Issues for Proximate User Interfaces

In the future world of ubiquitous computing, interactive devices ranging in size from pocket to wall will be strewn about the user’s environment. Display and digitizer surfaces will be merged so that users appear to interact directly on display surfaces using an electronic pen or touchscreen. Within some size range of these devices, and for some tasks, traditional “widget” style interfaces may suffice. However, for devices at the extremes of the size range, such as the Xerox Liveboard, widget style interfaces break down. When interacting directly on a very large display surface, static interface widgets will be so situated as to be useless, out of reach on the opposite side of the board, near the ceiling, or near the floor. In this paper, we discuss issues and solutions to this problem and present a prototype example of a proximate user interface.