Increasingly, our modern, mobile population works and lives with information. Most individuals interact with information through a single portal: a personal desktop or laptop computer. To provide mobile workers with more convenient access, companies are beginning to produce various portable and embedded information devices. These developments hint at a future where people will interact with information through a continuously varying array of devices that combine to form ad hoc portals suitable to particular situations. In such a future, people and information will be emancipated. No longer will information be captive of single devices, nor will one person necessarily own each device. This leap of imagination requires that human-computer interaction (HCI) researchers solve some significant challenges. This paper identifies and discusses these challenges, and also points to some current, early research on the trail to the next frontier of human-computer interaction.
