Charting past, present, and future research in ubiquitous computing

TLDR

Ubiquitous computing extends computing into everyday physical environments, driving research on natural interfaces, context‑aware applications, and automated capture while raising scale, privacy, security, and evaluation challenges that reshape human‑computer interaction. The authors aim to chart future research directions in ubiquitous computing by reviewing past achievements and proposing everyday computing as a new area focused on scaling interaction over time. They propose designing for continuous interaction by addressing interruption, re‑entry, temporal representation, and associative storage, and by reviewing prior work to identify remaining research challenges. They identify everyday computing as a promising research area that scales interaction with respect to time.

Abstract

The proliferation of computing into the physical world promises more than the ubiquitous availability of computing infrastructure; it suggest new paradigms of interaction inspired by constant access to information and computational capabilities. For the past decade, application-driven research on abiquitous computing (ubicomp) has pushed three interaction themes: natural interfaces, context-aware applications, and automated capture and access . To chart a course for future research in ubiquitous computing, we review the accomplishments of these efforts and point to remaining research challenges. Research in ubiquitious computing implicitly requires addressing some notion of scale, whether in the number and type of devices, the physical space of distributed computing, or the number of people using a system. We posit a new area of applications research, everyday computing, focussed on scaling interaction with respect to time. Just as pushing the availiability of computing away from the traditional desktop fundamentally changes the relationship between humans and computers, providing continuous interaction moves computing from a localized tool to a constant companion. Designing for continous interaction requires addressing interruption and reumption of intreaction, representing passages of time and providing associative storage models. Inherent in all of these interaction themes are difficult issues in the social implications of ubiquitous computing and the challenges of evaluating> ubiquitious computing research. Although cumulative experience points to lessons in privacy, security, visibility, and control, there are no simple guidelines for steering research efforts. Akin to any efforts involving new technologies, evaluation strategies form a spectrum from technology feasibility efforts to long-term use studies—but a user-centric perspective is always possible and necessary