Mobile HCI 04: Mobile Communications vs. Pervasive Communications · 2004-09-16 17:57

Mobile Communications vs. Pervasive Communications: The Role of Handhelds panel
Scott Weiss (Moderator), Akseli Anttila, Anxo Cereijo Roibas, Sabine Seymour and David Williams

SW: few delightful moments in convergent technology
poor UI and usability are the cause

camera + phone – bad unfocused pictures
phone + MP3 player

convergence leads to divergence

will good design processes improve these devices?

DW:
why isn’t it working?
users don’t see value
difficult to interact across devices
content is too mainstream

market doesn’t want it – requires standardisation and brand sharing

technology can’t deliver it – backend systems and transcoding of content is not sufficient

all thinking too device-centric – need to take the technology and push it into environments, rather than push it all into a device

ACR:
satisfy the new needs, demainds and expectations of nomadic users

2 main problems – poor usability and wrong usage scenarios
e.g. three offer video news, but this is normally consumed in a sit-down laid-back position

think about new forms of content

SS:
interested in context of use – changing quicker than the users
phone is a computational device (works as the PAN controller)

integration into clothing and wearables

in the long-term, right into the fibres

AA:
how will context of use be used to enable new forms of communication?
more emotional, less intrusive

how will it influence other (non-communication) devices?

Q:
what is the best example currently of pervasive communications?

Finnish SMS games on TV
newspapers in a cafe
texting (invented by users as a communication medium)

Q: how do we translate pervasiveness into something that has value to a carier?
need new business models
hard for carriers to look more than 3 months ahead – has to create value immediately

Q: what is the difference between pervasive and ubiquity?
ubiquity implies it has been subsumed into the environment, pervasive just sounds like devices talking to each other all the time

Q: what do we need to do in the future?
understand real scenarios for pervasive communication

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