Social user interfaces

Abstract

Current technological and research developments pertaining to Ambient Intelligence, Ubiquitous Computing or Pervasive Computing share an impetus towards embedding computation in our social and physical environments making it an inseparable part of our daily lives. One consequence of embedding technology in this way in our everyday life is that today's user-system interaction paradigm will change substantially. Interaction is expected to be continuous, prolonged, and tied in with the physical spaces that surround us. It will involve a disparate range of interaction devices, affect social interactions and will often bridge physical and virtual worlds. Additionally, technology is expected to become more intelligent and to adapt itself to our needs and the dynamics of the environments we live in. To make this possible, AmI systems will need to be equipped with sensorial and reasoning capabilities. One consequence of confronting users with, for example, home dialog systems that have perceptive and reasoning capabilities is that additional expectations are created. Since people already have a tendency to attribute human like properties to interactive systems (Reeves and Nass 1996), it is expected that implementing human like properties in such home dialog systems will have an important impact on the user-system interaction. Similar observations can be made for other environments, e.g., smart office environments, (virtual) collaborative work or meeting environments and smart educational environments. In this chapter we look at user-system interaction from this particular viewpoint. How can we include aspects of human social interaction in the interface and what difference will it make? We will investigate this in the paradigm of Ambient Intelligence. That is, we assume that there are sensors that perceive the user or inhabitant of a smart environment and that the information that is obtained from the sensors is being processed, fused, and interpreted in order to give useful, acceptable, and effective responses, taking into account characteristics of the user (interests, personality, moods, emotions, background, culture). Hence, in this chapter we look at smart environments to see how social interaction can be improved rather than simply the efficiency of the interaction. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.