Conducting a Wizard of Oz Experiment on a Ubiquitous Computing System Doorman

1 Abstract A problem in developing and testing ubiquitous computing systems is the fact that they are environments and cannot be tested in conventional laboratory settings. Here we have addressed the problem of testing such an environment by applying the Wizard of Oz method to a ubiquitous computing system called Doorman. Doorman uses spoken language input and multimodal speech output (speech synthesis combined with pointing gestures) to control the access of incoming visitors and staff members to our office premises and to guide the visitors to find the people or the room they are seeking. The experiment was conducted by simulating speech recognition with a human wizard operating the otherwise fully working system. The userinitiated dialogue strategy was mostly successful, but did not meet the requirements in some cases. We also found that guiding visitors using multimodal spoken output was not successful and should be redesigned.