Proximal Sensing: Supporting Context Sensitive Interaction

Bill Buxton,
Alias Research

This talk addresses the issue of increasing complexity for the user that accompanies new functionality. Briefly, we discuss how complexity can, through appropriate design, be off-loaded to the system -- at least for secondary commands. Consider photography, for example. The 35 mm SLR of a decade ago was analogous to MS-DOS. You could do everything in theory, but in practice, were unlikely to do anything without making an error. When we think of photography, however, we see that there are only two primary decisions: "what" and "when", which correspond to the two primary actions: "point" and "click". By embedding domain-specific knowledge, modern cameras off-load all other decisions to the computer (a.k.a. camera) with the option of overriding the defaults. The net result is that the needs of the novice and expert are met with a single apparatus device.

What we do in this presentation is talk about how this type of off-loading can be supported, and why this should be done. We do this by example, drawing mainly on the experiences of the Ontario Telepresence Project.

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