesting question would also be what verification one would employ to ensure that the ratings are real - or perhaps we would not need to care? Interested in the topic - perhaps we should get 5 people together implemented in a week and get rich ;-) 

The direction of such rating systems are taking is very clear - and it seems that they will come in many areas of our life. Perhaps there is some real research in it… how will these technology change the way we live together?

* travelling from Munich (leaving at 22:30) and arriving in Essen in the morning (or Darmstadt) works fairly well and if you stay in a hotel in Stuttgart ;-) - it is surprisingly a real alternative to a night train or an early morning flight…

No 3 ;-) Paul defends his PhD - Congratulations!

Paul Holleis defended today his PhD thesis on "Integrating Usability Models into Pervasive Application Development" in Munich - My No.3. He worked together with Matthias on the DFG project “Embedded Interaction”. Paul is now with Docomo Eurolabs in Munich. 

The set of publication Paul produced is impressive - you probably don't have time to read all of them ;-) but at least take a look at the following ones: an extension to KLM for mobile phones [1], an integrated development environment that includes usability models [2], and a explorative study in wearable computing [3]. 

In Germany we have a tradition to make a hat for the candidate. Paul's hat has items on it that insiders can interpret, including a world map with bikes, miniature TEI'07 proceedings, Birkenstock shoes, a key with a label "Amsterdam", a display, a phone, a yoyo, a control unit for vibration motors, 4 flags of town, and some context-aware plug-and-play hardware (and obviously batteries).

[1] Holleis, P., Otto, F., Hussmann, H., and Schmidt, A. 2007. Keystroke-level model for advanced mobile phone interaction. InProceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (San Jose, California, USA, April 28 - May 03, 2007). CHI '07. ACM, New York, NY, 1505-1514. DOI=http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1240624.1240851

[2] P. Holleis, A. Schmidt: MakeIt: Integrate User Interaction Times in the Design Process of Mobile Applications. 6th International Conference on Pervasive Computing (Pervasive'08), Sydney, Australia, May 2008

http://www.pervasive.wiwi.uni-due.de/uploads/tx_itochairt3/publications/Holleis_MakeIt.pdf

[3] Holleis, P., Schmidt, A., Paasovaara, S., Puikkonen, A., and Häkkilä, J. 2008. Evaluating capacitive touch input on clothes. InProceedings of the 10th international Conference on Human Computer interaction with Mobile Devices and Services(Amsterdam, The Netherlands, September 02 - 05, 2008). MobileHCI '08. ACM, New York, NY, 81-90. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1409240.1409250

Mechanical Computing, Beauty of Calculating Machines

Instead of covering the history of calculating machines in the DSD lecture, we took the train and went to the Arithmeum in Bonn to the see the artefacts live and to play with some of them.

We started with early means for counting and record keeping. The tokens and early writings did not use numbers as abstract concepts, rather as representatives of concrete objects – this is very inspiring, especially from a tangible interaction point of view. The knots, as used in south America, show impressively how the tools for calculation have to fit the context people live in. Interestingly all these artefacts highliht how the ability to calculate and store information is related to the ability to do trade – quite a good motivation for the setup we have in Essen business studies and computer science within one faculty.

I was again impressed by the ingenuity by the early inventers of calculating tools and machines. There is an interesting separation between calculating tools and machines – the first ones require the user to take care of the carry and the second do it by themselves. We tried out replicas of Napier’s calculating tool and Schickard’s calculating machine.

The beauty and the mechanical precision required of those early machines is impressive. These prototypes (most of them took years and massive funds to be built complete) can teach us something for research today. These inventors had visions and the will to get it implemented, even without a clear application or business model in mind. They were excited by the creating of systems than can do things, machines could not do before. From the professions of the inventors (e.g. Philipp Matthäus Hahn was a clergyman)  it becomes apparent that at these times some considered religion and calculation as closely related - which to mondern understanding is very very alien.

Seeing the Hollerith machine that was used for the US census more than 100 years ago can teach you a lot about data processing. Punch cards, electrical reading and electrical counters (using mainly relays) were the basis for this technology. Looking at the labels on the counters showed that the US has a long tradition in collecting data that is after some time is not seen as political correct ;-)

Having learned binary calculations during the DSD course it was nice to see a machine that did binary additions, using small steel balls and gravity. On each place (1,2,4,8, …) there is space for one ball. If a second one comes to this place one moves up to the next place (carry) and one is discarded. This is implemented with very simple mechanics and the working prototype (recently build) is based on designs of Schickard (but he never built - if I am correct).

