Affiliations: Intelligence Engineering Lab, Institute of Software,
CAS, Beijing, PR China
Abstract: We are entering the age of Ubiquitous Computing, and its most
distinguished advantage is invisibility of computing. The essence of invisible
computing is the invisibility of Human-computer Interaction, as people can
focus their attention on the content instead of the tools they are using. This
paper studies how to make computers invisible, and proposes a framework of
online invisible computing and offline invisible computing. Online invisible
computing is Intelligent Human Computer Interaction, where the computers
function as intelligent agents; whereas offline invisible computing as in
Natural Human Computer Interaction, people are able to use the computers
without much conscious effort. This paper focuses the study on offline
invisible computing which needs only minimal users' attention when the users are
using computers. The paper attempts to realize invisible computing with
Affordances, especially designing Action Affordances in computers. In the
Ubiquitous Computing age, the computers would not only be invisible but also be
embedded in the environment where people are living, so Human-Computer
Interaction could not be separated from the environment any more; User &
Environment Centred Design (UECD), a new designing method for ubiquitous
computing is also proposed in this paper. A Pen Based User Interface system is
developed as the first step to invisible computing.
