‘Head up’ interaction: can we break our addiction to the screen and keyboard?

Kurzbeschreibung

Mobile user interfaces are commonly based on techniques developed for desktop computers in the 1970s, often including buttons, sliders, windows and progress bars. These can be hard to use on the move which then limits the interactions, applications and services that can be provided on mobile devices. This seminar will look at the possibility of moving away from these kinds of interactions to ones more suited to mobile devices and their dynamic contexts of use where users need to be able to look where they are going, carry shopping bags and hold on to children. I will present a range of multimodal (audio and haptic) interactions that we have developed which can be used eyes and hands free, and allow users to interact in a ‘head up’ way. I will present some of the work we have done on input using pressure, and gestures done with fingers, wrist and head, along with work on output using non-speech audio, 3D sound and tactile displays in applications such as text entry, camera phone interfaces and navigation. I will talk about how we designed these for mobile use and the evaluation techniques we have developed to assess whether they are effective or not for users on the move.

Vita

Stephen Brewster has been a professor of human-computer interaction in the department of computing science at the University of Glasgow since 2001. His research focuses on multimodal human computer interaction, or using multiple sensory modalities (particularly hearing, touch and smell) to create richer interactions between human and computer. His work has a strong experimental focus, applying perceptual research to practical situations. He has shown that novel use of multimodality can significantly improve usability in a wide range of situations, for mobile users, visually-impaired people, older users and in medical applications.

Letzte änderung am 27.05.2009