Ad-hoc Action Adaptation through Spontaneous Context

Typical everyday physical interactors, such as switches, perform a specific static action upon actuation by a user. For such simple components, this action is independent of the immediate user situation; consideration of this situation typically involves the augmentation of the interactor with specific added interface features (e.g., long-press of a button for dimming). We introduce the "spontaneous context" interaction pattern for everyday interactors where the concrete action is spontaneously adapted based on information about the user situation that the interactors gather and interpret ad hoc. In our approach, the interactor and user hence share no prior relationship and no user data is stored, yet the interactor adapts the action at interaction time. To demonstrate the spontaneous context pattern, we implemented a "plot door": this is an automatic door that differs from classical infrared motion sensor-activated doors by opening only when it is likely that an individual wants to enter. Our plot door uses an infrared sensor that is augmented with our proposed interaction pattern and thereby spontaneously gathers and interprets accelerometer and gyroscope data from the individual to determine whether it should open or not.

Raffael Rot, Simon Mayer, and Jannis Strecker-Bischoff. 2025. Ad-hoc Action Adaptation through Spontaneous Context. In Companion of the 2025 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp Companion ’25), October 12–16, 2025, Espoo, Finland. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 5 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3714394.3755878