TY - JOUR
T1 - Context shifts
T2 - Extending the meanings of physical objects with language
AU - McGee, David R.
AU - Pavel, Misha
AU - Cohen, Philip R.
N1 - Funding Information:
Support. Our work on this essay was supported in part by DARPA’s Command Post of the Future Program DARPA under SPAWAR contract number N66001–99–D–8503, and also in part by ONR Grants N00014–95–1–1164, N00014–99–1–0377, and N00014–99–1–0380.
PY - 2001
Y1 - 2001
N2 - The influence that language has on contextual interpretations cannot be ignored by computer systems that strive to be context aware. Rather, once systems are designed to perceive language and other forms of human action, these interpretative processes will of necessity be context dependent. As an example, we illustrate how people simply and naturally create new contexts by naming and referring. We then describe Rasa, a mixed-reality system that observes and understands how users in a military command post create such contexts as part of the process of maintaining situational awareness. In such environments, commander's maps are covered with Post-it® notes. These paper artifacts are contextually transformed to represent units in the field by the application of multimodal language. Rasa understands this language, thereby allowing paper-based tools to become the basis for digital interaction. Finally, we argue that architectures for such context-aware systems will need to be built to process the inherent ambiguity and uncertainty of human input in order to be effective.
AB - The influence that language has on contextual interpretations cannot be ignored by computer systems that strive to be context aware. Rather, once systems are designed to perceive language and other forms of human action, these interpretative processes will of necessity be context dependent. As an example, we illustrate how people simply and naturally create new contexts by naming and referring. We then describe Rasa, a mixed-reality system that observes and understands how users in a military command post create such contexts as part of the process of maintaining situational awareness. In such environments, commander's maps are covered with Post-it® notes. These paper artifacts are contextually transformed to represent units in the field by the application of multimodal language. Rasa understands this language, thereby allowing paper-based tools to become the basis for digital interaction. Finally, we argue that architectures for such context-aware systems will need to be built to process the inherent ambiguity and uncertainty of human input in order to be effective.
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U2 - 10.1207/S15327051HCI16234_15
DO - 10.1207/S15327051HCI16234_15
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:0035570936
SN - 0737-0024
VL - 16
SP - 351
EP - 362
JO - Human-Computer Interaction
JF - Human-Computer Interaction
IS - 2-4
ER -