Moving on with binary systems and finally to silicon, we got to see the Busicom 141 - a desk calculator that uses the Intel 4004. It is impressive to see that this is not even 40 years ago – starting with 2300 transistors and 180kHz. 

you can find the full set of photos at: http://foto.ubisys.org/dsd0809/

CfP Workshop on Pervasive Advertising

We organize at this year's Pervasive computing conference in Nara, Japan a workshop on Pervasive Advertising - http://pervasiveadvertising.org. 

We expect that there is a lot of interesting research going on in the area and it is clearly a controversial topic. Being an optimist - I see the new options that arise. In particular a future with less annoying advertisements is one hope :-)

But many people are focusing on the risks that arise - an interesting positing with some criticism of our workshop objective can be found at the near future laboratory  I do not share their views :-)

To me the idea that if you do not research it, it does not happen seems not a very viable option. I still think with research we can shape the future!

I am already looking forward to the submission and to the workshop. You have a contribution? Deadline is Feb, 11 2008.

Hans is visiting, generating new ideas for projects

Hans was for a meeting in Stuttgart and he stayed another day to discuss project ideas with me - won't tell them here ;-).

Nevertheless there are always small new things to discover, too. Hans showed Vivien the Ocarina application for the iPhone - it is quite amazing how little it takes to create an interesting application - and that is very different from a traditional musical instrument. Especially the interweaving of playing yourself with the worldwide community is extremely well done. 

Light themes - cool idea but with usability flaws

Over new year we went for a short skiing trip to Bödele in Austria. It is a small ski resort but great for learning to ski (and this is what Vivien did :-)

We stayed in Dornbirn (not far from Lake Constance) in at Hotel Krone and had a really nice room - and it had a remarkable light installation. 

There were several lights (like you have them typical in a hotel room), then there were many switches, and finally there was a full page manual how to use the light - welcome to ambient intelligence! Instead of switching on and off individual lights one can chose a predefined light theme, e.g. a setting for working on the desk, a setting for watching TV, a setting for reading, etc. All lights are switched and dimed to fit this situation (or at least as the designer thinks it would fit the situation).

The basic idea of having light themes is quite interesting but when being in the hotel room with 3 people it gets really difficult to set the lights. Even after a lot of trying out I could not manage to set the lights so that I can work on the desk (desk lamp on), Petra can read in bed (reading light at on bed on), and Vivien can sleep (her bedside lamp off). 

Nevertheless one should not underestimate the entertainment of previously simple tasks - We spend have the evening exploring potential settings, rhythms, and speeds of the colored wellness light ;-)

PS: (1) There is a good natural science museum in Dornbirn - inatura and (2) 3D projections are still not convincing...

PPS: using a GPS tracking device to record your skiing activity (including speed) is cool!

New project on ambient visualization - kick-off meeting in Munich

We met in Munich at Docomo Euro Labs to start a new project that is related to context and ambient visualizations. And everyone already got bunnies ;-)

Related to this there is a large and very interesting project: IYOUIT. Besides other things it can record and share your context – if you have a Nokia series 60 phone you should try it out. As far as I remember it was voted best mobile experience at mobile HCI 2008. 

Random Links, toys and free location data

Over the last day I have learned about some (more) interesting things out there – here are some to share with you:

• OpenGeoDB: http://opengeodb.hoppe-media.com is a database with locations in Germany and an open API
  
• A community effort to create an open map: http://www.openstreetmap.org/
• publishing you travels to others: http://www.dopplr.com 
  
• Ubfunckeys: USB connected strange toy, www.ubfunkeys.com
  
• A communicative rabbit: http://www.nabaztag.com/ 
  

Tactile interfaces, Visit from Gordon Bolduan

This afternoon Gordon Bolduan from Technology Review was visiting the lab. We talked about haptic and tactile interfaces and showed some demos (e.g. navigation with tactile cues). 

When preparing for the visit I looked for some good examples of tactile interaction - and interestingly there is more and more work out there that has the potential to change future interfaces and means of communication. 

Recent work on connecting people [1] and [2] at the boundary between computing and design shows new options for emotional communication. 

We used in our work multiple vibration motors and explored the potential for mobile devices [3]. What to use for tactile interaction beyond vibration is one obvious question, and I find the paper by Kevin Li [4] a good starting point to get some more ideas.

