Schlagwort: tangible

Design Ideas and Demos at FH Potsdam

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During the workshop last week in Potsdam we got to see demos from students of Design of Physical and Virtual Interfaces class taught by Reto Wettach and JennyLC Chowdhury. The students had to design a working prototype of an interactive system. As base technology most of them use the Arduino Board with some custom made extensions. For a set of pictures see my photo gallery and the photos on flickr. It would need pages to describe all of the projects so I picked few…

The project “Navel” (by Juan Avellanosa, Florian Schulz and Michael Härtel) is a belt with tactile output, similar to [1], [2] and [3]. The first idea along this lines that I have tried out was Gentle Guide [4] at mobile HCI 2003 – it seemed quite compelling. The student project proposed one novel application idea: to use it in sport. That is quite interesting and could complement ideas proposed in [5].

Vivien’s favorite was the vibrating doormat; a system where a foot mat is constructed of three vibrating tiles that can be controlled and different vibration patters can be presented. It was built by Lionel Michel and he has several ideas what research questions this could address. I found especially the question if and how one can induce feelings and emotions with such a system. In the same application context (doormat) another prototype looked at emotions, too. If you stroke or pat this mat it comes out of its hiding place (Roll-o-mat by Bastian Schulz).

There were several projects on giving everyday objects more personality (e.g. a Talking Trashbin by Gerd-Hinnerk Winck) and making them emotional reactive (e.g. lights that reacted to proximity). Firefly (by Marc Tiedemann) is one example how reactiveness and motion that is hard to predict can lead to an interesting user experience. The movement appears really similar to a real firefly.

Embedding Information has been an important topic in our research over the last years [6] – the demos provided several interesting examples: a cable that visualized energy consumption and keyboard to leave messages. I learned a further example of an idea/patent application where information is included in the object – in this case in a tea bag. This is an extreme case but I think looking into the future (and assuming that we get sustainable and bio-degradable electronics) it indicates an interesting direction and pushing the idea of Information at your fingertip (Bill Gates Keynote in 1994) much further than originally intended.

For more photos see my photo gallery and the photos on flickr.

[1] Tsukada, K. and Yasumrua, M.: ActiveBelt: Belt-type Wearable Tactile Display for Directional Navigation, Proceedings of UbiComp2004, Springer LNCS3205, pp.384-399 (2004).

[2] Alois Ferscha et al. Vibro-Tactile Space-Awareness . Video Paper, adjunct proceedings of Ubicomp2008. Paper. Video.

[3] Heuten, W., Henze, N., Boll, S., and Pielot, M. 2008. Tactile wayfinder: a non-visual support system for wayfinding. In Proceedings of the 5th Nordic Conference on Human-Computer interaction: Building Bridges (Lund, Sweden, October 20 – 22, 2008). NordiCHI ’08, vol. 358. ACM, New York, NY, 172-181. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1463160.1463179

[4] S.Bosman, B.Groenendaal, J.W.Findlater, T.Visser, M.de Graaf & P.Markopoulos . GentleGuide: An exploration of haptic output for indoors pedestrian guidance . Mobile HCI 2003.

[5] Mitchell Page, Andrew Vande Moere: Evaluating a Wearable Display Jersey for Augmenting Team Sports Awareness. Pervasive 2007. 91-108

[6] Albrecht Schmidt, Matthias Kranz, Paul Holleis. Embedded Information. UbiComp 2004, Workshop ‚Ubiquitous Display Environments‘, September 2004

Towards interaction that is begreifbar

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Since last year we have in Germany a working group on graspable/tangible interaction in mixed realities.
In German the key term we use is “begreifbar” or “begreifen” which has the meaning of acquire a deep understanding of something and the words basic meaning is to touch. Basically understand by touching – but in a more fundamental sense than grasping or getting grip. Hence the list of translations for “begreifen” given in the dictionary is quite long.
Perhaps we should push more for the word in the international community – Towards interaction that is begreifbar (English has too few foreign terms anyway 😉

This meeting was organized by Reto Wettach at Potsdam and the objective was to have two days to invent things together. The mix of people mainly included people from computer science and design. It is always amazing how many ideas come up if you put 25 people for a day in a room 🙂 We followed this week up on some of the ideas related to new means for communication – there are defiantly interesting student projects on this topic.

