Title:
Instant Interaction
Abstract:
Although Mark Weiser’s original vision of “ubiquitous computing” has all but arrived due to the wide availability of smartphones, tablets and interactive screens, the envisioned ease of use is still mostly lacking. This is particularly apparent when we consider interaction and collaboration between multiple persons and their personal mobile devices. These issues can be partly mitigated by relying on cloud services for data exchange, but this approach opens up multiple other issues regarding data safety and privacy. In this talk, I will present the concept of “instant interaction”, which aims to enable ad-hoc interaction between multiple persons, their individual mobile devices, and fixed infrastructure, without requiring any prior exchange of account data or PINs. The only prerequisite for immediate interaction is physical proximity. Examples from my current research will illustrate this  concept.

Speaker Biography:
Florian Echtler is junior professor for mobile media at Bauhaus-Universität Weimar. His research interests focus on interaction and collaboration using peer-to-peer communication technologies available in today’s mobile devices. Additional topics covered by his research include computer vision for HCI applications, sensor technology and gesture recognition.