When talking about human computer interaction that includes stroking, tapping and rubbing an association to erotic and sexual interactions seem obvious; and there is more to that if you are curious just search for teledildonics and you will find interesting commercial products as well as a lot of DIY ideas.

[1] Eichhorn, E., Wettach, R., and Hornecker, E. 2008. A stroking device for spatially separated couples. In Proceedings of the 10th international Conference on Human Computer interaction with Mobile Devices and Services (Amsterdam, The Netherlands, September 02 - 05, 2008). MobileHCI '08. ACM, New York, NY, 303-306. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1409240.1409274 

[2] Werner, J., Wettach, R., and Hornecker, E. 2008. United-pulse: feeling your partner's pulse. In Proceedings of the 10th international Conference on Human Computer interaction with Mobile Devices and Services (Amsterdam, The Netherlands, September 02 - 05, 2008). MobileHCI '08. ACM, New York, NY, 535-538. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1409240.1409338 

[3] Alireza Sahami, Paul Holleis, Albrecht Schmidt, Jonna Häkkilä: Rich Tactile Output on Mobile Devices. European Conference on Ambient Intelligence (Ami'08). Springer LNCS Nürnberg 2008, S. 210-221. DOI= http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-89617-3_14

[4] Li, K. A., Baudisch, P., Griswold, W. G., and Hollan, J. D. 2008. Tapping and rubbing: exploring new dimensions of tactile feedback with voice coil motors. In Proceedings of the 21st Annual ACM Symposium on User interface Software and Technology (Monterey, CA, USA, October 19 - 22, 2008). UIST '08. ACM, New York, NY, 181-190. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1449715.1449744

One Ez430-F2013 for each student in DSD

This term we teach digital system design and besides the essential (gates, flip-flops, 2-complements, alu, data path, etc) we decided to include some practical parts. In the first part we introduced Verilog. We did the exercises with Icarus Verilog (free, text-based verilog) and there are more powerful tools available, e.g. ISE WebPACK.

In the second part we have practical exercises in assembly language using the Ez430-F2013 development kit. We borrowed one kit to each student (just in case someone is bored over Christmas) and the current task is to complete and assembly program (incomplete sample) that the LED shows repeatedly "Hello" in Morse code. This is just the start - perhaps we do some more interesting stuff in January. The development kit is really interesting - especially given the fact that it is only 20€ (including hardware, compiler, and IDE). The MCU is small - but still good enought to generate a video signal (eagle CAD files, some assembly code). 

Enrico Rukzio visits our Lab

Enrico Rukzio (my first PhD from Munich, now lecturer in Lancaster) visited our Lab. He was make a small tour of Germany (Münster, Essen, Oldenburg). In the user interface engineering class Enrico showed some on his current work on mobile interaction, in particular mobile projectors and NFC tags. After the presentation we wondered how long it will take till kids on the train will play with mobile projections ;-)

We showed Enrico a demo of eye-tracking for active customization of browser adverts. In our setup we use the Tobii X120. For tracking of people in the room we still have not decided on a system - and Enrico told me about the Optitrack system they have. That looked quite interesting... 

As we all do studies in our work - the design of studies is critical and there is an interesting book to help with this: How to Design and Report Experiments by Andy Field  and Graham J. Hole.

Biometrics will come, who will care about privacy

Arriving at the new Terminal 5 at Heathrow airport I saw some extra installations (and extra lines) for iris scan immigration. Arriving at 4 am in the morning they were closed and there were not queues - but I could see that it is very attractive at other times of day when queues are long. On the official website they claim that border control will be down to 20 seconds. There is a more detailed document on the schema - I saved the document to have it in 10 years when we will have a very different view on privacy.

Will we have face-2-face PC meetings in the future?

On Thursday morning I flew to Boston for the CHI 2009 PC meeting. The review and selection process was organized very professional and efficient. We discussed all papers in one and a half days - and I think an interesting program came out and I learned a lot about what values my colleagues see or see not in papers. On Friday afternoon I flew back to the UK for the Pervasive 2009 PC meeting in Cambridge (with the same crew on the plane).

Nevertheless the question remains how sustainable is it that 100 people fly to a face-2-face meeting. In what way could we do such a meeting remotely? Video conferencing still does not really work well for larger group discussions (just collecting experience here in Cambridge during the Pervasive PC meeting)… Can it be so difficult to make a reasonable video link between two meeting room? How could we recreate the social aspects (like a joined dinner or walking back through the city with Gregory) as well as side conversations in the meetings? We probably should try harder - It cannot be that difficult - there have been massive amounts of work in CSCW research? Perhaps we should try linking two rooms at different universities as a group project next term? 

