Section: Overall Objectives

Tools supporting transparent use

Technology is most empowering when it is transparent. But the transparent tool is not the one you cannot see, it is the one invisible in effect, the one that does not get into your way but lets you focus on the task. Heidegger used the term zuhanden (ready-to-hand) to characterize this unobtruded relation to things  [50]. Transparency of interaction is not best achieved with tools mimicking human capabilities, but with those taking full advantage of them and fitted to the context and task. Our actions towards the digital world need to be digitized, and the digital world must provide us with proper feedbacks in return. Input and output technologies pose inevitable constraints while the digital world calls for more and more sophisticated perception-action couplings for increasingly complex tasks. We want to study the means currently available for perception and action in the digital world. We understand the important role of the body on the human side, and the importance of hardware elements on the computer side. Our work thus follows a systems approach encompassing these elements and all the software layers above, from device drivers to applications.