Day 2 of the MobileHCI 2008

Yesterday was kicked off by a keynote by BJ Fogg from Stanford dealing with persuasive computing. Whilst interesting, it did feel like I could have used some practical examples of what was being mentioned.

Next I attended the Tools and Methods presentations. Several papers were being presented, amongst them one dealing with a non-linear browsing method for video content on mobile devices, which I found very fascinating, purely because of its simplicity. David Langley from TNO then discussed Social Contagion of Mobile Television in which the mimicking of each others behavior was equated to Darwinian Theory. All in all a very interesting way to look at things.

The afternoon was spent taking a look at some Industrial Case Studies, most notably the presentation of Younghee Jung from Nokia on Designing for the Evolution of Mobile Contacts Application. This dealt with how we utilize our phone book in our mobiles and the interactions, metaphors and idioms behind this usage.

Finally I saw a few presentations on Multimodel & Multimedia interfaces. Xavier Anguera’s presentation of Multimodal annotations on a camera phone led to some interesting thoughts and concepts being discussed. However, what I found most interesting was seeing Stephen Brewster from Glasgow University talking about multimodal interfaces for camera phones. What I liked about his approach to solving the problem of poor/bad feedback or feedback overload (depends on how you want to look at it) was that he utilized existing inherent properties found in the camera phone and did not add new feedback features to come to a solution.

I will hopefully be seeing quite a lot of other interesting, thought provoking presentations today too.