Position paper accepted for workshop on extreme navigation

Mats Liljedahl at Interactive Institute Sonic Studio will participate in the workshop ”Multimodal Location Based Techniques for Extreme Navigation” at the conference Pervasive 2010 - The Eighth International Conference on Pervasive Computing. The conference will take place in Helsinki, Finland May 17-20.

His position paper covers how sound can be used to help navigate and explore a cityscape. When creating a ”map” on sound instead of graphics the user can get a continuous guidance through the headphones and at the same time keep the eyes on the surroundings. Another aim is to use headphones that does not lower the sound from the surroundings but rather puts a layer of navigational aid on top of the environmental sounds. These types of user interfaces are called Minimal Attention User Interfaces or Head-Ups Displays which means that the user put minimal effort into using the interface which in turn lets her act as natural as possible.

In the "II City project ", where we do research on the theme "City Guide & Game", one objective is build an application for navigation but as well for exploring and experiencing things that the user did not look for actively.