11778998
The calder toolkit: wired and wireless components for rapidly prototyping interactive devices
Toolkits and other tools have dramatically reduced the time and technical expertise needed to design and implement graphical user interfaces (GUIs) allowing high-quality, iterative, user-centered design to become a common practice. Unfortunately the generation of functioning prototypes for physical interactive devices as not had similar support -- it still requires substantial time and effort by individuals with highly specialized skills and tools. This creates a divide between a designers' ability to explore form and interactivity of product designs and the ability to iterate on the basis of high fidelity interactive experiences with a functioning prototype. To help overcome this difficulty we have developed the Calder hardware toolkit. Calder is a development environment for rapidly exploring and prototyping functional physical interactive devices. Calder provides a set of reusable small input and output components, and integration into existing interface prototyping environments. These components communicate with a computer using wired and wireless connections. Calder is a tool targeted toward product and interaction designers to aid them in their early design process. In this paper we describe the process of gaining an understanding of the needs and workflow habits of our target users to generate a collection of requirements for such a toolkit. We describe technical challenges imposed by these needs, and the specifics of design and implementation of the toolkit to meet these challenges.
3952650
Haptic pen: a tactile feedback stylus for touch screens
In this paper we present a system for providing tactile feedback for stylus-based touch-screen displays. The Haptic Pen is a simple low-cost device that provides individualized tactile feedback for multiple simultaneous users and can operate on large touch screens as well as ordinary surfaces. A pressure-sensitive stylus is combined with a small solenoid to generate a wide range of tactile sensations. The physical sensations generated by the Haptic pen can be used to enhance our existing interaction with graphical user interfaces as well as to help make modern computing systems more accessible to those with visual or motor impairments.
8239026
The kinetic typography engine: an extensible system for animating expressive text
Kinetic typography --- text that uses movement or other temporal change --- has recently emerged as a new form of communication. As we hope to illustrate in this paper, kinetic typography can be seen as bringing some of the expressive power of film --- such as its ability to convey emotion, portray compelling characters, and visually direct attention --- to the strong communicative properties of text. Although kinetic typography offers substantial promise for expressive communications, it has not been widely exploited outside a few limited application areas (most notably in TV advertising). One of the reasons for this has been the lack of tools directly supporting it, and the accompanying difficulty in creating dynamic text. This paper presents a first step in remedying this situation --- an extensible and robust system for animating text in a wide variety of forms. By supporting an appropriate set of carefully factored abstractions, this engine provides a relatively small set of components that can be plugged together to create a wide range of different expressions. It provides new techniques for automating effects used in traditional cartoon animation, and provides specific support for typographic manipulations.
37265440
RFIG lamps: interacting with a self-describing world via photosensing wireless tags and projectors
This paper describes how to instrument the physical world so that objects become self-describing, communicating their identity, geometry, and other information such as history or user annotation. The enabling technology is a wireless tag which acts as a radio frequency identity and geometry (RFIG) transponder. We show how addition of a photo-sensor to a wireless tag significantly extends its functionality to allow geometric operations - such as finding the 3D position of a tag, or detecting change in the shape of a tagged object. Tag data is presented to the user by direct projection using a handheld locale-aware mobile projector. We introduce a novel technique that we call interactive projection to allow a user to interact with projected information e.g. to navigate or update the projected information.The ideas are demonstrated using objects with active radio frequency (RF) tags. But the work was motivated by the advent of unpowered passive-RFID, a technology that promises to have significant impact in real-world applications. We discuss how our current prototypes could evolve to passive-RFID in the future.
2523816
The kinedit system: affective messages using dynamic texts
Kinetic (dynamic) typography has demonstrated the ability to add significant emotive content and appeal to expressive text, allowing some of the qualities normally found in film and the spoken word to be added to static text. Kinetic typography has been widely and successfully used in film title sequences as well as television and computer-based advertising. However, its communicative abilities have not been widely studied, and its potential has rarely been exploited outside these areas. This is partly due to the difficulty in creating kinetic typography with current tools, often requiring hours of work to animate a single sentence.In this paper, we present the Kinedit system, a basic authoring tool that takes initial steps toward remedying this situation and hence promoting exploration of the communicative potential of kinetic typography for personal communication. Kinedit is informed by systematic study and characterization of a corpus of examples, and iterative involvement and validation by designers throughout the development process. We describe the tool and its underlying technology, usage experiences, lessons learned, and next steps.
