The world is going mobile. Mobile devices have intricately integrated into people’s daily lives on both personal and professional levels. The rapid advancements in hardware, applications and its encompassing supportive technologies pose significant challenges to the process of mobile user interface design. The key in a successful design for the forthcoming generation of mobile services is to understand the users' needs, the mobile context (including the opportunities it presents), the network characteristics and the constraints of the hardware. Although the development of mobile technologies provides powerful hardware and networks, users are expecting services to be tailor-made for the mobile context, rather than exploiting the full spectrum of the latest technology features. In addition, interaction design is extended beyond mainstream practices to become more of a crafting of “user experience”, rather than a conventional process that focuses on the “ease-of-use”. This means that mobile interaction developers need to adopt new and innovative ways of thinking for creating a truly good user experience for mobile services.

While mobile phones remain massively pervasive to become a vital part of our everyday lives, we are heading towards a course of science fiction with the propagation of Augmented Reality (AR). The fusion of AR and mobile technologies will together unveil the creations of novel mobile AR applications. As image processing algorithms and processing capabilities of mobile hardware significantly improve, mobile AR will be ubiquitously penetrating across multiple facets in the future. We will be able to immersively interact with virtual information in physical environments for entertainment, navigational, informational and exploratory purposes.

The workshop is hosted by Professor Henry Duh and Professor Mark Billinghurst. The content of the workshop consists of lectures and design practices. Dr. Duh is the deputy director (research) of KEIO-NUS CUTE center, and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Interactive and Digital Media Institute at National University of Singapore. Dr. Duh is a Senior Member of both ACM and IEEE. His research interests are human-computer interaction, virtual interface design, interface usability testing and information navigation behavior. His current research focuses on user experiences, interaction design and game effects in advanced display and mobile systems. Dr. Billinghurst has a wealth of knowledge and expertise in human computer interface technology, particularly in the area of Augmented Reality (the overlay of three-dimensional images on the real world). He has achieved several accolades in recent years for his contribution to Human Interface Technology research. He was selected as one of eight leading New Zealand innovators and entrepreneurs to be showcased at the Carter Holt Harvey New Zealand Innovation Pavilion at the America's Cup Village from November 2002 until March 2003. His research focuses primarily on advanced 3D user interfaces such as Wearable Computing, Shared Space and Multimodal Input.

The goal of the workshop is to explore the user experiences involved in designing mobile services for handheld devices. An introduction to the mobile user experience and various types of applied technology will set the scene to interactive discussions and hands-on activities focused on user-centered design, rapid prototyping. Exercises will be carried out in small project teams and will focus on applying the skills and Mobile Augmented Reality (Mobile AR) techniques to design services for mobile handsets.