Interacting with Proactive Community Displays

In this paper we describe the design and architecture of an adaptive proactive environment in which information, which reflects the communal interests of current inhabitants, is proactively displayed on large- scale public displays. Adaptation is achieved through implicit communication between the environment and personal sensor devices worn by users. These devices, called Pendle, serve two purposes: they store and make available to the environment user preferences, and they allow users to override the environment’s proactive behavior by means of simple gestures. The result is a smooth integration of environment-controlled interaction (experienced by the user as implicit interaction, triggered by their presence) and user-controlled explicit interaction. Initial results show that user-controlled adaptation leads to an engaging user experience that is unobtrusive and not distracting