. Nomadic Radio
provides an audio-only wearable interface to unify remote information
services such as email, voice mail, hourly news broadcasts, and
personal calendar events. These messages are automatically downloaded
to a wearable device throughout the day and users can browse them
using speech recognition and tactile input. To provide an unobtrusive
interface for nomadic users, the audio/text information is presented
using a combination of ambient and auditory cues, synthetic speech
and spatialized audio.
A notification model developed in Nomadic Radio
dynamically selects the relevant presentation level for incoming
messages based on message priority, user activity and the level
of conversation in the environment. Temporal actions of the
user such as activating or ignoring messages while listening,
reinforce or decay the presentation level over time and change
the underlying notification model. Scaleable notification allows
incoming messages to be dynamically presented as subtle ambient
sounds, distinct VoiceCues, spoken summaries or spatialized
audio streams foregrounded for the listener.
This project addressed techniques for peripheral awareness,
spatial listening and contextual notification to manage the user's
focus of attention on a wearable audio computing platform.
Note: Nomadic Radio was a research project developed from Jan 1997 to May 1999.
It is not currently active and there are no plans for any commercial products
based on this work. For more information please refer to the papers listed below.
Nitin Sawhney and Chris Schmandt. Nomadic Radio: Speech & Audio Interaction for Contextual Messaging in Nomadic Environments. To appear
in the special issue of ACM Transactions on Computer Human Interaction (ToCHI) on the topic of Human Computer Interaction and Mobile
Systems. (June'2000) Abstract -- PDF
Nitin Sawhney and Chris Schmandt. Nomadic Radio: Scaleable and Contextual Notification for Wearable Audio Messaging.
ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Pittsburgh, May 15-20, 1999. --
PDF
Brian Clarkson, Nitin Sawhney and Alex Pentland. Auditory Context Awareness in Wearable Computing, Workshop on Perceptual User Interfaces, San Francisco, Nov. 5-6, 1998. [ pdf ]
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