This week we’ll be at MobileHCI’09 in Bonn, presenting a poster on our research within the Diadem project. One of the main goals of the Diadem project is to detect potentially hazardous airborne pollutants in urban-industrial areas using input from both a distributed sensor network and people through their mobile phones. In the proposed interaction model, a semi-autonomous system will use sensor data to detect abnormal situations, while people in the affected area will be requested by a mobile service to report additional observations, such as chemical smells (which may not be the easiest to describe).
This raises quite some interesting issues. Continue reading
New paper! June 18th we’ll present our work on touch and human-robot interaction at CASA 2009 here in Amsterdam. The full paper will appear in a special issue of the Journal of Computer Animation and Virtual Worlds. Our paper discusses an experiment on the effects of (observing) touch and proactivity on attitudes towards embodied social agents. Based on our results we think a holistic approach to interaction design for embodied characters’ social behaviour is the way to go. 
