Traditionally, computer interfaces have been confined to conventional displays and focused activities. However, as displays become embedded throughout our environment and daily lives, increasing numbers of them must operate on the periphery of our attention. Peripheral displays can allow a person to be aware of information while she is attending to some other primary task or activity. We present the Peripheral Displays Toolkit (PTK), a toolkit that provides structured support for managing user attention in the development of peripheral displays. Our goal is to enable designers to explore different approaches to managing user attention. The PTK supports three issues specific to conveying information on the periphery of human attention. These issues are abstraction of raw input, rules for assigning notification levels to input, and transitions for updating a display when input arrives. Our contribution is the investigation of issues specific to attention in peripheral display design and a toolkit that encapsulates support for these issues. We describe our toolkit architecture and present five sample peripheral displays demonstrating our toolkit’s capabilities.

Abstract. Our goal in this paper is to clearly delineate how households currently manage communication and coordination information; this will provide practitioners and designers with a more complete view of information in the home, and how technology embedded within the home can augment communication and coordination of home inhabitants. Through contextual interviews, we identify five types of communicative information: reminders and alerts, awareness and scheduling, notices, visual displays, and resource coordination. These information types are created and understood by home inhabitants as a function of contextual locations within the home. The choice of location is important to the functioning of the home, and is highly nuanced. Location helps home inhabitants understand time: when others need to interact with that information, as well as ownership: who this information belongs to and who should receive it. It also provides them with awareness of the actions and locations of others. These findings resonate and further elaborate on work by other researchers. 1

Traditionally, computer interfaces have been confined to conventional displays and focused activities. However, as displays become embedded throughout our environment and daily lives, increasing numbers of them must operate on the periphery of our attention. Peripheral displays, ubiquitous computing devices that present information without demanding attention, are difficult to build, particularly because they must dynamically manage the cognitive load they place on users. We present a toolkit that aids the development of peripheral displays. We determined three key issues for the toolkit, based on a survey of existing peripheral displays and cognitive science literature: abstraction of data, selection of notification levels, and transitions between notification levels. Our contribution is the investigation of these key characteristics, combined with a toolkit that encapsulates them and supports the design of displays that focus on these issues. We describe our toolkit architecture, and present five sample peripheral displays demonstrating our toolkit’s capabilities.

Re-finding information is commonly cited as a problem on the Web. One reason re-finding on the Web is difficult is that while people rely on a considerable amount of context to return to information (e.g., the original path taken to it), the Web makes no guarantee that the context will remain static. The Re:Search Engine is designed to help people return to information in the dynamic environment of the Web by maintaining consistency in the search results it returns across time. For example, if Connie, while looking to purchase a Global Positioning System, found several systems she liked via a search for “GPS”, she would expect to be able to use the same query to locate the exact same systems again. However, simply returning the original result list when she re-issues the query might omit newly available GPS systems that she would like to see. The ideal result list would contain both the systems Connie remembers having seen and high quality new systems. Because people tend to remember little of what is presented in a result list, when a person repeats a query, the Re:Search Engine can preserve what is remembered about the original result set while still presenting new information.

This chapter discusses displays that sit on the periphery of a user's attention. Many public displays of information that we encounter are in this category the majority of the time, including clocks, posters, and windows. Computationally enhanced variations on this theme are called peripheral displays . Our work focuses on ambient displays , a subset of peripheral displays that continuously display information to be monitored. Peripheral (and ambient) displays have the peculiar property that they are not meant to be the focus of the user's attention. Contrast this with desktop applications, which require a user's attention. In this chapter, we present a case study of two public ambient displays that we developed and evaluated. We present some lessons learned about the design of ambient displays, and conclude with a practical guide to using a modified version of heuristic evaluation that we developed as a result of designing these displays.

We present the generalized peephole metaphor, a model of interaction in augmented reality and instrumented environments. After briefly introducing previous research, which led to the model, we describe a specific scenario in which we introduce the core idea and some implications. The model nicely matches research in human perception, which is also discussed briefly. A short outlook describes our current research, of which the generalized peephole metaphor has become an integral aspect. I.

This video shows some concept sketches of applications that might be created for a living room with ubiquitous display and laser pointer interaction technology. A fully-functioning prototype of a persistent interface is also described: a language-learning tool.

Although one of the most common uses for the Internet to search for information, Web search tools often fail to connect people with what they are looking for. This is because search tools are designed to satisfy people in general, not the searcher in particular. Different individuals with different information needs often type the same search terms into a search box and expect different results. For example, the query “breast cancer” may be used by a student to find information on the disease for a fifth grade science report, and by a cancer patient to find treatment options. This thesis explores how Web search personalization can help individuals take advantage of their unique past information interactions when searching. Several studies of search behavior are presented and used to inform the design of a personalized search system that significantly improves result quality. Without requiring any extra effort from the user, the system is able to return simple breast cancer tutorials for the fifth grader’s “breast cancer” query, and lists of treatment options for the patient’s. While personalization can help identify relevant new information, new information can

Ubiquitous computing researchers suggest that technology embedded within the home can augment communication and coordination of home inhabitants. Our goal in this paper is to inform the design of effective home information systems, where we determine how households now manage communication and coordination. Through contextual interviews, we identify four types of communicative information found in homes: reminders and notes, awareness and scheduling, visual displays and alerts, and resource coordination. We found that these information types are created and understood by home inhabitants as a function of contextual locations within the home. We also found that the choice of location is highly nuanced. Location affects the time when others need to interact with that information, the meaning of that information and what needs to be done with it, and the ownership: who this information belongs to and who should receive it. Author Keywords Ubiquitous computing, home technologies.

Computing (Ubicomp) is concerned with enabling a future in which the most useful applications of such technology are feasible to build, and pleasing to use. But what is useful? What is usable? What do people actually need? These questions are only beginning to be answered partly because Ubicomp systems are more di#cult to evaluate, particularly at the early stages of design, than desktop applications.