Towards new realities: implications of personalized online layers in our daily lives

Abstract

We are currently in a period of upheaval, as many new technologies are emerging that open up new possibilities to shape our everyday lives. Particularly, within the field of Personalized Human-Computer Interaction we observe high potential, but also challenges. In this article, we explore how an increasing amount of online services and tools not only further facilitates our lives, but also shapes our lives and how we perceive our environments. For this purpose, we adopt the metaphor of personalized ‘online layers’ and show how these layers are and will be interwoven with the lives that we live in the ‘human layer’ of the real world.