[TECHNOLOGY OPPORTUNITY 2002-019]

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Attentive User Interfaces: Making devices more interactive and responsive to their users
2002-019

Increasingly, users are surrounded by multiple ubiquitous computing devices, such as BlackBerries®, Palm Pilots® and cell phones. Moore's Law for user interfaces would state that the number of computers per user will double every two years. As our devices connect to a global wireless network, we become members of a 24-hour global society where we are always connected and always on. Such benefit comes at a cost of being available at any time or place. Rather than mitigate this problem, our computing devices currently exacerbate it, as their user interfaces were designed to act in isolation, monopolizing user attention.

Dr. Roel Vertegaal of Queen's University has been pioneering the design of user interfaces that are attentive to their user. These "attentive user interfaces" optimize the allocation of the attentive resources of users and systems; they enable devices that don't bug you when you're busy. Cues of user attention are applied to make devices more sociable and efficient and to increase the bandwidth of user communication with and via computers.

The technologies supporting these attentive user interfaces include eye contact sensors that can sense eye contact at up to 4 metres and be imbedded in electronics, appliances, walls, or computer or video screens; and a novel calibration-free eye tracking technology to measure the exact position of user gaze on a surface, such as a computer screen or billboard.

Several prototype products have recently been developed by Dr. Roel Vertegaal in the Human Media Lab at Queen's University. These include:
• ecsGlasses™, eye contact sensor glasses that can be worn by a user;
• EyePliances™, appliances that contextualize speech recognition on eye contact;
• AuraLamp™, an attentive light fixture;
• AuraMirror™, a mirror that visualizes user attention; and
• EyeProxies™, robot eyes that communicate device attention;
• Gaze-2™, an attentive video conferencing system that measures and conveys where you are looking in a virtual meeting room, so that others are aware whom you talk to, and what you are referring to. Dr. Vertegaal's research has shown that eye gaze-mediated communication systems, such as Gaze-2 TM, increase turn taking efficiency by more than 25%.
• Attentive Cell Phone, a prototype cellphone that uses an EyeContact sensor and speech analysis to detect whether its user is in a face-to-face conversation.

ROEL VERTEGAAL is a professor in Human-Computer Interaction and director of the Human Media Lab at Queen's University, Canada. He holds degrees in Computer Science from Bradford University, UK, and Twente University, The Netherlands. Roel also holds a degree in Music from Utrecht University, and spent time as a visual artist and photographer at the Vrije Academie, The Hague. His current interest lies in the psychology and design of nonverbal computers. For more info, see the Human Media Lab website.

Contact:
Davis Hill
Manager, Commercial Development
PARTEQ Innovations
(613) 533 2342
dhill@parteqinnovations.com