Context Aware UIs

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Context Aware UIs

• Interfaces that leverage implicit input

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Agenda

• Questions
• What is context?
• Context-aware applications
• Examples
• Challenges
• Architectural solutions

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What is context?

• Any information that can be used to characterize
  the situation of an entity
• Who, what, where, when
• Why is it important?
• Information, usually implicit, that applications
  do not have access to
• Its input that you dont get in a GUI

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How to design for?

• One approach
• Physical behaviors have implicit application
  meaning
• Add sensors to devices / environments to
  facilitate larger class of physical inputs

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Example tour guides

• Very popular theme
• Location is an easy piece of context
• G. Abowd et al. Cyberguide A mobile
  context-aware tour guide. Balzer/ACM Wireless
  Networks, Vol. 3(5), 1997, pp. 421-433.

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How Cyberguide worked
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Example Navi-Cam

• Context-aware interaction

location
identity
objects
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Natural Context-Aware

• Augmented Reality

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Location, identity, objects

• Design issues
• reliability
• timeliness
• social

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Challenges

• More context
• Who, What, Where, When, Why

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Why is this hard?

• Steps
• Acquisition
• Representation
• Interpretation
• Storage
• Delivery
• Reaction
• Most of these steps repeated in all development.

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How to better support on a device

• Sensor platform
• Software architecture
• Interaction techniques

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Sensing technique for mobile interaction

• Sensor platform

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What Can Be Sensed?
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Software Architecture

• How is sensor data delivered to apps?

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Interaction Techniques

• Voice memo detection
• Display mode detection
• Tilt scrolling
• contrast compensation
• interaction with display mode
• Power management

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Beyond handhelds

• Handling context-awareness in the more general
  sense.
• D. Salber, A. Dey G. Abowd. The Context
  Toolkit Aiding the development of
  context-enabled applications. CHI 99, pp.
  434-441.

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Early work on context support

• Bill Schilit (now at Intel Research)
• While at Xerox PARC, main software architect of
  PARCTab
• Location-aware rules for applicationbehavior

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The Context Toolkit

• Anind Dey (now at CMU)
• GUI widget separates details of presentation
  behavior from application semantics
• By analogy, a context widget is defined to
  separate details of sensor acquisition from
  application reaction
• callbacks, attributes, encapsulation, abstraction

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And many others

• Too many to list
• It is a solved problem (?)
• But new problems arise

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Upcoming

• Wednesday Capture access Gregory Abowd
• Friday Privacy by design Carlos Jensen
• Attendance is mandatory