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ing a phone call, (2) reading an email message,
and (3) playing a song. Two devices were used in
the carefully designed within-subject experiment:
Slide Rule and Pocket PC with MSP. Findings
showed that task-completion times were shorter
with Slide Rule but that participants made more
errors per trial than with the Pocket PC; most
errors were made with the playing a song-task.
Despite of this poorer performance, seven of the
10 participants preferred Slide Rule to the Pocket
PC, suggesting that the most preferred device may
not be the one with which one is most 'successful'.
Similar results have also been found in numerous
other studies (see e.g. Tractinsky & Zmiri, 2006;
Diefenbach & Hassenzahl, 2008; 2009, study 2; De
Angeli et al., 2006; Mahlke, 2006). One issue these
studies raise is the subjective trade-off between
performance and preference. In HCI, we take it for
granted that people are motivated to perform well
with whatever technology, device, or application
we offer, and that this motivation will override
their preferences. With a little more experience
than was possible to obtain during the Slide Rule
experiment, one would expect performance to
improve anyway. Thus, if people are motivated
to persevere with a slightly more difficult task
on a device they enjoy using, one may question
the wisdom of always insisting on excellent user
performance in usability tests. We believe that
the HCI community needs to be more sensitive
to preferences, at least when designing software
that is not aiming to support critical work tasks.
As the abovementioned studies show, gesture-
based technologies, particularly the mobile aspects
of these technologies, are giving rise to a fascinat-
ing variety of innovative interactions. These range
from tracking full body movements to detecting
very slight hand-, or even finger gestures, and from
relying on hefty whacks to gentle stroking gestures
for reliable and accurate detection. Compared to
the traditional keyboard-mouse paradigm, this
genre of interactive technologies would appear to
open a whole new interactive world. The status
of each approach outlined above suggests that the
exploration of possibilities that gesture-based tech-
nologies offer have barely begun to be explored.
This is evidenced by the observation that most
of the studies had only pilot-tested the relevant
technology, with fully fledged user studies still in
the planning stage. It is especially noteworthy that
evaluation of all the user-based studies adhered to
traditional experimental paradigms. Apparently,
the need for novel approaches to evaluation of
mobile technologies is not really relevant while
the technologies are still in the incubator as seems
to be the case with gesture-based technologies.
While the development of gesture-based
technologies and applications are very exciting
in their own right, other technologies and inno-
vative uses of these are worth exploring. In the
following sections, we address issues associated
with location-aware technologies, sound based
technologies, and large emergency management
technologies.
CONTEXT- AND LOCATION-
BASED INTERACTION
Navigating one's environment unhindered is ex-
tremely difficult for people who are completely or
partially blind. Research into sensory substitution
using technology has made impressive advances
in recent years. It is now known, for example, that
a certain part of the occipital cortex is activated
when objects are recognized by vision or touch
(Amedi et al., 2007), and that one sensory capacity
can substitute for another. Thus, for example, as
with the Slide Rule technology described to above,
sound can substitute vision (e.g. Meijer, 1992)
because 'we see with the brain, not with the eyes'
(Bach-y-Rita et al., 2003). Certain smart phones
can translate visual images, for example, signs,
into sound via built-in cameras that interact with
specialized image-to-sound software (e.g. Nokia
3650). Other systems comprising head-mounted
cameras placed in eye glasses connected to a
laptop and worn in a backpack (e.g. the vOICe sys-
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