Usability Issues in COMRIS, An Intelligent Personal Information System Geert de Haan IPO, Center for Research on User-System Interaction Eindhoven University of Technology P.O. Box 513 5600 MB Eindhoven The Netherlands g.d.haan@tue.nl Abstract Comris is a research and development project that aims to create a wearable assistant for conference and workshop visitors. A personal interest profile and an active badge system enable agents in a virtual information space to provide context-sensitive information about interesting persons and events to conference and workshop visitors in their own physical information space. Comris encounters special usability problems, not found in either traditional information systems or virtual reality applications. This paper describes the Comris project, discusses the proposed usability studies, and presents the conclusions from the first experiment. Introduction COMRIS (Cohabited Mixed Reality Information Spaces; Van der Velde, 1997) is a research and development project that seeks to develop a wearable assistant for conference and workshop visitors. On the basis of a personal interest profile and an active badge system, conference visitors receive context-sensitive information about interesting persons and events in their spatio-temporal vicinity. For example, a person who has indicated a high interest in wearable computers on her home-page or profile form may receive a message that "a demonstration of the parrot, a wearable conference assistant, is about to start in 5 minutes at the Comris booth". To the user the most tangible part of the Comris system is a small wearable and personal device, mimicked 'the parrot' that every now and then speaks in the user's ear and provides a few buttons to fine-tune messaging defaults to the circumstances and to delete, repeat and elaborate messages. To the system, the parrot is also a transmitter that help keep track of the whereabouts of people. Conference visitors also have a number of information kiosks to their disposal to enter and adjust their interest profiles and to consult the conference schedule and their personal agenda. Presumably, the information kiosks also provide for general internet facilities apart from to their use within Comris. Only indirectly noticeable to the user is the virtual agent space that forms the software side of the 'cohabited information space' that Comris is about. In this space, agents represent the possible (events and persons) and the actual interests (from the interest profile) of all the users and compete for the attention of the user's personal agent that decides which interests are passed on for language and speech generation and output via the user's parrot.