Shifting Contexts in Invisible Computing Environments
David R. McGee, Misha Pavel, Philip R. Cohen, Prasenjit Dey · 2001
Invisible computing systems are highly context-dependent. Consequently, the influence that language has on contex-tual interpretation cannot be ignored by such systems. Rather, once language and other forms of human action are perceived by a system, its interpretative processes will of necessity be context-dependent. As an example, we illus-trate how people simply and naturally create new contexts for interpretation by creating new names and referring ex-pressions. We then describe Rasa, a mixed-reality system that observes and understands how users in a military command post create such contexts as part of the process of maintaining situational awareness. Rasa augments both the commander’s map and the Post-it notes pasted on it, which represent units in the field, with multimodal language, thereby allowing paper-based tools to interact with digital information. Finally, we argue that architectures for such context-aware systems must reduce the inherent ambiguity and uncertainty through fusion and other means. Keywords Context-aware computing, invisible computing, mixed real-