Martin Tomitsch – Using the world as a canvas

Martin Tomitsch — Using the world as a canvas

• By:Guy Leech
• Tweet: @webdirections
• November 8, 2011

Web Directions South 2011, Sydney, October 13th.

• Audio recording of session
• Presentation slides
• Session description
• About Martin Tomitsch

Presentation slide

Session description

Now that we are comfortable developing and designing web content for desktop screens, just when we finally understood how to translate the web experience to mobile screens, there is a new challenge ahead of us. How do we develop and design web content when the physical environment becomes our canvas?

While for a period there was (and largely still is) an emerging trend to stick a screen on everything (remember the Internet fridge), increasingly the smartphone is becoming our swiss army knife for information access. Constantly connected to the Internet, smartphones have literally made information available at our fingertips in more personalised and less obtrusive ways than embedded screens.

With the arrival of new display technologies, like integrated personal projectors, we will be able (again) to design for a much larger content area. There is a danger though that this will be limited to marginal use cases, such as watching photos or movies, when in fact this opens up an entirely new and exciting design space. Drawing on the sensing power of smartphones, projected content could instead be designed to provide rich interaction and contextualised visualisation of information.

The session will draw on research projects and visions of the future to sketch out the possibilities of this new design space, and how current web practices can be translated into a future where using the world as a canvas will change information visualisation and access all over again.

About Martin Tomitsch

Martin Tomitsch holds a lectureship at the University of Sydney and works as researcher at the Design Lab, an interdisciplinary research group within the Faculty of Architecture, Design and Planning. He teaches interaction design for the Web, mobile devices, and experimental interfaces. In his research he investigates aspects of designing and evaluating information interfaces in everyday environments. He is particularly interested in using new technologies to create user experiences that merge the digital and the physical. Martin has a background in informatics with a focus on human-​​computer interaction, which he studied in Vienna, Paris and Stockholm. Before joining the Design Lab, he worked as interface designer in software projects.

Follow Martin on Twitter: @martintom

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