This home page is the primary ressource for all information around the HotWire apparatus developed at the TZI, Wearable Computing Lab. of the University of Bremen, Germany.

The HotWire is a novel apparatus for simulating real world primary tasks typically found in wearable computing. It was first introduced by Hendrik Witt & Mikael Drugge at the Computer-Human Interaction (CHI) Conference 2006 in Montreal, Canada.

The Idea

Unlike in stationary computing where users concentrate mainly on one task to be performed with the computer, wearable computing typically expects users to accomplish two different tasks. A primary task involves real world physical actions whereas the secondary task is often dedicated to explicitly interacting with a wearable computer. The HotWire allows a simulation of these real world primary tasks in a controlled laboratory environment that is needed when conducting user studies on wearable computing aspects such as, for example, user interface evaluations.