THE OVERVIEW

Future Living, Future Life is an on-going project (2009 - 2012) looking at new, expressive forms of human-technology interaction and the impact that they are having on the lives of people. Expressive Interaction describes the next generation of interactive technologies. The keyboard, mouse and screen will increasingly be augmented by touch, gesture and other forms of more natural interaction.

The opportunities presented by these developments promise to be extremely far-reaching, enabling new forms of interaction with information technologies that are much more intuitive and expressive than current graphical user interfaces. This in turn will democratise access to a wide range of new services, cutting across language, literacy and other barriers. Expressive interactions will open up the digital economy, empowering people who are economically, educationally or physically challenged.

The challenge for research in computer science is how to design and engineer systems that exploit these new technologies in the most effective way for the widest possible range of people. We also want to explore how these new technologies change the way we live.

In 2009 we created the ‘future meeting room’ equipped with the latest in touch and multi-touch technology and large screen displays. This state-of-the-art facility will showcase research from across the Faculty of Engineering, Computing & Creative Industries, particularly from the Institute for Informatics Research and Digital Innovation (IIRDI). Within IIRDI, novel visualisations and navigation techniques are being developed in the Centre for Information and Software Systems. The future meeting room will provide large, multi-touch displays allowing researchers from the centre to explore the future of interactions with very large amounts of data. Other new forms of interaction being developed in the Centre for Interaction Design will also be demonstrated and explored through the future meeting room. The room is also being used by students studying Interactive Entertainment in the School of Arts & Creative Industries.

During the period 2010 - 2012, further spaces will be developed to create an network of ICEs. A future home would be established to showcase how new and emerging technologies will change the way we will live. Energy Management Systems and advanced communication technologies will be linked with intelligent home ‘agents’; characters that move across the devices in the home to provide help and advice for the occupiers.

Outside spaces will be enabled with new sensors and wireless forms of communication. Much interaction in the future will be using mobile devices. In this part of the demonstration these nomadic spaces will be covered in tiny computing devices that will link to home spaces and meeting rooms to create a seamless experience across many devices and environments. Such pervasive and adaptive spaces signal another aspect of future life.

The Future Living, Future Life project is overseen by Professor David Benyon, Director of Interdisciplinary Research at the Faculty of Engineering, Computing & Creative Industries.