Guest Editors' Introduction: Rapid Prototyping for Ubiquitous Computing

A s most of us are aware, recent technological advances offer tremendous promise in bringing the benefits of rich computational capabilities to dynamic, diverse situations in everyday life. However, much of this promise remains unfulfilled. We can’t yet use this enormous computing power to facilitate our day-to-day lives and regularly deliver compelling ubiquitous computing applications. Our situation is analogous to the early 1980s and the then-new concept of GUIs. We could see that GUIs had potential, but building any new application with them was a major undertaking, and building good interfaces seemed extremely difficult. To overcome these barriers, researchers and developers created a series of tools and methodologies over time to explore many alternatives quickly with minimal effort. Those prototyping tools and techniques had a much-needed enabling factor that contributed greatly to the success of what we now consider traditional interfaces. Today, building ubicomp systems for realistic scenarios is difficult. Compared to simpler, more mature interface domains, development tools and methods are still at an early stage, and development is expensive, significantly hindering our progress. Often it’s not clear in early development phases whether a system is feasible or acceptable to potential users. As in earlier HCI efforts, progress in prototyping methods and tools will be central to overcoming the barriers to widespread development and deployment of ubicomp. This need is particularly strong owing to our envisioned systems’ high-level complexity, the implementation challenges of using many small and distributed devices, the multidisciplinary questions involved, and the need to understand and evaluate the full impact of the systems we build.