Innovation & Invention

Overview

In everyday life, we can easily perform various activities without focused attention. For example, we can tie our shoelaces or know what the weather is like without consciously thinking about it. Such activities are performed in our periphery of attention while they may also shift to the center of attention when relevant. Contrarily, interactive devices such as smartphones usually require focused attention to be interacted with. Since such devices are becoming omnipresent in our daily environment, we need to explore how to design technology such that it can engage both the focus and periphery of attention. This direction, which is called “peripheral interaction”, aims to seamlessly embed computing technology into everyday life.

With computers now becoming truly ubiquitous in everyday life, certain interactions with computing technologies will inevitably not concern our focus of attention. While various past efforts in this domain aimed to subtly present information such that people can perceive it in their periphery of attention, we now see an upcoming interest in interactive systems that people can physically interact with in their periphery of attention. This special issue aims to unify the various terminologies used and will furthermore try to consolidate motivation for and framing of the work. This issue aims to enable a platform for a wide academic discussion on peripheral interaction and its value for embedding HCI in everyday life.