In an information rich environment, people access a multitude of content such as news, weather, stock reports, and data from a variety of information sources. People increasingly communicate via services such as email, fax, and telephony. Such a growth in information and communication options is fundamentally changing the workplace and "beginning to have a seismic effect on people's professional and personal lives" (see the recent Pitney Bowes Study, April 8, 1997). A partial solution to information overload is to give people timely and filtered information, most relevant to the context of their current tasks. Seamless access to personal information and communication services should be made available to users in a passive and unobtrusive manner, based on their level of attention and interruptability.

Simple devices such as pagers provide a convenient form of alerting users to remote information. Such devices offer an extremely low-bandwidth for communication and the interface does not afford rich delivery of information content. Telephones are ubiquitous and cellular services offer mobility. Computer-based telephony services, such as Phoneshell [Schmandt93], offer subscribers integrated access to information such as email, voice mail, news and scheduling, using digitized audio and synthesized speech. However telephones primarily operate on a synchronous model of communication, requiring availability of both parties, and high tolls for accessing services since a connection must be maintained while listening to the news or stock report. All processing must be done on the telephony servers, rather than the phone itself. The requirement of synchronous connection prevents the device from continuously sensing its user and environment.

Portable computing devices [Roy96] can download messages when not being actively used, allowing asynchronous interaction similar to email. Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) offer the benefit of personal applications in a smaller size; however they generally utilize pen-based graphical user interfaces, which are not ideal when the user's hands and eyes are busy. Hand-held [Stifelman93, Roy96] and mobile [Stifelman96, Wilcox97] audio devices with localized computing and richer interaction mechanisms certainly point towards audio interfaces and networked applications for a new personal information platform, Wearable Audio Computing (WAC) [Roy97a]. Auditory displays can be used to enhance an environment with timely information and provide a sense of peripheral awareness [Mynatt97] of people and background events.

The goal of Nomadic Radio is to develop an infrastructure and interface techniques for adaptive notification, messaging and communication services on a wearable device, with audio as the primary interaction modality. The contextual state of the user and the environment will be utilized to present relevant information in the user's listening space. Context can be determined by time of day, physical position, scheduled tasks, message content, level of interruption, and acoustic features of the environment. In addition, the user's long-term usage and listening patterns will determine effective audio interaction strategies that the system can evolve or reinforce over time. Such active sensing and context-dependent filtering of messages will provide a means for foregrounding and backgrounding messages, control the type and level of information and awareness cues presented as well as determine the focus of attention for nomadic listeners.

Hand-held and Mobile Audio Devices

[Degen92] Degen, L., Mander, R. and Salomon, G. (1992) "Working with Audio: Integrating Personal Tape Recorders and Desktop Computers". Proceedings of CHI '92, pp. 413-418, ACM.

[Roy96] Roy, Deb K. and Chris Schmandt. "NewsComm: A Hand-Held Interface for Interactive Access to Structured Audio". Proceedings of CHI '96, April 1996, pp. 173-180.

[Schmandt93] Schmandt, Chris. "Phoneshell: The Telephone as a Computer Terminal". Proceedings of ACM Multimedia '93, pp. 373-382, New York, Aug 1993.

[Schmandt94] Schmandt, Chris. "Multimedia Nomadic Services on Today's Hardware". IEEE Network, September/October 1994, pp12-21.

[Stifelman93] Stifelman, Lisa J., Barry Arons, Chris Schmandt, Eric A. Hulteen. "VoiceNotes: A Speech Interface for Hand Held Voice Notetaker". Proceedings of INTERCHI '93, New York, April 1993.

[Stifelman96] Stifelman, Lisa J. "Augmenting Real-World Objects: A Paper-Based Audio Notebook". Proceedings of CHI '96, April 1996.

[Wilcox97] Wilcox, Lynn D., Bill N. Schilit, Nitin Sawhney. " Dynomite: A Dynamically Organized Ink and Audio Notebook". Proceedings of CHI '97, March 1997, pp. 186-193.

Audio Augmented Reality and Wearable Computing

[Bederson96] Bederson, Benjamin B. "Audio Augmented Reality: A Prototype Automated Tour Guide". Proceedings of CHI '95, May 1996, pp. 210-211.

[Mynatt97] Mynatt, E.D., Back, M., Want, R. and Frederick, R. "Audio Aura: Light-Weight Audio Augmented Reality". Proceedings of UIST '97 User Interface Software and Technology Symposium, Banff, Canada, Oct 15-17, 1997.

[Rhodes97] Rhodes, Bradley J. "The Wearable Remembrance Agent: a system for augmented memory." Proceedings of the International Symposium on Wearable Computing, IEEE, 1997.

[Roy97a] Roy, Deb K., Nitin Sawhney, Chris Schmandt, Alex Pentland. "Wearable Audio Computing: A Survey of Interaction Techniques." Technical Report, MIT Media Lab, April 1997.

[Roy97b] Roy, Deb K. and Alex Pentland. "Adaptive Multimodal Interfaces." Proceedings of the Workshop on Perceptual User Interfaces, Banff, Canada, October 1997.

[Sawhney97a] Sawhney, Nitin and Chris Schmandt. " Nomadic Radio: A Spatialized Audio Environment for Wearable Computing." Proceedings of the International Symposium on Wearable Computing, IEEE, October 1997.

[Sawhney97b] Sawhney, Nitin and Chris Schmandt. "Design of Spatialized Audio in Nomadic Environments." Proceedings of the International Conference on Auditory Display, November 2-5, 1997, Palo Alto, CA.

[Starner97a] Starner, Thad, Steve Mann, Bradley Rhodes, Jeffery Levine, Jennifer Healey, Dana Kirsch, Rosalind Picard, and Alex Pentland, "Augmented Reality through Wearable Computing." Presence, Vol. 6, No. 4, August 1997, pp. 386-398.

[Starner97b] Starner, Thad and Dana Kirsch. "The locust swarm: An environmentally-powered, networkless location and messaging system." Proceedings of the International Symposium on Wearable Computing, IEEE, October 1997.

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