Mobile phones and other wearable devices have become an integral part of most people’s life. They support us in a wide variety of applications and use cases from simple navigation to health to work. Most of the time, these devices just externalize knowledge, be it ours (notes, pictures, calendar information, etc.) or that of others (e.g. access to Wikipedia, maps, internet applications). Yet, even though we have all of this information at our fingertips, it is unclear how we should interface with it. How can we make information intake more natural? Can we extend our perception to understand complex digital data more intuitively? Newest findings in neuroscience, applied psychology and physiology suggest that it’s possible. This Dagstuhl Seminar aims to bring together specialists of these fields, as well as researchers from wearable computing, human computer interaction, machine perception, and pattern recognition to discuss the possibility of digitally enhancing our cognition/perception, augmenting our skills, and creating novel digital senses.

The overall objective of the seminar is to foster research, and explore and model new means for increasing human intake of information in order to lay the foundation for augmented cognition, especially through somatosensation: the ability to sense the environment through our body. Beside enhancing the human range and perceivable sensory information, an elegant solution to extend people’s sensed information could be technology to augment or “code” cognition. While previously illusions and cognitive amplifications were designed for unique and highly particular use cases, can we find a more scalable model?

This seminar will focus on how to interact with information from the digital domain, in a minimally disruptive way, creating novel sensory experiences using and extending human perception and ultimately cognition.

Creative Commons BY 3.0 DE

Kai Kunze, Pattie Maes, Florian Mueller, and Katrin Wolf