User Interfaces for Wearable Computers

Abstract

Over the last decades desktop computers for professional and consumer applications have become a quasi standard, both in owning them and being able to use them for various applications. Recent years are, however, dominated by a new trend in computing: The mobile use of computers. The research presented in this thesis examines user interfaces for wearable computers. Wearable computers are a special kind of mobile computers that can be worn on the body. Furthermore, they integrate themselves even more seamlessly into different activities than a mobile phone or a personal digital assistant can. The thesis investigates the development and evaluation of user interfaces for wearable computers. In particular, it presents fundamental research results as well as support- ing software tools for wearable user interface development. The main contributions of the thesis are a new evaluation method for user interfaces of wearable computers and a model-driven software toolkit to ease interface development for application developers with limited human-computer interaction knowledge. Besides presenting a prototypical implementation of the so-called WUI-Toolkit (Wear- able User Interface Toolkit), empirical results of three experiments conducted to study the management of interruptions with gesture and speech input in wearable computing are discussed. Study results allow for deriving design guidelines for forthcoming interface designs. Both, the toolkit and the evaluation method, are essential parts of a generic user interface development approach proposed in the thesis. Summing up, the research presented motivates and validates the research hypothesis that user interfaces for wearable computers are inherently different to stationary desktop interfaces as well as mobile computer interfaces and, therefore, have to be designed dif- ferently to make them usable without being a burden for humans. In connection with this, the thesis provides new contributions for the design and evaluation of wearable user interfaces, mainly in respect to a proper interruption management.