Immersive interaction

Research opportunities and challenges

Around the world, people desire to be connected to, and engaged with, their co-workers, customers, friends, families, and other social communities – whenever and wherever they choose. Users expect technology to be easy to use, reliable, context aware, and personalized. Users also want technology to serve as the transparent enabler to an engaging experience, allowing people to immerse themselves in their online content or activity.

Challenges that inhibit truly immersive and intuitive interactions between users and technology include:

• The complexity and cost barriers of today’s audio and video conferencing technologies
• The lack of context-aware cloud services that extend and expand the real-time sensing of user context, beyond just location
• The desire to move beyond the limits of today’s ”unnatural” mouse and keyboard-based user interfaces to include stylus, touch, speech, hand gestures, and other forms that can be used individually or integrated for a multimodal experience.
• The complexity of today’s web services that offer users personalized experiences—mash-ups, widgets, feeds etc.— but are too difficult for the non-technical user to enjoy.