Auditory Interfaces for Small Screen Data Representation
Date:
Presented with Michael Jefferson (NYU ITP). Tuesday 7 March 2006, 2:35–3:20pm, Elizabeth Ballroom B.
As personal computing devices get ever smaller, it gets harder and harder to fit information onto their screens. One solution is the use of auditory or sound-based interfaces for representing information.
In our day-to-day lives, we process complex layering, mapping, and placement of sounds to make sense of the world around us. Yet in our applications, this crucial sensory experience has been reduced to non-descript alarms. Our research challenges this paradigm and looks optimistically at the migration from the desktop to the small mobile device as an opportunity to re-think the visual interface.
The talk discussed the usability testing, research, and prototyping conducted with members of the blind community in Manhattan over the previous year, in search of a purely auditory interface for the common data of the personal calendar.