Smart City is a generic and open concept. Different people have different interpretation about it. Generally speaking, it’s a smart system which incorporates ubiquitous computing into infrastructures, living and education etc. From the aspects of HCI, smart cities mean easier access and convenience interaction manner for users. Interaction will not just be passive for user operation, it could be proactive to know user and offer them services based on real time needs. Precisely speaking, we introduce an innovative human computer interaction mode. It has the characteristics of proximity and contextual. This means that the computer will be conscious of the space relationship between it and the user; furthermore, it could get the information of the user and surrounding and make inferences in order to supply “targeted” services. Based on the idea, we want to develop a generic platform which is independent of the application. The platform could be extended to different application scenarios.
Proxemics is the semiotics of space. Hall raises it in the context of anthropology [1]. Originally it is used as nonverbal communication, but after it becomes a more interdisciplinary research. Hall’s program of proxemics is concerned with the communication function of space. The focus is on different cultures behavior differently in spatial. The most intersection of proxemics and ubicomp should be the classified of distance. If we could measure the distance between human and screen, then it could be used as the reference of proxemics interaction.
In my research, we will first investigate the method of proxemics detection, including user discovery and proxemics (distance) detection. For instance use ARToolkit or infrared to detect distance. After it should get the context data about the user and the situation, in this way, we could offer target service to user. However, one obviously issue of proxemics interaction is privacy as personal information under public screen about the user could be peeped. For solving this problem, we propose to design migrate user interface. User could migrate the contents from the public screen to his/her personal mobile devices seamlessly user some condition. The key issue of migrate user interface is to connect different devices in different platform without complexity configuration.
Finally, we will develop an extensible platform for proxemics interaction and with the function of migration, the platform is independent of application, and it could be extended to various applications. At last we will apply it to a scenario of office public screen. And make validation of the prototype’s usability.