What's New:
ACM SIGMobile Conference
IEE Workshop on Personal technologies
Proceedings from the First Workshop on HCI and Mobile Devices
The 2nd Workshop will be in Edinburgh as part of the Interact'99 conference. Here are the preliminary details.
Brief report of the first workshop:
There were just over 70 delegates from eight countries and we had to turn people away almost a fortnight before the event.
Approximately 50% were academics, 50% were commercial researchers and practitioners.
The main positive points were that it was the first focussed meeting in this area. It provided a broad coverage of the main issues. These included the failure of traditional approaches to HCI; especially the difficulty of defining the concept of 'task' given diverse and changing physical contexts of interaction. It is very difficult to accurately form requirements for future generations of devices that will change the ways that we work AND play. This led on to a discussion of lab based evaluations of innovative input and output technology (eg audio events and key gloves) given that the lab has to abstract away from the details of `real world' interaction. There were several case studies of mobile 'field work' which raised questions about appropriate evaluation techniques; you may have to follow the worker some distance to perform your validation.
The main negative points were that we need to increase time for discussion in the future meetings. We also need to encourage participation from service providers and also researchers in the areas of speech input as well as infra red communications. Finally, there needs to be a means for commercial participation without the overheads associated with the full preparation of an academic paper. Panel sessions are one way to achieve this and increase scope for discussion.
Details from the First Workshop?
Aims and objectives:
The last 3-4 years have seen the development and marketing of a vast array of mobile computing devices.
These systems herald what we believe to be a new era of `ubiquitious' computing.
Unfortunately, there has been relatively little work into the development of effective interaction techniques for these systems.
The utility of these devices is reduced by the problems of accessing information resources through tiny displays.
This can be especially problematic where that information is `perishable'; where its value is only relevant to particular locations and times.
The utility of mobile devices is further reduced by the problems of manipulating miniaturised versions of `standard' keyboards and pointing devices.
Users are also forced to perform numerous, delicate operations by selecting very small icons.
We are concerned to provide a forum for academics and practitioners to discuss the challenges and potential solutions for effective interaction with mobile systems.
Chris Johnson Department of Computing Science, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, G12 8QJ, Scotland. email: johnson@dcs.glasgow.ac.uk tel.: +44 141 330 6053 fax.: +44 141 330 4913