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Human Interaction with Advanced Mobile Services and Intelligent Environments (INTERACT)
Professor Kari Kuutti, Department of Information Processing Science, University of Oulu
Research Professor Heikki Ailisto, VTT
kari.kuutti(at)oulu.fi, heikki.ailisto(at)vtt.fi
http://www.infotech.oulu.fi/interact
Background and Mission
The research group consists of researchers from the Department of Information Processing Science and the VTT Advanced Interactive Systems Research Field.
Currently, Human Computer Interaction (HCI) research is facing ever increasing challenges, with advanced mobile services and intelligent environments moving from research laboratories towards everyday use. The problems with WAP acceptance are a good example of the dangers of designing without a user-centred approach: despite the success in realising the technology, commercial success remains elusive because, for the majority of potential users, “the pain is greater than the gain”. While making telephone calls and sending text messages poses only moderate requirements on the device user interfaces, the more advanced services envisioned and even partly realised today are significantly more demanding. A smoothly operating and intuitive user interface will be a fundamental element of all successful applications and an important element of competition. Mobile services may still bear some resemblance to traditional applications, but new, intelligent, adaptive environments differ considerably with respect to user interfaces, and the usefulness of old design knowledge will indeed be limited.
There are therefore a number of difficult, but interesting research problems on different levels:
- The emergent use of non-traditional interaction modalities, such as voice, gestures and gaze, sets new requirements on HCI design, and opens up totally new, unexplored possibilities.
- There is a need for advanced technological architectures that can provide the necessary HCI
- services to the user and adapt to situations.
- We do not know how to efficiently utilize small, differently sized interfaces in the realisation of advanced mobile services
- We lack efficient design methods for combinations of mobile devices and traditional services, not to mention methods to design interfaces for intelligent environments.
- Although there is a body of knowledge for user-centred HCI design, we do not know which parts of that knowledge are directly applicable and what else might be needed.
The user experience in mobile networks and intelligent environments will be less controlled than with traditional applications. This is due to the fragmentation of service provision, which will be composed from parts offered by different providers. Ensuring that this collection will not have a detrimental effect on the user experience is a totally novel design challenge. Moreover, the increase in the number of stakeholders in service provision will make the organising of HCI design even more complex.
Human interfaces and experience with advanced mobile services and intelligent environments will be one of the major design challenges when the systems are moved from research laboratories towards everyday use. The INTERACT research group is addressing this problem area on a number of levels which support each other. At the level of basic research, the group is modelling the use situation of advanced services and intelligent environments, and correspondingly envisioning and constructing novel technology architectures needed to provide the optimal user experience in those environments in a controlled way. The group is also developing and experimenting with novel forms of enhanced multimodal interaction for devices and environments. Moreover, the group is developing new methods and techniques for design interaction in intelligent environments, and constructing test environments where both the interaction techniques and design methods can be tested and validated. Finally, the group is developing methods for the evaluation and improvement of HCI design processes in product development organisations.
Scientific Progress
During 2007 the main scientific results were
- A model to analyse user self-development of information systems (Anna-Liisa Syrjänen’s doctoral dissertation)
- A reference model for high value added mobile services (Zheng Xiaosong’s doctoral dissertation)
- A novel touch-based interface for elderly users (VTT group)
- A MapLens system for interaction with paper maps with mobile devices (Antti Juustila). The MapLens system, developed in the IPCity EU project together with Graz Technical University and the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology, allows a normal paper map be annotated with multimedia. An image of a map from a phone’s camera is analysed and the position of the mobile phone over the map identified, so that multmedia annotations can be shown.
- A WebMapMedia system for participatory urban design. The system, developed in the Academy of Finland project Studio’n’site allows citizens’ participate in an urban design project by sending in location-related textual or image comments using a map-based interface of a www-system. The system has been experimented on with good results together with the Laboratory of Urban Planning at the Department of Architecture.
Exploitation of Results
Dissemination of results - The group has been publishing actively, and additionally the members of the group have been giving talks, presentations and demonstrations on a number of occasions both in Finland and abroad, in both academic and industry-led events. Several short visits from other groups have also been hosted, including visits from Japanese and US delegations.
Industry cooperation - Prof. Kuutti gave a special full-day seminar for Nokia interface design managers in April. A number of Master’s theses have been supervised in cooperation with industry.
Personnel
|
professors & doctors |
14 |
|
graduate students |
13 |
|
total |
27 |
|
person years (univ. 63% VTT 37%) |
16 |
External Funding
|
Source |
EUR |
|
Academy of Finland |
85 000 |
|
Ministry of Education |
90 000 |
|
EU + other international |
130 000 |
|
total |
305 000 |
Doctoral Theses
Selected Publications
Alahuhta P, Löthman H & Helaakoski H (2007) Experiences in developing mobile applications using the Apricot Agent Platform. Personal and Ubiquitous Computing 11(1): 1-10.
Ermes, M, Parkka J, Mäntyjärvi J & Korhonen I (2008) Detection of daily activities and sports with wearable sensors in controlled and uncontrolled conditions. IEEE Transactions on Information Technology in Biomedicine 12(1): 20-26.
Friedewald M, Vildjiounaite E, Punie Y & Wright D (2007) Privacy, identity and security in ambient intelligence: A scenario analysis. Telematics and Informatics 24(1): 15-29.
Isomursu P, Hinman R, Isomursu M & Spasojevic M (2007) Metaphors for the mobile Internet. Journal of Knowledge, Technology & Policy 20(4).
Isomursu M, Tähti M, Väinämö S & Kuutti K (2007) Experimental evaluation of five methods for collecting emotions in field settings with mobile applications. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies65(4): 404-418.
Martikainen O & Naumov V (2007) Communication performance in knowledge networks. Information Technologies and Control (3-4): 2-7.
Vildjiounaite E & Kyllönen V (2007) Protecting user privacy in context-dependent personalized retrieval of information, multimedia and home media. WSEAS Transactions on Information Science and Applications 4(3): 492-499.
Zheng X & Pulli P (2007) Improving mobile services desing: a QFD approach. Computing and Informatics 26(4): 369-381.
Häikiö J, Isomursu M, Matinmikko T, Wallin A, Ailisto H & Huomo T (2007) Touch-based user interface for elderly users. 9th International Conference on Human Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services, MobileHCI’07, September 9-12, Singapore, 81-88.