The Stick-e Note Architecture: Extending the Interface Beyond the User

This paper proposes a redefinition of the human-computer interface, extending its boundaries to encompass interaction with the user's physical environment. This extension to the interface enables computers to become aware of their context of use and intelligently adapt their activities and interface to suit their current circumstances. Context-awareness promises to greatly enhance user interfaces, but the complexity of capturing, representing and processing contextual data, presents a major obstacle to its further development. The Stick-e Note Architecture is proposed as a solution to this problem, offering a universal means of providing context-awareness through an easily understood metaphor based on the Post-It note

Sensing and visualizing spatial relations of mobile devices

Location information can be used to enhance interaction with mobile devices. While many location systems require instrumentation of the environment, we present a system that allows devices to measure their spatial relations in a true peer-to-peer fashion. The system is based on custom sensor hardware implemented as USB dongle, and computes spatial relations in real-time. In extension of this system we propose a set of spatialized widgets for incorporation of spatial relations in the user interface. The use of these widgets is illustrated in a number of applications, showing how spatial relations can be employed to support and streamline interaction with mobile devices

Adding generic contextual capabilities to wearable computers

Context-awareness has an increasingly important role to play in the development of wearable computing systems. In order to better define this role we have identified four generic contextual capabilities: sensing, adaptation, resource discovery, and augmentation. A prototype application has been constructed to explore how some of these capabilities could be deployed in a wearable system designed to aid an ecologist's observations of giraffe in a Kenyan game reserve. However, despite the benefits of context-awareness demonstrated in this prototype, widespread innovation of these capabilities is currently stifled by the difficulty in obtaining the contextual data. To remedy this situation the Contextual Information Service (CIS) is introduced. Installed on the user's wearable computer, the CIS provides a common point of access for clients to obtain, manipulate and model contextual information independently of the underlying plethora of data formats and sensor interface mechanisms

LightSense: enabling spatially aware handheld interaction devices

devices. The outside-in approach tracks the light source and streams the data to the phone over Bluetooth. a) A wall-mounted map with embedded light sensors provides hotspot tracking. b) A table-top setup tracks the phone with a camera through a diffused glass surface. c) The spatially aware device augments a physical map with a detailed interactive road map of the area of interest. The vision of spatially aware handheld interaction devices has been hard to realize. The difficulties in solving the general tracking problem for small devices have been addressed by several research groups and examples of issues are performance, hardware availability and platform independency. We present Light-Sense, an approach that employs commercially available components to achieve robust tracking of cell phone LEDs, without any modifications to the device. Cell phones can thus be promoted to interaction and display devices in ubiquitous installations of systems such as the ones we present here. This could enable a new generation of spatially aware handheld interaction devices that would unobtrusively empower and assist us in our everyday tasks. CR Categories: H.5.1 [Multimedia Information Systems]: Artificial, augmented, and virtual realities; H.5.2. [User Interfaces]: Graphical user interfaces, Input devices and strategies; I.3.6 [Methodology and Techniques]: Interaction techniques