Objective
The project "Ambient Agoras" aims at providing situated services, place-relevant information, and feeling of the place ('genius loci') to users, so that they feel at home in the office. This is achieved by using information technology (IT) in an innovative way, e.g. via ambient displays embedded in the environment and mobile devices that are used in a combined way. "Ambient Agoras" adds a layer of information-based services to the place, enabling the user to communicate for help, guidance, work, or fun. It integrates information into the architectural environment by means of smart artefacts. The computer as a device disappears, but the functionality is available in a ubiquitous and invisible fashion. Finally, "Ambient Agoras" augments reality by providing better "affordances" to existing places. It aims at turning everyday places into social marketplaces (= 'agora') of ideas and information where people can meet and interact. The project "Ambient Agoras" aims at providing situated services, place-relevant information, and feeling of the place ('genius loci') to users, so that they feel at home in the office. This is achieved by using information technology (IT) in an innovative way, e.g. via ambient displays embedded in the environment and mobile devices that are used in a combined way. "Ambient Agoras" adds a layer of information-based services to the place, enabling the user to communicate for help, guidance, work, or fun. It integrates information into the architectural environment by means of smart artefacts. The computer as a device disappears, but the functionality is available in a ubiquitous and invisible fashion. Finally, "Ambient Agoras" augments reality by providing better "affordances" to existing places. It aims at turning everyday places into social marketplaces (= 'agora') of ideas and information where people can meet and interact.
OBJECTIVES
"Ambient Agoras" is a project which addresses the office environment as an integrated organisation located in a physical environment and having particular information needs both at the collective level of the organisation, and at the personal level of the worker. The project promotes an approach to designing individual as well as team interaction in physical environments using augmented physical artefacts to support collaboration, informal communication, social awareness, and to enhance the quality of life in the working environment. Ambient Agoras couples a set of interaction design objectives (disappearance of computing devices) with sensing technologies (badges, tags), smart artefacts (ambient displays, mobile devices, tables, walls) and the emerging functionalities of two or more artefacts working together. During the course of the project, these technologies are to be tested for user feedback and evaluated with different methods by setting up pilot installations in the work environment of the partner EDF. Since the use of sensing technology for the detection of people raises issues re privacy, the project investigates these aspects in parallel to system design and technology development.
DESCRIPTION OF WORK
Approach:In our approach, we are combining two perspectives that can be taken towards the issue of how the computer will disappear. We propose that disappearance can happen in two ways: via the "physical disappearance" by becoming very small due to miniaturisation; via the "mental disappearance" of devices by becoming "invisible" because they are integrated/embedded in the physical environment (e.g. walls, doors, tables) around us. They are not considered as computer devices anymore but as augmented elements of the environment. In the latter case, the resulting artefacts can be even quite large but their appearance is transformed so that they are perceived as everyday artefacts that are augmented for communicative and co-operative situations. Thus, people move the "computer device" character in the background and the functionality in the foreground. This approach has implications for the design of interacting with "computers", respectively, with the resulting compound artefacts. Interaction with them becomes more and more implicit and is to a large degree triggered by sensors that detect people and objects in their neighbourhood.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
- engineering and technology electrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineering electronic engineering sensors
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Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
Coordinator
79108 MÜNCHEN
Germany
The total costs incurred by this organisation to participate in the project, including direct and indirect costs. This amount is a subset of the overall project budget.