Abstract
Exploring user interaction in specific contexts is often based on simulated environments and semi-functional prototypes of interactive systems. In this paper, we address a combination of context simulation with the Wizard of Oz (WOz) technique, where a hidden human ”wizard” simulates missing functionalities and system intelligence. The goal of our work is to provide a software framework for fast prototyping and concurrent evaluation through user studies during iterative interaction design processes. Contextual interaction research is particularly challenging in high-dynamic interaction contexts like ambient environments and includes the simulation of various context parameters to elaborate interaction designs in the target context. For this purpose, we have developed a prototyping framework that allows the setup and handling of different contextual situations during user studies. The framework and the proposed WOz protocol, which is used for integrating the WOz technique, are highly flexible, modular and adjustable at runtime. This allows their application in a big variety of study contexts in in-situ and in-vitro settings. A detailed description of the framework’s requirements and architecture as well as a user study, where we successfully applied our framework, are presented. First results have been collected through interviews with evaluators and developers who used the framework to develop the particular study setups. The identified improvements and potentials experienced during the usage of the framework have been analyzed and provide valuable findings for further iterations.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Ardito, C., Buono, P., Costabile, M.F., Lanzilotti, R., Piccinno, A.: A tool for wizard of oz studies of multimodal mobile systems. In: Proceedings of the 2nd Conference on Human System Interactions, HSI 2009, pp. 341–344. IEEE Press, Piscataway (2009)
Barton, J.J., Vijayaraghavan, V.: UBIWISE, A Ubiquitous Wireless Infrastructure Simulation Environment. Technical report (2002)
Diaper, D.: The wizard’s apprentice: a program to help analyse natural language dialogues. In: Proceedings of the Fifth Conference of the British Computer Society, Human-Computer Interaction Specialist Group on People and Computers V, pp. 231–243. Cambridge University Press, New York (1989)
Dow, S., MacIntyre, B., Lee, J., Oezbek, C., Bolter, J.D., Gandy, M.: Wizard of Oz Support throughout an Iterative Design Process. IEEE Pervasive Computing 4, 18–26 (2005)
Gu, T., Pung, H.K., Zhang, D.Q.: Toward an OSGi-Based Infrastructure for Context-Aware Applications. IEEE Pervasive Computing 3, 66–74 (2004)
Kurz, M., Ferscha, A.: Sensor Abstractions for Opportunistic Activity and Context Recognition Systems. In: Lukowicz, P., Kunze, K., Kortuem, G. (eds.) EuroSSC 2010. LNCS, vol. 6446, pp. 135–148. Springer, Heidelberg (2010)
Lee, M., Billinghurst, M.: A Wizard of Oz Study for an AR Multimodal Interface. In: Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Multimodal Interfaces, ICMI 2008, pp. 249–256. ACM, New York (2008)
Liu, L., Khooshabeh, P.: Paper or Interactive? A Study of Prototyping Techniques for Ubiquitous Computing Environments. In: CHI 2003 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI EA 2003, pp. 1030–1031. ACM, New York (2003)
Maulsby, D., Greenberg, S., Mander, R.: Prototyping an Intelligent Agent through Wizard of Oz. In: Computer Human Interaction, pp. 277–284 (1993)
Newman, M.W., Ackerman, M.S., Kim, J., Prakash, A., Hong, Z., Mandel, J., Dong, T.: Bringing the field into the lab: supporting capture and replay of contextual data for the design of context-aware applications. In: Proceedings of UIST 2010, pp. 105–108. ACM, New York (2010)
Obrenovic, Z., Martens, J.-B.: Sketching interactive systems with sketchify. ACM Trans. Comput.-Hum. Interact., 18:4:1–4:38 (2011)
Salber, D., Coutaz, J.: Applying the Wizard of oz Technique to the Study of Multimodal Systems. In: Bass, L.J., Unger, C., Gornostaev, J. (eds.) EWHCI 1993. LNCS, vol. 753, pp. 219–230. Springer, Heidelberg (1993)
Schlögl, S., Doherty, G., Karamanis, N., Luz, S.: WebWOZ: A Wizard of Oz Prototyping Framework. In: Proc. of EICS 2010, pp. 109–114. ACM, New York (2010)
Strasser, E., Weiss, A., Grill, T., Osswald, S., Tscheligi, M.: Combining Implicit and Explicit Methods for the Evaluation of an Ambient Persuasive Factory Display. In: Paternò, F., de Ruyter, B., Markopoulos, P., Santoro, C., van Loenen, E., Luyten, K. (eds.) AmI 2012. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 7683, Springer, Heidelberg (2012)
Suchman, L.A.: Plans and Situated Actions: The Problem of Human-Machine Communication. Cambridge University Press, New York (1987)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Zachhuber, D., Grill, T., Polacek, O., Tscheligi, M. (2012). Contextual Wizard of Oz. In: Paternò, F., de Ruyter, B., Markopoulos, P., Santoro, C., van Loenen, E., Luyten, K. (eds) Ambient Intelligence. AmI 2012. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7683. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-34898-3_15
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-34898-3_15
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-34897-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-34898-3
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)