Christmas market in Essen

Going to Christmas market is in Germany a tradition - and obviously our group went, too ;-)
It is interesting that most of us had time for this "appointment" with only two days notice - usually it takes us weeks to find a date for a meeting and so far we did not find a date for a strategy meeting in the near future. Perhaps offering Glühwein (that is what you drink at Christmas markets) would help…
The quality of photos taken with a mobile phone is in difficult context (e.g. night, lights around) still not satisfactory (even with 5MP, downscaling, and image enhancing).

Known route - driving your car in mental auto-pilot?

Mandy Marder, a doctoral student at university hospital in Essen has done an interesting study, looking at the activity of the brain at different driving situations. It seems that if you are driving a well know route you are less alert than when you drive an unknown route (see press release, we have yet to find the appropriate reference). This is an interesting finding that may help to inform some of our work on automotive user interfaces. Together with trends that move more responsibility from the driver to assitive functions this nay be an indication that driving could be a valid domain for serious games.

Exporting your cars information to the mobile phone

In our user interface engineering class one of the tasks in the exercise is to create a concept design for providing information from the car on the mobile phone (e.g. millage, amount a fuel in the car, next service date, alram status, etc). The first part is to assess what information could be made accessible and what value it would create for the user. 

Today I came across a device (Tyredog TD-1000A) that is concerned with a one sub-part of this scenario: checking your pressure in the tires of the car. It is a simple sensor system, screwed on to each of the tires, connected to a wireless receiver. There is also a version that includes features for the car alarm (Tyredog TD-3000A).

Another group is looking yet again into the domain of  restaurant finders or more general night life. Apropos restaurant finders, Saturday night we got out of the subway onto union square and discussed where to go for dinner (an we probably looked disoriented). A local lady stoped and recommended the Union Square Café - and it was just great… sometimes just talking to someone in the street may provide you with an excellent alternative to technologies ;-) Perhaps the students find a solution that can reflect personal recommendations well...

Information vs. Mobility, Percom PC meeting in New York

The PC meeting for Percom 2009 took place at IBM in Hawthorne, NY. Percom had about 200 submissions and many good ones - so we could compile an exciting program across the whole field of pervasive computing and communication. As one of three program vice chairs I have looked in detail in about 1/3 of the submissions that were application related. It is interesting to observe that research as a whole in the field becomes more major and at the same time more incremental. 

To me this puts up the big question in which domains will the new big innovations happen, what is the next trend after we have pervasive computing? There are luckily plenty of options, but at the moment it seems that there develops an interesting relationship between information, communication, mobility and energy. It seems that we can compensate mobility by information and communication and similarly we can reduce energy required by information available. One example is: if I know where things are (=information) I can reduce the effort required to find them (=mobility). Is there more to it?

Each time in the US - even in New York were public transport works quite well - one is surprise how alien it appears to many that it could be an option to take public transport on a business trip (e.g. there are no first class coaches on regional trains). Flying from Düsseldorf into Newark it was convenient to take the train to Penn Station in NY City and then an express train to White Plaines. If we would not have gone for a walk in the city we probably would have been equally fast as by car. With the again low gas prices in the US (less than 2U$ per gallon, down from 4 just a few month ago) I would expect public transport and small cars will not gain too much popularity - before the next rise in gas prices.

PS: it is amazing how many possiblities there are to serve coffee (and this is probably not one of the most environment friendly)

Male (88%), writing like Oscar Wilde (35%)

Looking into Paul Rayson's blog and discovered an interesting link: http://www.genderanalyzer.com. It is a web form where you can put in an URL and you get an estimate whether the author of this text is male or female. For me it worked great ;-) It says that the text I wrote in my blog is with 88% written by a male. I tried it with a few more of my pages and it worked. Then I looked at some pages of some of my female colleagues and to my surprise it seems they do not write their web pages by themselves (as the program indicated 95% male writer) - they probably all have a hidden male assistant ;-)

While I was in Lancaster I shared for most of the time an office with Paul. During this time I learned a lot of interesting things about corpus linguistics and phenomena in language in general - just by sharing the office. One fact at that at the time was surprising to me is that if you take 6 words from an arbitrary text in the exact order as they appear in the text and you search on the web for the exact phrase it is likely that you will only find this text. How many hits do you get for phrase "I was at Trinity College reading" in google? Try it out ;-) [to students: that is why not getting caught when you plagiarize is really hard]

