Beyond the Desktop: Natural Interaction and Intelligent Assistance for the Everyday Life

As computers are becoming more and more ubiquitous, moving from the desktop into the infrastructure of our everyday life, they begin to influence the way we interact with this environment - the (physical) entities that we operate upon in order to achieve our daily goals. The most important aspect of future human-computer interaction therefore is the way, computers support us in efficiently managing our personal environment. This might be called the ecological level of user-interface design. The paper discusses the fundamental challenges and solution concepts for building personal digital assistants that support users in interacting with the real world, based on the model of situation-aware mobile assistance.