Chapter 17 - Natural and Implicit Information-Seeking Cues in Responsive Technology

Abstract

Technologies are increasingly entering our physical environments, including retail shopping. In addition to the practical issues of deploying pervasive technology in physical spaces, designers of applications in this domain need to consider the information goals of shoppers as well as their social concerns. In today's world, there is a quest for moving and devising optimal strategies to seek maximal information. In this context, this chapter investigates the procedure to design effective information technologies to enhance the shopping experience in retail stores. It discusses the approach, an implicit interaction paradigm that interprets natural behavioral cues, and presents a case study of a prototype system called the Responsive Mirror. In this prototype, users need to understand the implicit interaction with the visual estimation of their orientation to the mirror to focus on the evaluation of the clothes rather than on explicitly controlling the information display. Having learned the system, some participants can want more control over what they could display. Designers must take care not to lose the benefit of natural and implicit interaction by introducing explicit interface controls that may be useful only occasionally. People have a wide variety of preferences, as exhibited from the breadth of user feedback about the Responsive Mirror prototype. The ultimate goal for designing natural and implicit interaction systems is to accommodate each person on an individual basis rather than most people in an aggregate sense. The challenges are immense and worth pursuing.