Mobile collocated interactions with wearables: past, present, and future

Abstract

This Special Issue focuses on the emerging use of wearable technologies for mobile collocated interactions. Rather than merely listing off the articles that follow, we wish to introduce this Special Issue by discussing the past, present, and future of this field in HCI through its theories, ongoing designs and research efforts, and emerging frame-works. We conclude by providing an overview of a series of workshops on the topic, and introduce the two main articles that comprise this Special Issue. Mobile collocated interactions: origins of the field Mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets were originally conceived and have traditionally been utilized for individual use. Over the last decade, research on mobile collocated interactions [1–4] has explored situations in which collocated users engage in collaborative activities using their mobile devices, thus going from personal/individ-ual toward shared/multiuser experiences and interactions. Early research in this field frequently encouraged people to share their devices to create a collective experience or reach a common goal. Various physical and social contexts of use were investigated including teamwork at the office [2], sharing media content at home [3] and outdoors [1], public expression in a theme park [5] and in a pub [3, 6], location-based mobile disaster response games [7], and sharing educational stories in rural, developing-world contexts [8]. The investigation of mobile collocated interactions began almost a decade ago when work in engineering platforms that allow designers to easily create applications for mobile groups began to emerge around 2007/2008 [2, 9, 10]. Hardware and sensing innovations coupled with the smartphone revolution and researchers' newfound ability to design, build, and deploy mobile applications provided an opportunity for HCI researchers to begin to prototype mobile collaborative group experiences. Additionally, some researchers had earlier focused on how general groupware issues such as ad-hoc group formation and floor control policies are impacted by the switch from standard group-use hardware, such as tabletop displays or interactive whiteboards, to a collec-tion of mobile devices [11, 12]. More recently researchers have looked into simple ways to bind devices together in the context of mobile collocated interactions [13, 14]. The gaming community also showed interest in understanding and designing for the mUX: The Journal of Mobile User Experience