Interacting with a personal wearable device

Comris is a research project that aims to create a wearable assistant, "the parrot", for conference and workshop visitors. A personal interest profile and an active badge system enable agents in a virtual information space to provide context-sensitive information about interesting persons and events to conference and workshop visitors in their own physical information space. This paper describes a usability experiment for the interaction design of the parrot device as a device that should not distract the users from their regular activities and provide the users with a sense of being in control. We describe the usability evaluation of 4 prototypes for the design of the user-parrot dialogue, each based on a different principle for function-to-button allocation. Because the parrot device was still being developed, the evaluations were performed in simulated settings. The results of the experiment are related to the importance of conceptual aspects versus perceptual aspects in user interface design methods, and in particular the role of perceptual and dialogue consistency.