46877382
"Please Turn ON Your Mobile Phone" - First Impressions of Text-Messaging in Lectures
Previous work by Draper and Brown [3] investigated the use of specialized handsets to increase interactivity in lecture settings. Inspired by their encouraging findings we have been exploring the use of conventional mobile phones and text-messaging to allow students to communicate with the lecturer as the class proceeds. In our pilot-study, students were able to respond to MCQs and send free-text comments and questions to the lecturer via SMS. Through observations and interviews with students and lecturers, we gained useful impressions of the value of such an approach. Students enjoyed the opportunity to be more actively involved but voiced concerns about costs.
22559047
Usability of digital libraries
42586645
The music is the message
the music being played by her tiny mobile audio appliance. She's standing waiting for a train. Other commuters swarm nearby, headphones on, listening in more muted ways to the soundtracks they've chosen to accompany today's episode of their daily routine. Mobile music players—iPods, Walkmans and the like—are exciting for those of us involved in thinking about the future of mobile devices and services. Like the mobile phone—increasing numbers of which also sport a music player—these are gadgets that people actually desire, and aspire to own. They have vast storage capacities, increasingly sophisticated processors and pleasing, effective mechanisms for users to control their func-tionality. From click and jog wheels to high-resolution color displays, these players are far from being the impoverished devices that typified mobile platforms just a few years ago. And there are hundreds of millions of them in circulation—Apple sold five million in the first quarter of 2006 alone. But at the same time, these marvelous mobiles could be seen as an obstacle to the bright futures dreamt up in the research labs. How will people be able to make use of the ubiquitous computing infrastructure being envisaged, the anytime, everywhere access to information and services, when they are immersed in digital sound bubbles of their own choosing? Some mobile listeners, at first sight, certainly appear cut off. Another scene: A young man stares out of a train window, watching the long green fields flash by. His eyes are bright but still; his gaze betrays a mood of deep reflection. Listening to music on expensive , noise-reducing headphones, what is he thinking? Is he sadly contemplating a lover left or anticipating a longed-for meeting at his destination? How can we design mobile services that will fit this context? The conventional clumsy beeps, vibrations, and attention-seeking displays seem out of place. What opportunities are there to build more emphatic systems , systems to enhance the music and environmental experience or to provide ways for the listener to later reflect on the situations they've lived through in relation to the music they've heard? At other times, though, these sound bubbles seem more permeable, don't they? One of the photos of people listening to music available on a popular image-sharing site is entitled " Listening to Kim's iPod and talking to Joe! " A teenager holds a mobile phone to her left ear while wearing the distinctive white music-player headphones. Chatting and …
3268647
A digital library of conversational expressions: helping profoundly disabled users communicate
Digital libraries are for everyone. This paper describes the development of a digital library for a user who has a profound physical disability that means she cannot communicate verbally, and cannot use conventional communication tools.
39264003
HyperAT: HCI and Web Authoring
We review HCI problems with hypertext, and for authoring World Wide Web documents in particular. We suggest that a framework is required to understand the usability issues, and that these issues cannot be seen as psychological or computing: they are multi-disciplinary. We discuss HyperAT, a protorype authoring tool, being implemented to test these ideas.
3300534
Improving mobile internet usability
Mobile internet technologies, such as WAP, are important for pervasive, anytime, anywhere computing. Although much progress has been made in terms of technological innovation, many of mobile internet systems are difficult to use, lack flexibility and robustness. They give a poor user experience. Evaluation and theoretical analysis of usability combined with innovative design can achieve significant improvements in user performance and satisfaction. Using such multidisciplinary methods explains the negative reactions to WAP, and — more constructively — suggest ways of developing more effective and efficient devices and services.
6541426
Wikifying your interface: facilitating community-based interface translation
We explore the application of a wiki-based technology and style of interaction to enabling the incremental translation of a collaborative application into a number of different languages, including variant English language interfaces better suited to the needs of particular user communities. The development work allows us to explore in more detail the design space of functionality and interfaces relating to tailoring, customization, personalization and localization, and the challenges of designing to support ongoing incremental contributions by members of different use communities.
34512114
Nanomanipulator applications in education: the impact of haptic experiences on students' attitudes and concepts
This research investigated educational uses of the nanoManipulator (nM) that when connected to an atomic force microscope allows students to get tactile feedback and manipulate objects such as viruses that are nanometer-sized. Our research focused on documenting how haptic feedback impacted students' attitudes as well as their understandings of viruses. The study involved 209 middle and high schools students. Half of the students received haptic feedback during investigations and half had the same investigations with the haptic feedback blocked by the computer. The results showed that students' with haptic feedback had better attitudes towards the investigations and were more likely to develop 3-dimensional concepts of adenoviruses that were more morphologically accurate.
2186746
3D distance fields: a survey of techniques and applications
A distance field is a representation where, at each point within the field, we know the distance from that point to the closest point on any object within the domain. In addition to distance, other properties may be derived from the distance field, such as the direction to the surface, and when the distance field is signed, we may also determine if the point is internal or external to objects within the domain. The distance field has been found to be a useful construction within the areas of computer vision, physics, and computer graphics. This paper serves as an exposition of methods for the production of distance fields, and a review of alternative representations and applications of distance fields. In the course of this paper, we present various methods from all three of the above areas, and we answer pertinent questions such as How accurate are these methods compared to each other? How simple are they to implement?, and What is the complexity and runtime of such methods?.
16167152
Functional Programming with Overloading and Higher-Order Polymorphism
The Hindley/Milner type system has been widely adopted as a basis for statically typed functional languages. One of the main reasons for this is that it provides an elegant compromise between flexibility, allowing a single value to be used in different ways, and practicality, freeing the programmer from the need to supply explicit type information. Focusing on practical applications rather than implementation or theoretical details, these notes examine a range of extensions that provide more flexible type systems while retaining many of the properties that have made the original Hindley/Milner system so popular. The topics discussed, some old, but most quite recent, include higher-order polymorphism and type and constructor class overloading. Particular emphasis is placed on the use of these features to promote modularity and reusability.
6680702
Melting Objects
This paper describes a technique for producing realistic animations of melting objects. The work presented here introduces a method that accurately models both thermal flow and the latent heat during the phase change. The mechanism for energy transfer to the model is via both boundary conditions and radiation. Emphasis is made on accurately modelling the solid object and the method is particularly suited to rigid solids with complex surface geometry. The underlying objects are constructed using Volume Graphics modelling techniques (specifically voxelization), and a numerical simulation computes the time-dependent heat flow throughout the object. A technique for computing the phase transition is given, and details for rendering the melting objects are provided. The melting is controlled by material parameters, such as specific heat capacity, thermal conductivity, latent heat and temperature. Examples are given of melting ice and a plastic man.