Revelationary Computing, Proactive Displays and The Experience UbiComp Project

People often reveal aspects about themselves in the physical world, through the clothes they wear, the places they go, and the people with whom they associate. Increasingly, people reveal aspects about themselves in the digital world, through mechanisms such as newsgroup postings, social network profiles, personal web sites and weblogs. Ubiquitous Computing makes it increasingly possible to access digital profiles in new physical contexts, allowing people to digitally reveal aspects of themselves to others with whom they are sharing physical space. One way of enabling this revelation between the digital and physical worlds is through a proactive display (http://www.proactivedisplays.org/): a large display augmented by sensors that can detect and respond in contextually appropriate ways to the people nearby. We designed, deployed and evaluated a suite of proactive display applications in the context of a conference – the Fifth International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp 2003, http://www.ubicomp.org/ubicomp2003/) – based on radio frequency identification (RFID) tags embedded in conference badge sleeves that were associated with digital profiles created by those who wanted to participate. The goal of the applications was to increase awareness and interaction opportunities among the community of attendees. AutoSpeakerID was deployed in a session room, displaying the name, affiliation and picture of a person approaching a microphone stand (equipped with an RFID antenna) to ask a question after a paper or panel presentation; Ticket2Talk was deployed in the coffee break area, displaying the same information as AutoSpeakerID, plus a photo & caption from the profile of a person getting coffee, representing some interest that person would be happy to talk about with anyone at the conference; Neighborhood Window was deployed in a lounge area, displaying phrases found on the homepages of people near the display, highlighting both phrases that are shared among those people’s homepages as well as those that are uniquely associated with each of them. Future potential extensions of this work include targeting different contexts (e.g., homes, workplaces, and “third places” such as coffeehouses), different sources of content (e.g., weblogs, social networking software profiles or e-Bay offerings), and different sensing devices and technologies (e.g., Bluetooth phones, personal digital assistants or laptops).