Equator technical innovation in physical and digital life A PROPOSAL FOR THE FORMATION OF AN INTERDISCIPLINARY RESEARCH COLLABORATION Case for Support Professor David May, University of Bristol Dr Matthew Chalmers, University of Glasgow Professor Tom Rodden, Lancaster University Professor Steve Benford, The University of Nottingham Professor Gillian Crampton-Smith, Royal College of Art Professor Wendy Hall, University of Southampton Dr Yvonne Rogers, University of Sussex Professor Mel Slater, University College London Summary The central goal of the Equator IRC is to promote the integration of the physical with the digital. In particular, we are concerned with uncovering and supporting the variety of possible relationships between physical and digital worlds. Our objective in doing this is to improve the quality of everyday life by building and adapting technologies for a range of user groups and application domains. Examples include: − combining physical and digital cities to promote people’s understanding of the world within which they live, and to enhance wayfinding and access to physical and digital artefacts, information and people. − creating new forms of play, performance and entertainment that combine the physical and digital so as to promote learning, participation and creativity. − exploring how new technologies that merge the physical and the digital can support activities outside of the workplace, including maintaining family and social relationships in the home, and supporting work in the open air. Meeting this objective will require us to address fundamental and long-term research challenges. We will conduct research into new classes of device that link the physical and the digital, including embedded devices that are integrated into physical environments, information appliances that combine computing functionality with purpose designed physical objects, and wearable devices that are carried on the person. In turn, these activities will be supported by fundamental research into adaptive software architectures that can knit together heterogeneous collections of such devices, as well as new design and evaluation methods that draw together approaches from social science, cognitive science and art and design. To achieve these goals we have brought together a group of the UK’s leading, internationally known, academic researchers in the design, development and study of interactive technologies for everyday settings. All have a track record of working in interdisciplinary teams, and many have worked together and continue to do so on current EPSRC, ESRC and EU funded projects. The expertise of the group is rich and diverse: it includes hardware engineering (Bristol), computer graphics (UCL), mobile multimedia systems (Lancaster, UCL), art and design (RCA), software development and system architecture (Lancaster, Nottingham, Southampton, UCL), information sciences (Glasgow) and social and cognitive sciences (Sussex, Lancaster, Nottingham). The Equator vision As digital technologies have matured, they have begun to move beyond the workplace to other domains in our everyday lives: our homes, neighbourhoods, what we wear and carry with us. At the same time, the phenomenal spread of the Internet has enabled the public to participate in a variety of new online experiences, such as email, distributed hypermedia and virtual reality. The current convergence of interactive digital systems, networks and mobile devices is further transforming the ways that we carry out our everyday life, e.g. how we entertain ourselves, work, shop and converse. We increasingly undertake everyday activities and share our lives with others in both physical and digital environments, continually stepping over the border between the two. Many actions in our physical environment have analogues and effects in the digital, and vice versa. It becomes possible to link geographically distant people, to access information from remote locations, and to draw from the recorded past to support ongoing activity and plans for the future. For example, a car driver checks her location, plan, and route recommendations on a dashboard display, circumventing a traffic jam while hardly aware of the system of computers and satellites in the background. An Internet shopper chooses an item from a web site, triggering a chain of events in the physical and digital worlds that end with a physical book being delivered to their home. Despite these ongoing developments, there are still many everyday activities where the boundary between physical environments and digital space is often over-complex and poorly designed. For example, many people are frustrated with the digital information found in public kiosks when trying to find their way in a strange city. The physical technology can be cumbersome and awkward to use, while the online information is often difficult to navigate and understand. In contrast, our vision is to allow people to pass between the physical and the digital so readily that the boundary becomes just a line on a map, rather than an obstacle to their activities, goals and desires. The physical and the digital need to be seen as integrated and interdependent aspects of our everyday world, rather than disjoint and independent spheres of activity. Creating such a seamless integration, however, is difficult. It requires long term research into new models of interaction, new interface and distribution technologies, new applications and new methods. Equator objectives and results To achieve our vision of the universal integration of the physical and digital worlds we have set ourselves the following objectives: 1. To develop new theories and concepts to understand the interplay between the physical and the digital. 2. To create devices to establish new relationships between the physical and the digital. 3. To develop new forms of adaptive infrastructure to support heterogeneous collections of these devices. 1 4. To inform this research with direct experience of how these technologies can be used to support interaction, exploration, communication, play and learning by real users in a variety of everyday settings. 5. To generate design and evaluation methods appropriate to these technologies based on a combination of approaches from cognitive science, social science and art and design. 6. To disseminate the results of this research to the international research community, the IT industry, user groups, and the general public. The main outcomes of Equator will be technological advances, new applications, methodological advances, and advances in our understanding of the relationships between the physical and the digital. Technological advances – Equator will produce new techniques for linking the physical and the digital that move beyond the design assumptions inherent in the current personal desktop computer, including: − Virtual environments that link to physical environments in new ways, for example through the integration of video and audio and other sensory data. − Embedded devices that support new forms of reactive and traversable public display that embed digital spaces into everyday physical spaces. − Information appliances that link digital information to purpose designed physical objects. − Wearable computers that provide continuous and parallel access to physical environments and digital spaces as people move about. − Adaptive middleware that supports large collections of heterogeneous devices that link the physical to the digital. New applications – Equator will create new applications that focus on different aspects of people’s everyday lives: − Community – applications to enhance existing physical communities and to create new forms of digital community. − Creativity – applications to support self-expression. − Education – applications to provide learning experiences for all ages. − Leisure – applications to increase public participation in new forms of art, performance and entertainment. − Home – applications to enhance domestic life, especially support for family and social relationships. − Work – applications that focus on work outside of the conventional workplace, for example in the open air. Methodological advances – Equator will generate a suite of interdisciplinary design and evaluation methods, including: − User studies– interventionist-based methods from art and design will be used together with ethnographic techniques from social science to understand everyday practice and to inform the design process. − Envisionment techniques–drawing on ideas from the visual and conceptual arts, new techniques will be evolved that engage users’ imaginations with impressionistic design proposals in order to support the early stages of design. − Evaluation methods – experimental techniques from cognitive science, naturalistic observation techniques from social science, and dramatic interventions from the arts will be integrated to help understand users’ experiences. Advances in understanding - Equator will produce new understandings of the relationships between the physical and the digital. These will be based on the need to anticipate scenarios of use in which the technologies will be embedded. Our collective experience has been that current methods of ‘forecasting’ the value of new technologies have been of very limited success. We shall overcome this problem by synthesising the conceptual and methodological strengths of the partners in cognitive and social science, design practice and system engineering and implementation to consider innovation at several