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April 18, 2007

Lit Review - Bubble Badge

The BubbleBadge: A Wearable Public Display (Falk and Bjork 1999)

The Bubble Badge (BB) is a wearable public display. This paper provides a brief overview of a prototype wearable public display, and then discusses some areas for future work. The BB project is not incredibly insightful, but it is one of the first papers to discuss the concept of a wearable public display. The authors describe BB as a small badge that is worn on one’s lapel, and a portable computer drives the content displayed on the small lapel display. The authors discuss how the BB has three dynamics: the wearer as the information provider, the viewer as information provider, and the environment as information provider. Each of these dynamics introduce interesting usage scenarios, for example, when the environment is the information provider the BB might display news updates broadcast wirelessly. There was really no more then a very short antidotal evaluation of the BB system.

There are two interesting features of this paper: A) public displays as a wearable device, and B) considering the role of information provider in the equation.

Falk, J. and S. Bjork (1999). The BubbleBadge: a wearable public display. CHI '99 extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, ACM Press.

I wish there was a simple way to embed an image into these blog posts. In fact for a blog on public displays there is a huge dearth of images. In any case, Bubble Badge is an interesting concept from 1999. (Yea there were public display ideas back then, too)

Posted by bcx at April 18, 2007 01:25 AM

Comments

The idea of wearing a display on a badge doesn't sound that intersting. For 1999 I'm sure it was neat. If we could get en entire outfit that was a display I'm sure the sporting industry would change forever. Just think of a football player scoring a touchdown in the superbowl then his uniform turns in to a Coca-Cola billboard. Good for his bank account I guess, but I don;t think we're too far out from this being reality.

Posted by: paul.dillinger@gmail.com at September 8, 2007 02:51 AM

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