"Combining Physical and Digital Interaction"
Tom Rodden
Lancaster University

11:30 a.m. Reception
12:00 Noon on Thursday, November 14, 2002
Room 102, MiRC

Equator (www.equator.ac.uk) is an Interdisciplinary Research Collaboration (IRC) - a large scale, collaborative venture spanning eight partners and multiple disciplines including Computer Science, Electronics, Social Science, Psychology, Art and Design and Architecture and Planning. The goals of Equator are to create new devices and software platform to interweave the physical and digital worlds; to establish new methods for designing and evaluating these technologies; and to bring these technologies and methods together in a series of practical projects that directly engage users in the research process. The approach is defined by the following characteristics.

• Adopting a balanced view of digital and the physical - Equator is not only concerned with how the digital can be accessed from or overlaid on the physical, but is also focused on how the physical appears to the digital.
• Methods for understanding experience - Equator combines expertise in established design methods, especially ethnography, with emerging methods from art and design and architecture and planning.
• Engaging users - Equator will carry out a series of large-scale practical experiments that directly involve the public and user-organizaations such as museums, performance groups, community support groups, schools.

Equator is structured around three long-term fundamental research challenges that combine with a series of practical user experience projects. The research challenges explore long-term underlying technical and methodological issues. This talk will introduce the IRC with a particular focus on user applications contributing to the overall endeavor.

Tom Rodden is Professor of Interactive Systems at the Mixed Reality Laboratory (MRL) at the University of Nottingham and Director of Equator, a six-year program of research to explore new technologies that interweave the physical and digital worlds. This brings together a range of different research traditions and addresses a diverse set of applications and domains ranging from citywide based performances, through medical applications, to a range of novel devices for the home. In addition to directing Equator, Tom's research interests focus on the development of new technological arrangements to support groups of users. This has involved working closely with a diverse set of disciplines and has also involved both methodological and design contributions and novel infrastructures, platforms and applications.

Refreshments will be served.