Visiting Andreas Butz's group in Munich

Finally, I got the chance to go Munich again. On the way I took the opportunity to visit the group of Andreas Butz at LMU. Sebastian showed me his impressive Demo of interacting with large screen by touching on the see-through image from the iphone - augmented reality interaction with display, what a nice idea [1].
Yaxi presented me a visualization of music tastes of different users. I specifically liked this work as it might be well combined with Appaware, too. I also got the chance to learn about Curve [3], a vertical-horizontal interface for workspaces. Currently, it is still difficult to motivate the advantage to a screen, but I'm pretty sure they come up with compelling apps soon, as the combination of diplaying, interacting and sensing in these two dimensions is really fascinating.
Finally, I learned from Alexander about ColoPin [4], a really smart idea that combines colors and numbers in way that you can't spy on the PIN by looking over someone's shoulder.
Overall, I enjoyed the visit very much.




[1] Sebastian Boring, Dominikus Baur, Andreas Butz, Sean Gustafson, Patrick Baudisch
Touch Projector: Mobile Interaction-Through-Video
To Appear: In Proceedings of the 28th ACM International Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - CHI 2010, Atlanta, Georgia, USA, Apr. 2010
[2] Yaxi Chen, Sebastian Boring, Andreas Butz
How Last.fm Illustrates the Musical World: User Behavior and Relevant User-Generated Content To appear in Proceedings of the international workshop on Visual Interfaces to the Social and Semantic Web, VISSW 2010, Hong Kong, China, February 17. Proceedings. (bib)
[3] Raphael Wimmer, Florian Schulz, Fabian Hennecke, Sebastian Boring, Heinrich Hussmann
Curve: Blending Horizontal and Vertical Interactive Surfaces
Adjunct Proceedings of the 4th IEEE Workshop on Tabletops and Interactive Surfaces (IEEE Tabletop 2009), Banff, Canada, Nov. 2009 (bib)
[4] Alexander De Luca, Katja Hertzschuch, Heinrich Hussmann
ColorPIN - Securing PIN Entry through Indirect Input
To appear in proceedings of CHI 2010. Atlanta, GA, USA, April 10 - 15, 2010. (bib)

Digital kills real

Today I received a quite remarkable auto-reply:

Dear email sender,
I receive on a normal day around 100 emails which takes about 4 hours to read and answer. After a trip or vacation some 1000+ emails are waiting for me. I thus decided not to read all email any longer. I apologize for any inconvenience it will cause.
If you need to contact me, please do not use the phone as this is also given me similar problems and I had to switch it off.

You can always call the secretaries to leave your tel number or email address (+xxx xxxxx xxxxx) between 6:30 and 7:30am in the morning it is awfully quite and I would like to chat with you then. Later I will be too busy.

Alternatively you may want to write me a conventional letter. I would be delighted to receive one once in a while and probably even read it.

best regards

XXX

Poor guy, wasn't IT meant to make life more efficient and more effective? Now it's starting to absorb us. This is not really what I mean when aiming at "integrating the real world with the virtual world". But it's probably get worse. How can we cope with all that emails, tweets, blogs, facebook status updates? Technology can help to interweave places, things, people and information but there always only one timeline pressing ahead quickly.
However, I'm not convinced that this radical opt-out as described above should prevail - connections and relationships might break rather soon.

We probably should find ways to collapse and delete notifications that have become obsolete which is usually the most tedious part to find out after a longer absence...

Interact 2009, Uppsala - KeyNote 1: Krista Höök "Mobile life - body and interaction"

Last week I could attend Interact2009. I was really thrilled by the huge variety in the program, six tracks in parallel - quite hard to not miss the most interesting talks;)
Anyway, at least the keynotes were in the plenary and not to miss:

First Krista Höök talked about the lasting challenge of coming up with new interfaces for new environments. She set out her talk with the confession that HCI research in the past would have lost it's relevance. As it has left the ground of reality needs.

The challenge - according to her - was to design interfaces in the wild for strange environments, e.g. video dj applications that allows to stream videos from various mobile phones' cameras of the audience to the big display [1]. At that point I was not sure whether Krista was pointing a way out of the crisis or rather wanted to illustrate the status of the HCI crisis.
She emphasized the difficulties of designing something new which might be even hard to describe in words, e.g. body expression. She proposed explanatory design, a playful way of associating technology with habits. She was talking about reptile owners that treat their animals as a living exhibition and she taking that as a motivation for designing a living wallpaper that gave birth to a flower fertilized by images the users had been uploading. Krista strongly voted for the ludic society, as social would be all life is about. Later in the discussion she even clearly outlined that supporting playful entertainment would be more important than solving a murder.
I really enjoyed when she was talking about the malleable experience and introduced Mobile2.0 [2], an environment that allows everybody to become a designer of pervasive games. She used the notion of "digital handicraft for all".
Finally, she mentioned the importance of the eco-systems of drivers, namely mobile network operators vs. google vs. application design. She proposed to start with the consumers' needs when designing applications. Interestingly, she didn't want to call the users 'users' but rather 'actors', as those themselves should apps in short cycles, as they know their problems best.
That was a nice message to follow, however, I didn't really see in the examples she gave herself following that advice.

[1] Engström, A., Esbjörnsson, M. and Juhlin, O. (2008). Mobile Collaborative Live Video Mixing. In Proceedings of MobileHCI 2008. ACM Press, pp. 157-166.
[2] Holmquist, L. E. 2007. Mobile 2.0. interactions 14, 2 (Mar. 2007), 46-47.