HCI 2006: Tackling Ubiquity with Games that mix Realities

'Ambient intelligence should be balanced by focussed stupidity,' quipped the ever witty Tom Rodden, professor of Interactive Systems at the Mixed Reality Laboratory at the University of Nottingham. He was opening the British HCI Group 2006 conference at Queen Mary University of London.

Looking to the future, he presented a vision of a smart kitchen conspiring with his children to stop him reaching into his smart fridge to get another beer because his blood sugar needed watching and the monitoring was saying he'd had enough. 'Future digital visions are often led by new technological possibilities', he said. 'But it's our relations not the technology that are important.' He urged the HCI audience to situate ubiquitous computing in the incomplete, complex and very messy real world.

His research group, and the wider Equator research project (http://www.equator.ac.uk/), of which he is director, have been working on games and playful educational tools which situate players in an augmented world that exploits the shortcomings of the technologies. He gave the examples of "Can you see me?", a game that involves both online and real-world players covering the same ground and hunting each other down, and an educational game "Savannah", developed with the BBC, which involves school children collaborating as lions do, to hunt other animals. In both cases, the GPS system allows some idiosyncratic behaviour that people can exploit to cheat the system, and the 'seamful' design of the game allows players to spot this and use it. 'They pray hard to the anti-satellite god', he said.

Ethnographers have been developing appropriate techniques for following such awkward research subjects in order to explore the behaviour people show with these opportunities. Rodden also presented the tools the projects have devised to capture information that helps log what is happening in different exchanges. In conclusion, he argued that the emergence of the ubiquitous computing was a grand challenge for the computing community and that the role for the HCI community was central in this challenge.

'It's not about revealing the failure of the infrastructure, it's about revealing the nature of it – we routinely exploit the nature of the manifest/shared world,' he said. 'Change those modalities and shared aspects disintegrate like sand.'

After the talk, questions returned to Rodden's vision of the future. 'So, in old age, what do you want?' asked one delegate. 'I want to be recognised as a cantankerous old git. I don't want old age recognised as a 'condition'. And I want to be left alone,' he replied firmly.

Associated Link: HCI2006

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