Mobile workers need seamless access to communication and information services while on the move. However, current solutions overwhelm users with intrusive interfaces and ambiguous notifications. This article discusses the interaction techniques developed for Nomadic Radio, a wearable computing platform for managing voice and text-based messages in a nomadic environment. Nomadic Radio employs an auditory user interface, which synchronizes speech recognition, speech synthesis, nonspeech audio, and spatial presentation of digital audio, for navigating among messages as well as asynchronous notification of newly arrived messages. Emphasis is placed on an auditory modality as Nomadic Radio is designed to be used while performing other tasks in a user's everyday environment; a range of auditory cues provides peripheral awareness of incoming messages. Notification is adaptive and context sensitive; messages are presented as more or less obtrusive based on importance inferred from content filtering, whether the user is engaged in conversation and his or her own recent responses to prior messages. Auditory notifications are dynamically scaled from ambient sound through recorded voice cues up to message summaries. Iterative design and a preliminary user evaluation suggest that audio is an appropriate medium for mobile messaging, but that care must be taken to minimally intrude on the wearer's social and physical environment.

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A formal methodology is needed to integrate and exchange spatial and temporal properties in hypermedia and hypertext. We propose a generic framework to structure and dynamically present a new form of videoand text-based media called hypervideo. We developed a Hypervideo Engine and produced an experimental hypermedia work, HyperCafe, to illustrate the general properties and aesthetic techniques possible in such a medium.

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The use of speech and auditory interaction on wearable computers can provide an awareness of events and personal messages, without requiring one's full attention or disrupting the foreground activity. A passive "handsand-eyes-free" approach is appropriate when users need convenient and timely access to remote information and communication services. Nomadic Radio is a distributed computing platform for wearable access to unified messaging via an auditory interface. We demonstrate the use of auditory cues, spatialized audio, and speech I/O in the wearable interface for passive awareness, scaleable notification and navigation/control. The architecture is designed for wired audio wearables and has been extended for distributed wireless operation.