"Invisible Interfaces".

Abstract:
While computers have become qualitatively smaller, cheaper, and more powerful, we still interact with them using techniques that differ very little from those of two decades ago. While at Xerox PARC, the "Extreme UI" group was exploring ways to enrich our connection with the computer: to investigate new interaction techniques which use everyday skills and the physical affordances of the devices themselves. By integrating the natural affordances of the device(s) with the natural gestures we already use, we hope to lower the cognitive effort required for interaction; to make the application interface "invisible".

In this talk, we'll describe two of our investigations. The first effort, "Embodied User Interfaces", is an attempt to describe and categorize this emerging UI space, so that we can derive and evaluate design principles. We'll present examples from our (and others) work, and show how it fits into our categorization, and the design principles we induced.

The second effort, "etags", takes advantage of the progress made in the electronic tagging industry, which allows cheap, robust, easily sensed IDs to be unobtrusively placed on almost any object. By augmenting handheld computers to detect these IDs, a variety of enhanced interactions become possible.

This talk will be a combination of slides and video demonstrating these techniques in action. This work was done by the "Extreme UI" team at Xerox PARC (Ken Fishkin, Anuj Gujar, Beverly Harrison, and Roy Want). See http://www.parc.xerox.com/istl/members/fishkin/pubs.html for papers.