Christos Gkoumas

Researcher & Developer | Cognitive Neuroscientist | Technologist

The future of context-aware digital spaces


With immersive technologies becoming an integral part of our lives, it is almost certain that in the next few years, we are going to spend much of our daily time (e.g., working) in digital spaces. This calls for the understanding of how the different qualities of digital spaces would affect the users' behavior. Such understanding can be used, for example,  to adapt a digital environment to the cognitive state of the user in order to increase their productivity or performance. Influenced by my PhD research, which was about how the organization of spaces affects perception and cognition, and two recent papers (this one and this one), I came up with an idea about a virtual office environment. I developed two variants of this environment, a low-load, and a high-load to use them as a testbed for experimentation. The users are asked to perform various cognitive tasks displayed on the virtual computer screen while their eyes are being tracked. This will give valuable insights into how the organization of a digital working space affects users' information processing abilities and visual behavior. Several extensions can be made from there. For example, specific eye movement metrics can provide information about the cognitive state of the user (e.g., fatigue, distractibility, etc.) and can trigger changes to the working environment or give "smart" recommendations (e.g., you look tired. it might be a good idea to have some rest). These types of digital applications hold great promise for the future of human-centered context-aware computing!
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