Schlagwort: displays

Christian Kray visits our Lab

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Christian Kray and I were colleagues in Lancaster for a very short time – he just joined the university when I left for Munich. After his post-doc in Lancaster he moved to a position in Newcastle.

His work at the cross roads of mobile interaction and public displays is very exciting. In particular he investigates interesting concepts related to visual codes – some aspects to these ideas are discussed in “Swiss Army Knife meets Camera Phone” [1]. His new prototypes are really cool and I look forward to see/read more about them.

We realized that there are many areas where we have common interests. Perhaps there is a chance in the future to work together on some of the ideas discussed!

[1] Swiss Army Knife meets Camera Phone: Tool Selection and Interaction using Visual Markers. C. Kray and M. Rohs. (2007) In „Workshop on Mobile Interaction with the Real World at Mobile HCI 2007“. Singapore, September 9, 2007.

Embedded Information – Airport Seoul

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When I arrived in Seoul at the airport I saw an interesting instance of embedded information. In Munich we wrote a workshop paper [1] about the concept of embedded information and the key criteria are:

  • Embedding information where and when it is useful
  • Embedding information in a most unobtrusive way
  • Providing information in a way that there is no interaction required

Looking at an active computer display (OK it was broken) that circled the luggage belt (it is designed to list the names of people who should contact the information desk) and a fixed display on a suitcase I was reminded of this paper. With this set-up people become aware of the information – without really making an effort. With active displays becoming more ubiquitous I expect more innovation in this domain. We currently work on some ideas related to situated and embedded displays for advertising – if we find funding we push further… the ideas are there.
[1] Albrecht Schmidt, Matthias Kranz, Paul Holleis. Embedded Information. UbiComp 2004, Workshop ‚Ubiquitous Display Environments‘, September 2004

Talk by Florian Michahelles, RFID showcase at Kaufhof Essen

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Florian Michahelles, associate director of the AutoID-Labs in Zürich visited our group and gave a presentation in my course on Pervaisve Computing. He introduced the vision of using RFID in businesses, gave a brief technology overview and discussed the potential impact – in a very interactive session.

Florian and I worked together in the Smart-its project and during his PhD studies he and Stavros were well know as the experts on Ikea PAX [1], [2]. In 2006 and 2007 we ran workshops on RFID technologies and published the results and a discussion on emerging trends in RFID together [3], [4].

At Kaufhof in Essen you can see a showcase of using RFID tags in garment retail. The installation includes augmented shelves, an augmented mirror, and contextual information displays in the changing rooms. The showcase is related to the European Bridge project. …was fun playing with the system – seems to be well engineered for a prototype.

PS: Florian told me that Vlad Coroama finished his PhD. In a different context we talked earlier about his paper discussing the use of sensors to access cost for insurance [5] – he did it with cars but there are other domain where this makes sense, too.

[1] S. Antifakos, F. Michahelles, and B. Schiele. Proactive Instructions for Furniture Assembly. In UbiComp, Gothenburg, Sweden, 2002.
http://www.viktoria.se/fal/exhibitions/smart-its-s2003/furniture.pdf

[2] Florian Michahelles, Stavors Antifakos, Jani Boutellier, Albrecht Schmidt, and Bernt Schiele. Instructions immersed into the real world How your Furniture can teach you. Poster at the Fifth International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing, Seattle, USA, October 2003. http://www.mis.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de/Publications/ubipost03.pdf

[3]Florian Michahelles, Frédéric Thiesse, Albrecht Schmidt, John R. Williams: Pervasive RFID and Near Field Communication Technology. IEEE Pervasive Computing 6(3): 94-96 (2007) http://www.alexandria.unisg.ch/EXPORT/PDF/publication/38445.pdf

[4] Schmidt, A., Spiekermann, S., Gershman, A., and Michahelles, F. 2006. Real-World Challenges of Pervasive Computing. IEEE Pervasive Computing 5, 3 (Jul. 2006), 91-93 http://www.hcilab.org/events/pta2006/IEEE-PvM-b3091.pdf

[5] Vlad Coroama: The Smart Tachograph – Individual Accounting of Traffic Costs and Its Implications. Pervasive 2006: 135-152. http://www.vs.inf.ethz.ch/res/papers/coroama_pervasive2006.pdf

Visit at Microsoft in Redmond

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AJ Brush and John Krumm organize for the people who are in Redmond for the Ubicomp PC meeting a visit to Microsoft. In the morning we got a tour at the home lab – Microsoft’s vision of future home environments – was quite interesting, but had to sign an NDA.
After lunch we went over to Microsoft Research (which is in a new building). We got to see some cool demos. Andy Wilson showed us some new stuff moving the SURFACE forward (physics rocks!). I learned more about depth sensing cameras and Andy showed a fun application [1] – there is video about it, too. Patrick Baudisch talked us through the ideas of LucidTouch [2] and more general about future interaction with small mobile devices. The idea of using the finger behind the screen and the means to increase the precision has many interesting aspects. I found the set of people that work at MSR as impressive as the demos – it seems to be a really exciting work environment.

The atrium of the new building is amazing for playing Frisbee and shoot rubber band missiles. And waiting for the pizza with those toys around proved yet again that researchers are often like kids 😉

[1] Wilson, A. Depth-Sensing Video Cameras for 3D Tangible Tabletop Interaction. Tabletop 2007: The 2nd IEEE International Workshop on Horizontal Interactive Human-Computer Systems, 2007.

