The mobile user experience -
how boundaries between devices
are starting to disappear
Lars Erik Holmquist

Lars Erik Holmquist is leader of the Future Applications Lab at the Viktoria Institute in Göteborg, Sweden, where he currently focuses on research related to mobile media and ubiquitous displays. His interests span from human-computer interaction and information visualization to ubiquitous computing. He chaired the UbiComp Conference in 2002 and is an associate editor of the Springer journal Personal and Ubiquitous Computing. Holmquist has experimented with ways to break the isolation between users of portable computers at the Future Applications Lab for several years. Read his receiver article to learn more about the Lab's goal to create seamless interaction between mobile devices.
 
 
 
When research scientist Mark Weiser formulated the vision of "ubiquitous computing" in the early 1990s, he observed that today's desktop computer is "isolated and isolating from the overall situation". Rather than being part of the world of shared activities in which we all live, it requires our full attention and fails to get out of the way of the work. Weiser wanted to construct an alternative form of computer that would be so natural to use that it would in effect disappear from our consciousness. While the interface of the desktop computer is based on the rigid and stationary one-to-one relationship that deskbound secretaries used to have with their typewriter, tomorrow's computer should be as easy to pick up and use as it is to pick up a pen and jot down a note on a scrap of paper.

Today, phones, laptops, Gameboys and MP3 players allow us to take our personal communication and media experience with us everywhere. But in many ways, the mobile user is just as isolated from the outside world as the desktop user used to be – or even more so! The bus passenger playing Doom on a PlayStation Portable is as lost in his own world as the person who plays the game staring into a screen in his bedroom. The music listener walking down the street can be so totally cut off from the outside world that it might even be dangerous, since we rely so much on our hearing to navigate traffic (say what you want about the desktop computer, at least it has never been a traffic hazard!). Even now, when wireless networking is starting to be introduced to many mobile devices, there is surprisingly little in the mobile computer experience that is different from stationary use. How can mobile media become more integrated with the everyday world of which they are a part – and is this actually what we want?

At the Future Applications Lab at the Viktoria Institute, we have experimented for several years with ways to break the isolation between users of portable computers. An early experiment, circa 1998, was the Hummingbird. It was a little gadget you could carry in your pocket that would maintain a constant radio connection to other devices nearby. As soon as somebody you knew was in the vicinity – less than 100 metres or so away – your Hummingbird would "hum", thus alerting you to the presence of others, even if they were in a different room or even on a different floor. In addition to the sound, you could see the names of people nearby on the Hummingbird's display. You could even see the names of those who had recently been around, but whom you might not have noticed at the time, letting them leave a sort of virtual trace. The Hummingbird created a "sixth sense" that let you "see" people through walls and ceilings, illustrating how even a simple piece of mobile technology could support a sense of presence and awareness of others.
 
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