Posts filed under 'Publications'
Colin Swindells, University of British Columbia (2007)
Colin recently defended his Ph.D. research on ways to measure and elicit emotional responses, such as surprise, fear, anger, and acceptance, from physical manual controls. The visceral emotional reactions that users have to technologies are increasingly understood to be important in terms of safety, performance, and pleasure in its own right. The thesis systematically explores users’s emotional (affect) reactions to everyday physical manual controls, in order to inform a design process that considers appropriate affective response as well as performance relationships.
Design of both mechanical and emerging mechatronic physical controls are addressed through a novel design process that includes parameterizing second order (inertial) dynamics using a system identification technique, and rendering models on a custom force- feedback knob.
The thesis also examines biometric and self-reported measures of the affective responses elicited by these dynamics, and develops an iterative prototyping tool for rapid refinement of the “feel” of physical controls. This research impacts use of the passive physical interfaces such as mechanical knobs and sliders that are already ubiquitous in our everyday environments, as well as the active physical controls that are emerging in embedded computing environments such as cars, games, and medical devices.
One use for this technology is to enhance collaborative interfaces with haptic feedback that conveys a sense of the participants’
emotional states. The supervisory committee was Kellogg Booth, Karon MacLean, and Joanna McGrenere. Colin is currently working with Incaa Designs on novel pen and paper computing. Incaa Designs is the research branch of Adapx (http://www.adapx.com/).
Thesis: http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~swindell/pubs/
ColinSwindellsPhDThesis_07March2007.pdf
Website: http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~swindell
Photo: http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~swindell/colin_swindells.jpg
For more information
July 26th, 2007
Carman Neustaedter, a recent Nectar PhD graduate, won the Michael A. J. Sweeney Award for best student paper at Graphics Interface 2007 for a paper titled:
This paper was previously provided in this blog. This work was performed in association with Microsoft Research, and was part of Carman’s Nectar-funded PhD work.
May 31st, 2007
James E. Young, Gregor McEwan, Saul Greenberg, Ehud Sharlin
New generation media spaces let group members see each other and share information, but are often static and separated from the physical world. To solve this problem, we propose the AIBO Surrogate—a robotic interface for a media space group, allowing members to extend their group interactions into the physical, real world. Distributed group members see a first-person view of what the robot sees and can control its walking direction, gaze and actions. For members physically collocated with the robot the AIBO Surrogate provides physical presence and awareness: a tele-embodiment of the distributed group.
For more information
May 31st, 2007
Cockburn, A., Gutwin, C. and Greenberg, S. (2007)
Menus are a primary control in current interfaces, but there has been relatively little theoretical work to model their performance. We propose a model of menu performance that goes beyond previous work by incorporating components for Fitts’ Law pointing time, visual search time when novice, Hick-Hyman Law decision time when expert, and for the transition from novice to expert behaviour. The model is able to predict performance for many different menu designs, including adaptive split menus, items with different frequencies and sizes, and multi-level menus. We tested the model by comparing predictions for four menu designs (traditional menus, recency and frequency based split menus, and an adaptive ‘morphing’ design) with empirical measures. The empirical data matched the predictions extremely well, suggesting that the model can be used to explore a wide range of menu possibilities before implementation.
For more information
- A Predictive Model of Menu Performance, Proc ACM CHI’07 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. (Apr 28-May 3, San Jose, CA, USA). 10 pages
- Andy Cockburn andy@cosc.canterbury.ac.nz
May 31st, 2007
This may be a CHI Record! Ravin Balakrishnan and people he has worked with have 10 full papers appearing in CHI 2007. Usually, people are incredibly pleased to have a single paper at this conference, so this is a remarkable accomplishment.
Rather than provide all the abstracts, here are a list of the papers. You can find preprints of them as papers: #64-73 www.dgp.toronto.edu/~ravin. All papers below will appear as (in press - 2007) in Proceedings of CHI 2007 – the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.
Shengdong Zhao, Pierre Dragicevic, Mark Chignell, Ravin Balakrishnan, Patrick Baudisch.
earPod: Eyes-free menu selection using touch input and reactive audio feedback.
Clifton Forlines, Chia Shen, Daniel Wigdor, Ravin Balakrishnan.
Direct-touch vs. mouse input for tabletop displays.
Gonzalo Ramos, Ravin Balakrishnan.
Pressure marks.
Gonzalo Ramos, Andy Cockburn, Ravin Balakrishnan, Michel Beaudoiun-Lafon.
Pointing lenses.
Abhishek Ranjan, Jeremy Birnholtz, Ravin Balakrishnan.
Dynamic shared visual spaces: Experimenting with automatic camera control in a remote repair task.
Daniel Wigdor, Chia Shen, Clifton Forlines, Ravin Balakrishnan.
Perception of elementary graphical elements in tabletop and multi-surface environments.
Jeremy Birnholtz, Tovi Grossman, Clarissa Mak, Ravin Balakrishnan.
An exploratory study of input configuration and group process in a negotiation task using a large display.
Tovi Grossman, Nicholas Kong, Ravin Balakrishnan.
Modeling pointing at targets of arbitrary shapes.
Tovi Grossman, Daniel Wigdor, Ravin Balakrishnan.
Exploring and reducing the effects of orientation on text readability in volumetric displays.
Tovi Grossman, Pierre Dragicevic, Ravin Balakrishnan.
Strategies for accelerating on-line learning of hotkeys.
