Situation Aware Computing with Wearable Computers

For most computer systems even virtual reality systems sensing techniques are a means of getting input directly from the user However wearable sensors and computers o er a unique opportunity to re direct sensing technology towards recovering more general user context Wearable computers have the potential to see as the user sees hear as the user hears and experience the life of the user in a rst person sense This increase in contextual and user information may lead to more intelligent and uid interfaces that use the physical world as part of the interface Wearable computers are excellent platforms for contextually aware applications but these applications are also necessary to use wearables to their fullest Wearables are more than just highly portable computers they perform useful work even while the wearer isn t directly interacting with the system In such environments the user needs to concentrate on his environment not on the computer interface so the wearable needs to use information from the wearer s context to be the least distracting For example imagine an interface which is aware of the user s location while being in the subway the system might alert him with a spoken summary of an e mail However during a conversation the wearable computer may present the name of a potential caller unobtrusively in the user s head up display or simply forward the call to voicemail The importance of context in communication and interface can not be overstated Phys ical environment time of day mental state and the model each conversant has of the other participants can be critical in conveying necessary information and mood An anecdote from Nicholas Negroponte s book Being Digital Negroponte illustrates this point