Mobile Interaction with the Real World

I found The Mobile Phone as a Universal Interaction Device – Are There Limits? (part of the proceedings pdf) by Christof Roduner particularly interesting:

This project prototyped two interactions with consumer products where the mobile phone replaced some of the physical interfaces that otherwise would have been part of the product themselves. They tested out the suitability of the mobile phone for these kinds of interactions.



Information Provision
When an exceptional situation occurs, the appliance can support the user by providing
detailed information on his or her personal mobile device. For example, by opening the relevant section in the appliance’s manual on the user’s mobile device, a laser printer could instruct him or her to check the network cabling instead of just showing an error code on its integrated display.

User Interface Provision
Functions that are rarely needed and are thus not easily accessible through the actual
appliance’s user interface are offloaded onto the user’s personal mobile device, without completely replacing the traditional user interace. In this way, a GUI based on familiar widgets can be built to, for example, program an oven’s timer, while keeping the haptic user interface for the everyday tasks of switching the oven on and off.

(See also Ilario Musio (ETH Zurich) and Alan Ganguillet (School of Art and Design Zurich) for the implementation and visual design of the demonstrator.)

All information about the workshop, the papers and the proceedings are available at the website of the workshop http://www.hcilab.org/events/mirw2006/.