[2] Wigdor, D., Forlines, C., Baudisch, P., Barnwell, J., Shen, C. LucidTouch: A See-Through Mobile Device. In Proceedings of UIST 2007, Newport, Rhode Island, October 7-10, 2007, pp. 269–278 http://www.patrickbaudisch.com/projects/lucidtouch/

A service for true random numbers

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After the exam board meeting at Trinity College in Dublin (I am external examiner for the Ubicomp program) I went back with Mads Haahr (the course director) to his office. Besides the screen on which he works he has one extra where constantly the log entries of his web server is displayed. It is an interesting awareness devices 😉 some years ago we did a project where we used the IP-address of incoming HTTP-requests to guess who the visitors are and to show their web pages on an awareness display [1], [2]. Looking back at web visitors works very well in an academic context and with request out of larger companies where one can expect that information is available on the web. Perhaps we should revisit the work and look how we can push this further given the new possibilities in the web.

The web-server Mads has in his office is pretty cool – it provides true random numbers – based on atmospheric noise picked up with 3 real radios (I saw them)! Have a look at the service for yourself: www.random.org. It provides an HTTP interface to use those numbers in your own applications. I would not have though of a web service to provide random numbers – but thinking a little more it makes a lot of sense…

[1] Schmidt, A. and Gellersen, H. 2001. Visitor awareness in the web. In Proceedings of the 10th international Conference on World Wide Web (Hong Kong, Hong Kong, May 01 – 05, 2001). WWW ’01. ACM, New York, NY, 745-753. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/371920.372194

[2] Gellersen, H. and Schmidt, A. 2002. Look who’s visiting: supporting visitor awareness in the web. Int. J. Hum.-Comput. Stud. 56, 1 (Jan. 2002), 25-46. DOI= http://dx.doi.org/10.1006/ijhc.2001.0514

Interactive window displays – we have better ideas

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It seems that in the research community a lot of people are convinced of interactive public spaces and interactive window displays. Over the last month I have see great visions and ideas – as well as reflected on our own multi-touch ideas for interactive shop windows.

The installations I have seen in the real world however are at best boring (and often not functioning at all). It seems that even a student-project-lab-demo is more appealing and works at least as realiable.

Especially combining sensing (e.g. simple activity recognition, context) with low threshold interactive content seems to have great potential. If there is somebody interested in really cool stuff for a shop window (attention grabbing, eye catchers, interactive content, etc.) – talk to me. We are happy to discuss a project proposal 😉

Central mechanical workshop

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Currently we work in one of our courses on a specific multi-touch table. Students have already created a first version of an interesting application – and ideas for many more are there. However so far our prototype does not look like a table.

Learning that our university has central workshops we went there to talk about our project and to get the mechanical parts built. Our first meeting was really interesting – we got a tour and saw drilling and milling machines as well as a cutter that works with water (can cut glass precisely – extremely impressive). Best of all it seems (as they are at university) they find strange requirements in our prototypes not odd 😉

Our initial design is a welded metal table frame which leaves us a lot off options for experimenting with camera, projection, and surface. Looking really forward to see the first version!

Pervasive Computing to Change Advertising in the Real World

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It was great to spend some time chatting with Alois Ferscha and Gabi Kotsis in Linz. We discussed future forms of advertisement and it seems that it is very clear that pervasive computing technologies – ranging from new displays, to tracking and implicit and explicit interaction – will change our high streets (and any other place where we expect or don’t advertising) in the near future significantly. Looking at current installations we can already see that the race for grapping customer’s attention is on. Given the many ideas around I expect it will be quite exciting.

One interesting movie on youtube.com shows a pretty cool and novel form of advertising – beamvertising. The technology is simple (a projector mounted on a driving truck) but the effect looks pretty good! It is probably not legal but it shows interesting potential. I think interactive (outdoor) projections can be a real actor. Perhaps we should start talking to some companies to push our ideas for new forms of advertisement…

Visit at the University of Hamburg

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Yesterday we visited the computer science department at the University of Hamburg. Prof. Oberquelle und Beckhaus had invited me at the Mensch & Computer conference to visit them and give a talk about our work.

Before the seminar we had a chance to see the lab of Steffi Beckhaus. I have tried the ChairIO – and it was fun. They sound floor creates a really interesting experience (similar to the butt-kicker just more intense). We could also play with GranulatSynthese and try the smell user interface (apple smell is absolutely convincing, not sure about some of the others).

We had some discussion on emotions and capturing physiological parameters. Thinking about emotions and senses with regard to a community sharing them opens up a lot of potential for new experiences and potentially applications. We discussed this topic to some extent some weeks ago at the Human Computer Confluence Workshop in Brussels. I really thing a small scale experience in share emotions could move us forward and provide some more insight. In Hamburg they have the NeXus-system (perhaps we should get this too and create a networked application).

In my talk (creating novel user interfaces) I focused on the PhD work of Paul Holleis (KLM for mobile phones, his CHI Paper from last year) and of Heiko Drewes (Eye-Gestures, his Interact’07 paper). The discussion was quite interesting.

Information inside the cap

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Travelling on the train from Crailsheim to Nürnberg I saw several police officers on their travels back from an assignment at Stuttgarter Volksfest. When we got off the train the collected their caps from the luggage rack and observed an interesting (traditional) information display.

Inside the cap they carried a schedule and a description of the location they had to go. The size of the paper-display was about 15 x 15 cm. It seems an interesting place to display and access information – perhaps we will do a digital version of the cap as an assignment in our courses.