Abstract. Smartphones with touchscreen-based interfaces are increasingly used by non-technical groups including the elderly. However, application developers have little understanding of how senior users interact with their products and of how to design senior-friendly interfaces. As an initial study to assess standard mobile touchscreen interfaces for the elderly, we conducted performance measurements and observational evaluations of 20 elderly participants. The tasks included performing basic gestures such as taps, drags, and pinching motions and using basic interactive components such as software keyboards and photo viewers. We found that mobile touchscreens were generally easy for the elderly to use and a week's experience generally improved their proficiency. However, careful observations identified several typical problems that should be addressed in future interfaces. We discuss the implications of our experiments, seeking to provide informal guidelines for application developers to design better interfaces for elderly people.

Recently, there are various types of display systems that can present aural, visual and haptic information related to the user's position. It is also important to present olfactory information related to the user's position, and we focus on the spatiality of odor, which is one of its characteristics. In this research, we constructed and evaluated a wearable olfactory display to present the spatiality of odor in an outdoor environment. The prototype wearable olfactory display system treats odor in the gaseous state, and the odor air is conveyed to the user's nose through tubes. Using this system, we also present the spatiality of odor by controlling the odor strength according to the positions of the user and the odor source. With this prototype system, the user can specify the position of the odor source in an outdoor environment. To improve this prototype system, we constructed another wearable olfactory display. Because odor is treated in the gaseous state, the first prototype system has some problems such as the large size of the device and unintentional leakage of the odor into the environment. To solve these issues, we developed and evaluated an advanced wearable olfactory display that uses an inkjet head device to treat odor in the liquid state.

Three-dimensional user interfaces (3D UIs) let users interact with virtual objects, environments, or information using direct 3D input in the physical and/or virtual space. In this article, the founders and organizers of the IEEE Symposium on 3D User Interfaces reflect on the state of the art in several key aspects of 3D UIs and speculate on future research.

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