Agents for distributed context-aware interaction

This paper addresses post-wimp HCI system design by introducing the concept of Interaction Locus (IL), as a coordination of three-dimensional representation, auditory signs and hypermedia information, which informs the user about the specific nature of the part of the environment that he/she’s currently entered. The interaction between a user and the IL is observed and mediated by two agents that, borrowing the terminology from ancient Roman religion, are called the genius loci and the numen of the user. The genius knows the information opportunities of the IL and its interaction possibilities. The numen knows the user profile and exploration history across several places, and interact with the genii of the ILs in order to give them information about how to help the user in his/her visit. The population of genii implements a distributed computation, which becomes ubiquitous when we deal with an IL in the real world. The numen maintains the state of the computation for its own user adapting it to the context of the interaction. 1