Technological support for augmenting the relationship that people establish with remote places has been studied fairly little as the primary focus in telepresence studies is the connection between people. This paper addresses the design challenge for supporting "active place presence" at home. A prototype, Hole in Space, was created to explore the design challenge. A longitudinal study of how an urban couple appropriated the prototype was conducted over the duration of seven months. The paper elaborates on how the Web-mediated design influenced place presence and outlines several aspects that need to be considered when designing for active place presence at home.

Smart glasses suffer from obtrusive or cumbersome interaction techniques. Studies show that people are not willing to publicly use, for example, voice control or mid-air gestures in front of the face. Some techniques also hamper the high degree of freedom of the glasses. In this paper, we derive design principles for socially acceptable, yet versatile, interaction techniques for smart glasses based on a survey of related work. We propose an exemplary design, based on a haptic glove integrated with smart glasses, as an embodiment of the design principles. The design is further refined into three interaction scenarios: text entry, scrolling, and point-and-select. Through a user study conducted in a public space we show that the interaction technique is considered unobtrusive and socially acceptable. Furthermore, the performance of the technique in text entry is comparable to state-of-the-art techniques. We conclude by reflecting on the advantages of the proposed design.

Locating points of interest (POIs) in cities is typically facilitated by visual aids such as paper maps, brochures, and mobile applications. However, these techniques require visual attention, which ideally should be on the surroundings. Non-visual techniques for navigating towards specific POIs typically lack support for free exploration of the city or more detailed guidance. To overcome these issues, we propose a multimodal, wearable system for alerting the user of nearby recommended POIs. The system, built around a tactile glove, provides audio-tactile cues when a new POI is in the vicinity, and more detailed information and guidance if the user expresses interest in this POI. We evaluated the system in a field study, comparing it to a visual baseline application. The encouraging results show that the glove-based system helps keep the attention on the surroundings and that its performance is on the same level as that of the baseline.

Mobile devices have limited battery life, and numerous battery management applications are available that aim to improve it. This paper examines a large-scale mobile battery awareness application, called Carat, to see how it changes user behavior with long-term use. We conducted a survey of current Carat Android users and analyzed their interaction logs. The results show that long-term Carat users save more battery, charge their devices less often, learn to manage their battery with less help from Carat, have a better understanding of how Carat works, and may enjoy competing against other users. Based on these findings, we propose a set of guidelines for mobile battery awareness applications: battery awareness applications should make the reasoning behind their recommendations understandable to the user, be tailored to retain long-term users, take the audience into account when formulating feedback, and distinguish third-party and system applications.

The SiMPE workshop series started in 2006 with the goal of enabling speech processing on mobile and embedded devices. The SiMPE 2012 workshop extended the notion of audio to non-speech "Sounds" and thus the expansion became "Speech and Sound". SiMPE 2010 and 2011 brought together researchers from the speech and the HCI communities. Speech User interaction in cars was a focus area in 2009. Multimodality got more attention in SiMPE 2008. In SiMPE 2007, the focus was on developing regions.

Large interfaces are fixed to a certain use context, for example to a physical smart space. Mobile counterparts of public interfaces can allow user to continue interacting with the content also when leaving the space. However, wall applications make use of a large display surface and fitting the same user interface to the constraints of a mobile screen is challenging. Starting with Bubble Wall -- an information exploration application for multitouch walls -- we developed interfaces for browsing the same content graphs on mobile devices. A comparison study in exploration and navigation tasks was conducted with two mobile interfaces reproducing the large screen interactions: BubbleSpace with a more faithful redesign and BubblesDial reducing the interactions for better fit to a small screen. The BubblesDial scored significantly better in usability and performance evaluation, especially when priming with use of the Bubble Wall. We also present implications for the redesign of these large content graph interactions for mobile use.