March 9th, 2007
Carman Neustaedter (U Calgary), A.J. Brush (Microsoft Research) and Saul Greenberg (U Calgary)
Digital family calendars have the potential to help families coordinate, yet they must be designed to easily fit within existing routines or they will simply not be used. To understand the critical factors affecting digital family calendar design, we extended LINC, an inkable family calendar to include ubiquitous access, and then conducted a month-long field study with four families. Adoption and use of LINC during the study demonstrated that LINC successfully supported the families’ existing calendaring routines without disrupting existing successful social practices. Families also valued the additional features enabled by LINC. For example, several primary schedulers felt that ubiquitous access positively increased involvement by additional family members in the calendaring routine. The field trials also revealed some unexpected findings, including the importance of mobility—both within and outside the home—for the Tablet PC running LINC.
The figure illustrates the LINC family calendar as located in one household (in the kitchen)
For more information
March 1st, 2007
Kathryn Elliot, Mark Watson, Carman Neustaedter and Saul Greenberg
Ethnographic studies of the home revealed the fundamental roles that physical locations and context play in how household members understand and manage conventional information. Yet we also know that digital information is becoming increasingly important to households. The problem is that this digital information is almost always tied to traditional computer displays, which inhibits its incorporation into household routines. Our solution, location-dependent information appliances, exploit both home location and context (as articulated in ethnographic studies) to enhance the role of ambient displays in the home setting; these displays provide home occupants with both background awareness of an information source and foreground methods to gain further details if desired. The novel aspect is that home occupants assign particular information to locations within a home in a way that makes sense to them. As a device is moved to a particular home location, information is automatically mapped to that device along with hints on how it should be displayed.
The figure illustrates an appliance, an identifying data stream tag, and the base that defines how the appliance will operate at a particular location.
For more information
March 1st, 2007
Garth Shoemaker and Carl Gutwin
Multi-point interaction tasks involve the manipulation of several mutually-dependent control points in a visual workspace – for example, adjusting a selection rectangle in a drawing application. Multi-point interactions place conflicting requirements on the interface: the system must display objects at sufficient scale for detailed manipulation, but it must also provide an efficient means of navigating from one control point to another. Current interfaces lack any explicit support for tasks that combine these two requirements, forcing users to carry out sequences of zoom and pan actions. In this paper, we describe three novel mechanisms for view control that explicitly support multi-point interactions with a single mouse, and preserve both visibility and scale for multiple regions of interest.
We carried out a study to compare two of the designs against standard zoom and pan techniques, and found that task completion time was significantly reduced with the new approaches. The study shows the potential of interfaces that combine support for both scale and navigation.
For more information
February 24th, 2007
Tse, E., Shen, C., Greenberg, S. and Forlines, C.
Co-located collaborators often work over physical tabletops using combinations of expressive hand gestures and verbal utterances. This paper provides the first observations of how pairs of people communicated and interacted in a multimodal digital table environment built atop existing single user applications. We contribute to the understanding of these environments in two ways. First, we saw that speech and gesture commands served double duty as both commands to the computer, and as implicit communication to others. Second, in spite of limitations imposed by the underlying single-user application, people were able to work together simultaneously, and they performed interleaving acts: the graceful mixing of inter-person speech and gesture actions as commands to the system. This work contributes to the intricate understanding of multi-user multimodal digital table interaction.
For more information
- Tse, E., Shen, C., Greenberg, S. and Forlines, C. (2007) How Pairs Interact Over a Multimodal Digital Table. Proc. ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, (April 27-May 3), ACM Press. (Tech Note). Pre-publicationcopy available at: Grouplab Papers website.
- Contact Name saul.greenberg@ucalgary.ca or tsee@cpsc.ucalgary.ca
February 7th, 2007
Meghan Allen; Supervisor: Joanna McGrenere
PhotoTalk is a software application for a mobile device that allows people with aphasia to capture and manage digital photographs in order to support face-to-face communication. Aphasia is an acquired language impairment which can affect speaking, auditory comprehension, reading and writing. Individuals with aphasia often find it challenging to communicate verbally, although they generally retain their ability to recognize images. Unlike any other augmentative and alternative communication device, our application focuses solely on image capture and organization and is designed to be accessible to people with aphasia.
The PhotoTalk project used a streamlined research process that consisted of 4 phases: (1) a participatory design phase involving
speech experts, (2) an informal usability study, (3) the primary evaluation of PhotoTalk, a 1 month field study with 2 people who have aphasia, and (4) a secondary field study with 1 individual who has aphasia.
Two speech-language pathologists acted as representative users in the participatory design phase in order to rapidly design and develop PhotoTalk and to move quickly to the evaluation stage with individuals who have aphasia. The informal usability study with 5 participants caught usability problems and provided preliminary feedback on the usefulness of PhotoTalk before we moved forward with the field studies.
Our 1 month field evaluations with 3 users demonstrated the application’s promise in terms of both its usability and usefulness in
real life situations. Both participants in the primary field study used PhotoTalk regularly and fairly independently throughout the field study, although not always for its intended communicative purpose. The participant in the secondary study was able to use PhotoTalk completely independently for specific communicative purposes.
In this thesis we describe the streamlined research process we used, the PhotoTalk application, the informal usability study, and the two field studies, as well as provide preliminary guidelines for involving domain experts in assistive technology research.
For more information
October 21st, 2006
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