A new workshop on Mobile Interaction with the Real World is taking place at Mobile HCI in Singapore this September.
Following the success of Mobile Interaction with the Real World; at MobileHCI 2006, we would like to continue this workshop as a forum that concentrates on mobile interactions with real world objects. Among the questions that come up in this area of research are:
• Which kinds of interactions with the real world exist?
• What technologies can be used to implement mobile interaction with the real world?
• How can real world objects and services be described?
• How should systems and services for this kind of mobile interactions be designed?
• What should these user interfaces look like?
• What does the interaction design and usability look like for mobile interaction with physical objects?
• Can these interfaces be generated automatically?
• Should real world services be defined in a standardized way (e.g. with semantic web services)?
• How can real world objects be associated with new services?
• Which issues concerning privacy and security arise from this new kind of mobile interaction?
Last year’s workshop succeeded in bringing together like-minded researchers in the areas of physical hyperlinks, Near Field Communication and mobile technology.
The deadline for submissions of workshop papers is 29 June 2007.
Related things:
- MIRW 2006 The workshop Mobile Interaction with the Real World (MIRW 2006) at Mobile HCI in Espoo was a timely gathering of practitioners concerned with similar issues: connecting the mobile phone to places and things. The......
- Hybrid World Lab I’m pleased to announce that we will be involved in the Hybrid World Lab at Mediamatic in Amsterdam from 7 – 11 May 2007: Mediamatic organizes a new workshop in which the participants develop......
- Touch at Recalling RFID I will be presenting at Recalling RFID in Amsterdam on Friday 19 and Saturday 20 October 2007. The programme includes ‘presentations and debates on RFID and digital connectivity scenarios with speakers from the industry,......
- Mobile Interaction with the Real World My short position paper “A graphic language for touch-based interactions” has been accepted to the Mobile HCI 2006 workshop Mobile Interaction with the Real World. The workshop aims to “develop an understanding of how......
3 Comments
This seems like an interesting session. However, I find the implication of technical mediation somehow opposing (a categorisation of) a ‘real’ world problematic. Proposing the distinction between ‘real’ and ‘virtual’ or ‘digital’ (or anything other word that suggests a mythical ‘other’ world in which technical mediation takes place) sets up a facile binary that elides the interesting and nuanced differences between different types of interaction/ relation that the questions posed above otherwise appear to seek to investigate. All of the experiences implied by these questions are ‘real’ thus all of those interactions being addressed in this discussion are ‘real’. Giving slightly more rigorous empirical descriptions offers a greater potential for investigation, after all - over-generalisation serves nobody. Coming from perhaps a broader angle, taking into account social sciences standpoints, might I suggest that the questions be rephrased, for example:
- What different types of interaction (between people and between people & things) are afforded or signalled by mobile technical (inter)mediation?
- What are the different types of technologies and their combinations can, or might, be used in these different modes of interaction?
- How should we go about describing these different types of technologies, their combinations, and the different modes of interaction they engender/ are engendered by? How might we articulate causality within this schema?
- What sorts of strategies for design can we work within and towards that allow for the emergence of different modes of interaction (whether intended or otherwise)?
- What should these user interfaces look like?
- Can these interfaces be generated automatically?
- Should the services we design be defined in a standardized way (e.g. with semantic web services)?
- What types of approach might be used in the interaction design and usability for mobile technically mediated interaction in different social and environmental contexts?
- How are apparently inert material objects implicated or associated with new and existing forms of mobile technically mediated interaction?
- What issues and debates concerning privacy and security have and might continue to arise from the expansion of different kinds of mobile technical interaction?
I think with these minor changes the debates possible are considerably widened and I would be very interested in taking part!
Good feedback Sam, it is particularly the term ‘real’ which doesn’t sit right. Thanks for your thoughts on the research questions, I’ll forward your post on to the organisers (I’m not in any way involved in organising the workshop).
I’m glad that you found my remarks useful, I hadn’t realised that you were not directly involved - perhaps I should have read the MIRW page more closely! I think the particular issues of how such social/spatial/technological… relations are conceptualised is an interesting point of possible discussion across (increasingly malleable) disciplinary edges that, as it broadens, will continue to provoke interesting conversations.