3162456
Predicting human interruptibility with sensors
A person seeking another person's attention is normally able to quickly assess how interruptible the other person currently is. Such assessments allow behavior that we consider natural, socially appropriate, or simply polite. This is in sharp contrast to current computer and communication systems, which are largely unaware of the social situations surrounding their usage and the impact that their actions have on these situations. If systems could model human interruptibility, they could use this information to negotiate interruptions at appropriate times, thus improving human computer interaction.This article presents a series of studies that quantitatively demonstrate that simple sensors can support the construction of models that estimate human interruptibility as well as people do. These models can be constructed without using complex sensors, such as vision-based techniques, and therefore their use in everyday office environments is both practical and affordable. Although currently based on a demographically limited sample, our results indicate a substantial opportunity for future research to validate these results over larger groups of office workers. Our results also motivate the development of systems that use these models to negotiate interruptions at socially appropriate times.
8377958
Wizard of Oz interfaces for mixed reality applications
One important tool for developing complex interactive applications is "Wizard of Oz "(WOz)simulation.WOz simulation allows design concepts,content and partially completed applications to be tested on users without the need to first create a completely working system.In this paper we discuss the integration of wizard interface tools into a Mixed Reality (MR)design environment and show how easier creation and evolution of wizard interfaces can lead to an expanded role for WOz-based testing during the design evolution of MR experiences.We share our experiences designing an audio experience in an historic site,and illustrate the evolution of the wizard interfaces alongside the user experience
17186964
A Ubiquitous Fashionable Computer with an i-Throw Device on a Location-Based Service Environment
The ubiquitous fashionable computer (UFC), introduced in this paper, is a wearable computer that allows people to exploit ubiquitous computing environment in a user-friendly manner. We present the design approach and philosophy of the UFC that is wearable, aesthetic, and intuitive. The UFC supports the interoperability of various communication interfaces among WLAN, Bluetooth and ZigBee devices. We developed a wireless gesture recognition device, called i -Throw, which is small enough to be worn on one's finger like a ring. The UFC, with the help of i -Throw, can control ubiquitous environment using an intuitive hand motion. To explain the practical use of the UFC platform and the user-friendly interaction with ubiquitous environment, we implemented a ubiquitous testbed where multiple UFC users interact with various ubiquitous devices or other UFC users. In addition, we implemented a practical application which makes it possible to exchange the various objects and control ubiquitous devices very easily.
47092701
Loop formulas for circumscription
Clark's completion is a simple nonmonotonic formalism and a special case of many nonmonotonic logics. Recently there has been work on extending completion with "loop formulas" so that general cases of nonmonotonic logics such as logic programs (under the answer set semantics) and McCain-Turner causal logic can be characterized by propositional logic in the form of "comple(ion + loop formulas". In this paper, we show that the idea is applicable to McCarthy's circumscription in the propositional case. We also show how to embed propositional circumscription in logic programs and in causal logic, inspired by the uniform characterization of "completion + loop formulas".
17427180
Analyses of multiple evidence combination
It hsa been known that different representations of a query ret rieve different sets of documents. Recent work suggests that significant improvements in retrieval performance can be achieved by combining multiple representations of an information need. However, little effort has been made to understand the reason why combining multiple sources of evidence improves retrieval effectiveness. In this paper we analyze why improvements can be achieved with evidence combination, and investigate how evidence should be combined. We describe a rationale for multiple evidence combination, and propose a combining method whose properties coincide wit h the rationale. We also investigate e the effect of using rank instead of similarity on retrieval effectiveness.
52853952
Adaptive acknowledgment scheme for efficient error control in ATM clustering system
An ATM clustering system is a kind of workstation clusters over an ATM network. Such a system can be used as a distributed database server which requires reliable data delivery. This paper proposes an error recovery scheme at the transport layer for reliable data transfers with high throughput in the ATM clustering system. For such data transfers, acknowledgments are sent periodically as well as at the detection of packet losses. To be efficient the periods of acknowledgments for the scheme are adaptively varied depending on,whether current transfer is either in error-free phase or in an error recovery phase. The design and performance evaluation of the error recovery scheme is presented with a set of parameter values to achieve the best performance. The results show that the proposed scheme operates correctly and efficiently for the ATM clustering system. The throughput performance of the proposed scheme is superior to the SSCOP (service specific connection oriented protocol) regardless of packet loss rates.