From http://www.genderanalyzer.com I came to http://www.ofaust.com and to my great surprise I write like Oscar Wilde (35%) and Friedrich Nietzsche (30%). Thinking of social networks (and in particular the use of languages within closed groups) such technologies could become an interesting enabling technology for novel applications. Perhaps I should visit Paul again in Lancaster…

PS: and I nearly forgot I am a thinker / INTJ - The Scientists (according to http://www.typealyzer.com/)

PPS (2008-11-17): a further URL contrinuted from my collegues on the gender topic: http://www.mikeonads.com/2008/07/13/using-your-browser-url-history-estimate-gender/

Exoskeletons soon in the real world

Exoskeletons have received some attention over the last years (some with a clear application area in the army), e.g. Robot suit HAL and the BLEEX Project.  

Honda showed now an interesting exoskeletons as walking aid. It is called  "computerized leg device" or "walking assist device" and there is an short movie on youtube and it is designed to help people walk. The application areas are probably broad - I expected mainly in care and rehabilitation, but looking around there seem to be more application domains…

Illusions 2.0, Talk at the Museum Ludwig in Köln

In Cologne in the Museum Ludwig I gave in the afternoon a talk on "Illusions 2.0 - embedded interactive media" at the Forum Mediendesign. The talk focused on the new qualities of magical experiences we will be able to create with pervasive computing technologies in the future and linked this to Alan Kay's notion of user illusion and metaphors. I looked at trends that are ingredience for creating Illusions 2.0 - in particular ubiquitous communication and display, constant tracking and logging, and the decrease of value of traditional content (text, audio, video, software, tv, statistical data). I highlighted one development that have already happened and has impacted our lives with the following statement. The question "If I only would know when the others come and where they are now…" was common to people born before 1970 but is completely alien to people born after 2000. Mobile communication has changed this and tracking will add more change over the next years.

Based on some examples from recent popular fiction (Harry Potter) I showed that things that we have considered magical are becoming rapidly community products (e.g. marauders map). Spinning this idea forward I asked how far are we with regard to other human dreams such as looking into the future or never forgetting anything we have seen or heard. And the answer in short is: we are close ;-) for more see the slides of my talk on Illusion 2.0. There is an upcoming paper we wrote for IEEE Multimedia Magazine on this topic - will tell as soon as it is published ;-)

In the morning I had some time for sightseeing and Vivien and I went to the chocolate museum. The museum is brilliant and I learned how the hollow chocolate santas are made :-) In the top floor they have a table top projection for a quiz - it is very well done (as the whole museum) but the technology did not work on the table close to the window. As we know from our experience if you have sun light your camera-projector systems may have trouble ;-)

PS: it was interesting that the whole organization was done by students as a course in project management - and they did it really well.

My first hotel fire alarm, debugging smart environments

We arrived in the evening in Köln and went to our hotel and around 10:30 pm the fire alarm sounded (really loud - you want to leave) and a voice over the speaker system asked us to leave the hotel immediately. When we checked in an hour earlier we overheard that they called for the elevator repair man…

Better safe than sorry I packed up my laptop and rucksack and we went downstairs. At the reception they were pretty busy - but it seemed everyone clear that this a false alarm but it seemed they had no way of really understanding why the system behaved in this way [gap of evaluation ;-) teaching user interface engineering this term]. The error search reminded me on one error search strategy in C (if you do not have a debugger). Comment out part of the code (here: disable fire sensing for certain areas in the hotel) till you can tell which parts cases the error. If you have found this part and it is not essential just leave it as a comment (you can do the same with fire sensor - hope they did not…)

A fire alarm system has compared to smart environments we envision a very low complexity. I think providing appropriate means for debugging smart environments by end-users could be a topic worthwhile to look at.

PS: the elivator had the best display for showing the level you are in I have seen so far. From a UI perspective it is really a boring recreation of the non-digital version... 

USA votes, election party in our lab

There many good reason to have an international team - especilly when doing research in pervasive computing and user interface engineering. This morning I learned another one: you can have election parties (=drinks and food in the lab ;-). 

