Spaces of Interaction

As the world becomes increasingly computationally enabled, so our view of human-computer interaction (HCI) needs to evolve. The proliferation of wireless connectivity and mobile devices in all their various forms moves people from being outside a computer and interacting with it to being inside an information space and moving through it. Sensors on the body, wearable computers, wireless sensor networks, increasingly believable virtual characters and speech-based systems are all contributing to new interactive environments. New forms of interaction such as gesture and touch are rapidly emerging and interactions involving emotion and a real sense of presence are beginning. These are the new spaces of interaction we need to understand, design and engineer. Most importantly these new forms of interaction are fundamentally embodied. Older views of a disembodied cognition need to be replaced with an understanding of how people with bodies live in and move through spaces of interaction.