The mobileHCI 2010 was held in the castle city of Lisbon, Portugal. It was a four-day conference including tutorials, workshops, doctoral consortiums, paper presentations, a couple of keynotes and a panel discussion.
In this post I would cover the first keynote from Patrick Baudisch.
He is a professor in Computer Science at Hasso Plattner Institute in Berlin/Potsdam and chair of the Human Computer Interaction Lab. His research focuses on the miniaturization of mobile devices and touch input.
The general theme of his keynote was about small devices and the interactions outside the device. He stated that the software instead of hardware is the solution of addressing the precision problem of touch screen and the ergonomic limitation of ‘fat finger’ problem. This was followed by a number of examples of some of his work at Microsoft and HPI about invisible interactions (and interfaces), non-visual interaction methods, etc. You can have look at the work he shared on his site.
To me the most interesting part of his talk was about the things he applied in Interaction though some usual things done in theatre. Some of them are…
Elements on stage are set in such a way that the audience always creates an imaginary whole out of just a part on the stage. For example to depict a boat only a beginning or end would be shown.
To set the directionality of the stage there is a set point of entry and exit on the stage. This is similar to the transition effects and the navigation patterns in a UI; they are always constant unless a dramatic change has to be depicted.
The direction in which the actors see and speaks gives the clue of where and to whom they are speaking. These examples were quite interesting and made me realize that Interaction can learn a lot from theatre especially when the interaction is translating into real world gestures, actions or expressions.
It was also inspiring to find out how he actually pushes his students beyond the obvious. In one of the examples, his students had to design a mobile device of a size of a 1 Euro coin. This exercise resulted in device, which were more of wearable accessories than just a gadget to talk on phone.
In all it was an engaging keynote that set the right pace for the start of the conference.