Predicting elections results goes new ways and it is interesting that the Xbox Live Polls (http://blog.wired.com/games/2008/09/xbox-live-poll.html) were quite close to the result - already quite some time ago. Perhaps this large poll produced just by accident good results - but it may be a first step towards internet elections. Having internet voting on a game console brings new models for voting to one's mind (e.g. only if you have reached a certain level in the game you can vote ;-)

Geocaching, Travel bug

On Saturday we went for a walk and to make it more exciting we decided to look for a geocache (GCXP87, N 49° 08.775 E 010° 06.672). To our surprise it took us quite some time (10 minutes) to find it as the GPS reception was not perfect. Vivien, my daughter was excited by the idea of geo caching (I think I can anticipate some of our activities on the next weekends ;-), especially as we even found a travel bug. The travel bug is alreay on its second continent and we still discuss where we place it ;-) 

Technologies of Globalization 2008 in Darmstadt

I have been chairing the Stream "Aging as a Global Issue" at the conference Technologies of Globalization 2008 in Darmstadt. It is always very suprising who different research is across different diciplines...

On-Kwok Lai from Kwansei Gakuin University gave a really interesting overview on the current situation in Asia and in particular in Japan with regards the aging society. Learning more about ageing I find myself more often thinking the current “aging research” is more like treating a symptom and not looking at the real problem. And it seems the real problem: reduced reproduction in industrial states – basically we do not have enough children anymore. This leads to the obvious question: would researching into solutions and technologies that make it easier to raise children while working or studying not be the more important challenge?

In another talk Birgit Kasper reported from a study of multi-modal travel in Köln ("Patenticket"). In the trail they got people who have a yearly ticket to introduce other older people to public transport by providing them a 3 month flat-rate ticket for public transport in the region. The benefits seem to come from two sides: (1) people do not worry if they have the right ticket and (2) having a person that acts as a patron learning the public transport system is supported. If we look at the results a radical suggestion would be to introduce a car-city-tax (e.g. like London) and give in return free public transport to everyone – would this simple solution not solve many of our problems (economic, ecological, …) or would it create a two-tier society?

The social event was at castle Frankenstein – but surprisingly everyone came back in the morning unharmed ;-)

History and Future of Computing and Interaction

Today I was teaching my class on user interface engineering and we covered a selected history of HCI and looked at the same time at a potential future. We discussed how user interface evolved and where UI revolutions have happed. To my question "What is the ultimate user interface?" I got three very interesting answers (1) a keyboard, (2) mind reading, and (3) a system that anticipates what I want. 

With regard to history in HCI one of my favorite texts is the PhD dissertation of Ivan Sutherland [1]. The work described was done in 1960-1963 when the idea of personal computing was very far from main stream. Even just browsing some of the pages gives an impression of the impact the work had…

For future user interfaces we talked about brain computer interfaces (BCI) and how they very much differ from the idea of mind reading. I came across a game controller - Mindlink - developed by Atari (1984) and that was never released [2]. It was drawing on the notion of linking to the mind but in fact it only measured muscle activity above the eye brows and apparently did not perform very well. However there is a new round coming up for such devices, see [3] for a critical article on consumer BCI.

On the fun side I found a number of older videos that look at future technology predictions- see the videos for yourself:

• Home Shopping in 1999 (from 1967): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uO58SGiYwwo
  
• 1999 AD Kitchen of the Future (from 1967): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFgVTUle_EM 
  
• AT&T 1993 "You Will" Ads: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZb0avfQme8
  
• Vision of year 2000 from year 1957: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I7XYXRKIqeY
  

http://www.paleofuture.com one is a site that has an amazing (and largely funny) selection of predictions. There is a more serious - but nevertheless - very entertaining article on predictions for computing and ICT by Friedemann Mattern: Hundert Jahre Zukunft - Visionen zum Computer- und Informationszeitalter (hundred years future - predictions of the computing and information age) [4].

[1] Sutherland's Ph.D. Thesis, Sketchpad, A Man-Machine Graphical Communication System. 1963 http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/techreports/UCAM-CL-TR-574.pdf

[2] The Atari Mindlink. http://www.atarimuseum.com/videogames/consoles/2600/mindlink.html

[3] Emmet Cole. Direct Brain-to-Game Interface Worries Scientists. Wired. 09.05.07. http://www.wired.com/medtech/health/news/2007/09/bci_games

[4] Friedemann Mattern.Hundert Jahre Zukunft - Visionen zum Computer- und Informationszeitalter. Die Informatisierung des Alltags - Leben in smarten Umgebungen, Springer Verlag 2007. http://www.vs.inf.ethz.ch/publ/papers/mattern2007-zukunft.pdf