Sensory augmented computing

Abstract

The vision of Ambient Intelligence is to embed computing and communication capabilities into nearly everything, namely the environment, objects, or even clothing. Great advances in mobile computing, communication, and device technology for example allow to access a large variety of computing services without the constraint of sitting in front of a desktop computer or being in a particular smart or intelligent environment. However, many research challenges remain. A particularly challenging research topic within Ambient Intelligence is the question of how to interact unobtrusively and in a seamless way with users. Quite obviously current desktop interaction techniques do not generalize well to the more versatile settings of Ambient Intelligence. In order to realize the vision of Ambient Intelligence context awareness is often seen as a means to make the computing tasks sensitive to the situation and the user's needs. Ultimately, context awareness may support and enable seamless interaction and communication between human users and ambient intelligent computing environments. The notion of implicit interaction, for example, suggests to sense "an action, performed by the user that is not primarily aimed to interact with a computerized system but which such a system understands as input" (Schmidt 1999). That means, the user interacts with physical objects in a natural way, but a computer system also can extract inputs from these actions. Others such as Hinckley et al. (2000), Schmidt et al. (1999), Rekimoto (1996) and Harrison et al. (1998) propose physical interaction, e.g., tilting a device for configuring a device's functionality, as new and convenient forms of interaction for mobile user scenarios. System input generated from interaction with physical objects has been used for coupling physical objects with computer applications such as tangible user interfaces (Ishii and Ullmer 1997), computer-assisted furniture assembly (Antifakos et al. 2002), tracking a patient's medicine cabinet (Siegemund and Flotifakos 2003) or workflow monitoring in a chemical lab (Arnstein et al. 2002). © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.