This year’s CHI theme is ‘Weaving the Threads of CHI’, and Alla Vovk was one of the 3855 “threads-participants” at this conference. This year CHI reached the maximum number of participants.

The ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems is the premier international conference of Human-Computer Interaction. CHI – pronounced ‘kai’ – is a place where researchers and practitioners gather from across the world to discuss the latest in interactive technology.

Performance Augmentation Lab contributed by organizing Special Interest Groups on Augmented Reality Interfaces. Fridolin Wild, Alla Vovk and collaborators from the University of California San Diego brought together people to discuss spatial interfaces. We had a couple of small exercises and then created the definition of Spatial Interfaces. As a result, participants agreed that the environment is one of the most important components of the AR interface among interaction techniques, human senses, and form factor).

Interaction tasks. This topic covers potential task-specific interaction approaches. How can AR spatial interface be incorporated into different types of interaction tasks? Would it have similar components across distinct tasks?
Environmental component. What are the different ways the environment influences or is influenced by these AR interfaces? Does the meaning of the content derive only from its connection with the physical world?
Involvement of the human senses. AR is not restricted to augmentations of one particular human sense. What are the sensor limits that can be used in AR?
Technological advancements. What are the current and future technical challenges faced by devices? This topic covers device specifications, form factor, sensors, programming platforms, operating systems.

Please read more details here: https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3311756 (you will like it)

— AR is seen as a utility now
— VR is moving somewhere, not sure where (a lot of work on sensors, but this looks a bit bulky and unrealistic to use in the real world environment)
— AI is an attribute of spatial computing, it is more than data, it is about interaction
— the closing keynote by Ivan Poupyrev was a gem, he talked about using our world as an interface (I 100% support this, and even talked about this at AWE last year), even though this direction has a lot of controversial questions, like ethics and new tech ecosystems, it could help us to be less dependent on technology and focus on physical world

Alla Vovk

Announcement of the next conference in Hawaii

“UNICORNS ARE NOW SOLD OUT” — the saddest sign ever (Unicorn was the symbol of this year’s CHI)