Mobile HCI 2008 in Amsterdam

I've just returned from mobile HCI 2008 in Amsterdam - overall, a very enjoyable experience. As always, a broad range of topics were covered, both from an academic and from an industrial/commercial perspective. There were a couple of papers that stood out for me:

• Usage of Spatial Information for Selection of Collocated Devices (Roswitha Gostner, Enrico Rukzio, Hans Gellersen), which reported on a user study investigating the use of spatial cues to interact with the environment (relates to the RELATE project).
• T-Bars: Towards Tactile User Interfaces for Mobile Touchscreens (Malcolm Hall, Eve Hoggan, Stephen Brewster), which looked into using tactile feedback to overcome some of the limitations of finger-based touchscreen interaction.
• Multimodal Interfaces for Camera Phones (Stephen Brewster, Jody Johnston), which described a very subtle modification to existing non-visual cues on digital cameras to convey information that is usually encoded as (uncomprehensible) icons on the viewfinder display.
  

The best paper/presentation in my opinion was 'Mobiphos: A collocated synchronous mobile photo sharing application' by James Clawson, Amy Voida, Mirmal Patel & Kent Lyons. They described a system that enabled a group of people, each person armed with cameras, to instantaneously and effortlessly share photos on the spot as they were taken. Not only was the application very innovative and intuitive, but the user study was very thoughtfully designed and revealed some very interesting behaviours resulting from this new technology.

While the second keynote was slightly underwhelming, the first one by BJ Fogg was very inspiring. He talked about persuasion and his belief that persuasive systems (e.g. in health applications, social networking tools and environmental education) will take off on mobile devices in the near future.