Virtual Thought

Carnegie Melon is certainly doing some cool things in the field of HCI . Their list of research projects has some pretty cool stuff on it.

I have two favorites: Situationally Appropriate Interaction and Project Aura.

Situationally Appropriate Interaction is a way of getting a computer to figure out when it’s a good time to interrupt a human user. Imagine: no more cell phones going off during meetings, no IM programs interrupting your concentration. If they can do it, that’d be fantastic.

Project Aura’s modest goal is to capture that most scarce of resource in the information space: user attention. In their own words…

Project Aura will fundamentally rethink system design to address this problem. Aura’s goal is to provide each user with an invisible halo of computing and information services that persists regardless of location.

So we have programs that know when and when not to interrupt you and, oh yeah, they are helping you to remember stuff.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 24th, 2005 at 5:24 pm and is filed under tech, thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.