Digital and Physical - Interaction and Experience
- Reference number
- A3 02:119
- Start and end dates
- 020101-051231
- Amount granted
- 12 000 000 SEK
- Administrative organization
- KTH - Royal Institute of Technology
- Research area
- Information, Communication and Systems Technology
Summary
The current convergence of interactive digital systems, networks and mobile devices is transforming the ways that we carry out our everyday life, e.g. how we entertain ourselves, work, shop and converse. In contrast to the existing visions of ubiquitous computing, our vision was to recognise from the outset the variable levels of digital richness available in the world and to construct both design techniques and supporting infrastructures that recognise this variability as a fundamental feature. To achieve our vision of the integration of devices into a universe constructed of a tapestry of different regions each offering different digital capabilities we set ourselves the following basic research objectives: • To develop new theories and concepts to understand how interaction can be supported across a wide range of physical settings each offering different levels of digital support. • To generate new design and evaluation methods appropriate to these technologies based on a combination of approaches from cognitive science, social science, and art and design. • To create new devices to establish new relationships between users, activities and devices across a broad set of physical environments. • To develop new forms of adaptive infrastructure to support heterogeneous environments offering different levels of support and enabling different classes of device as they move between varied locales. Our approach to realizing these fundamental research objectives embodies a number of unique characteristics, each of which is intended to facilitate the public exposure and opportunities for uptake of the results of the work. We informed our fundamental research with direct experience of how these technologies can be used to support interaction, exploration, and communication by real users in a variety of everyday settings. These include augmented control rooms, museum settings, public spaces and homes. We designed and developed prototypes of the technologies in direct partnership with users and user communities as a means of ensuring the practical utility of our research results. In addition to disseminating the results of this research to the international research community, industry and user groups we directly engaged with the general public by placing devices within public spaces, specific work settings and domestic environments (public demonstration).