Special Issue on Mobile and Wearable Interaction
Michael Rohs, Florian Echtler · i-com · 2022
This special issue invited contributions in the broad and important field of mobile and wearable interaction.Mobile and wearable technologies are now universal.They enable ubiquitous communication, sensing, and interaction.The design of mobile and wearable technologies has a tremendous impact both on our everyday lives and on professional practice.Research in the field of mobile interaction investigates novel interaction techniques, multimodal feedback, the use of wearables in AR and VR, mobile activity tracking, mobile conversational user interfaces, mobile and wearable technologies in special fields like healthcare, and other related topics.Core questions concern how the overall experience of the user emerges from acting in the real world and from simultaneously using digital information, or conversely, how mobile and wearable devices may shape that experience.A challenge is the need to mediate between events in the real world and events in the digital realm.The papers in this special issue take different approaches in establishing this experience: augmenting the auditory channel, delivering notifications in the peripheral field of view, making digital information available to experts in the field, and simulating safety-relevant real-world activity in virtual reality."EnvironZen" by Schrapel et al. describes the design and evaluation of interactive and immersive soundscapes in urban areas.The paper focuses in particular on the role of footstep detection and on synchronizing sound augmentations with footsteps in real time.The paper shows that augmented footstep sounds effectively support the connection between user action and audio augmentation.Footstep sound augmentations may serve as unobtrusive navigation cues and slightly time-shifted augmentations affect walking speed. "Evaluation of Priority-Dependent Notifications for Smart Glasses based on Peripheral Visual Cues" by Faul-