In the evening we had a half pecha-kucha (each person 10 slides of 20 seconds – in total 3:20, the original is 20 slides) http://www.pecha-kucha.org/. It is a great way of getting quickly to know about work, research, ideas, and background of other people. It could be format we could use more in teaching a perhaps for ad-hoc sessions at a new conference we plan (e.g. http://auto-ui.org) … prepared my slides on the train in the morning – and it is more challenging that expected to get a set of meaningful pictures together for 10 slides.

Overall the workshop showed that there is a significant interest and expertise in Germany moving from software ergonomics to modern human computer interaction.
There is a new person on our team (starting next week) – perhaps you can spot him on the pics.
For a set of pictures see my photo gallery and the photos on flickr.

Two basic references for interaction byond the desktop

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Following the workshop I got a few questions on what the important papers are that one should read to start on the topic. There are many (e.g. search in google schoolar for tangible interaction, physical interaction, etc and you will see) and there conference dedicated to it (e.g. the tangible and embedded interaction TEI – next week in cambridge).

But if I have to pick two here is my joice:

[1] Ishii, H. 2008. Tangible bits: beyond pixels. In Proceedings of the 2nd international Conference on Tangible and Embedded interaction (Bonn, Germany, February 18 – 20, 2008). TEI ’08. ACM, New York, NY, xv-xxv. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1347390.1347392

[2] Jacob, R. J., Girouard, A., Hirshfield, L. M., Horn, M. S., Shaer, O., Solovey, E. T., and Zigelbaum, J. 2008. Reality-based interaction: a framework for post-WIMP interfaces. In Proceeding of the Twenty-Sixth Annual SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Florence, Italy, April 05 – 10, 2008). CHI ’08. ACM, New York, NY, 201-210. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1357054.1357089

Interesting interaction devices

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Looking at interesting and novel interaction devices that would be challenging for students to classify (e.g. in the table suggested by Card et al 1991 [1]) I can across some pretty unusual device. Probably not really useful for an exam but perhaps next year for discussion in class…

Ever wanted to rearrange the keys on your keyboard? ErgoDex DX1 is a set of 25 keys that can be arranged on a surface to create a specific input device. It would be cool if the device could also sense which key is where – would make re-arranging part of the interaction process. In some sense it is similar to Nic Villar’s Voodoo I/O [2].
Wearable computing is not dead – here is some proof 😉 JennyLC Chowdhury presents intimate controllers – basically touch sensitive underwear (a bra and briefs). Have a look at the web page or the video on youtube.
What are keyboards of the future? Each key is a display? Or is the whole keyboard a screen? I think there is too much focus on the visual und to less on the haptic – perhaps it could be interesting to have keys that change shape and where the tactile properties can be programmed… 
[1] Card, S. K., Mackinlay, J. D., and Robertson, G. G. 1991. A morphological analysis of the design space of input devices. ACM Trans. Inf. Syst. 9, 2 (Apr. 1991), 99-122. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/123078.128726 
[2] VILLAR, N., GILLEADE, K. M., RAMDUNYELLIS, D., and GELLERSEN, H. 2007. The VoodooIO gaming kit: a real-time adaptable gaming controller. Comput. Entertain. 5, 3 (Jul. 2007), 7. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1316511.1316518

Technology Review with a Focus on User Interfaces

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The February 2009 edition of technology review (German version) has its focus on new user interfaces and titles „Streicheln erwünscht“ (translates to stroking/caressing/fondling welcome). It has a set of articles talking about new way of interacting multimodality, including tangible user interfaces and tactile communication. In the article „Feel me, touch me“ by Gordon Bolduan on page 74 a photo of Dagmar’s prototype of tactile steering wheel is depicted. The full paper on the study will be published at Pervasive in May 2009 (so you have to be patient to get the details – or come and visit our lab 😉

In the blog entry of technology review  introducing the current issue there is a nice anecdote mentioned about a literature search on haptic/tactile remote communication (while I was still in Munich) – the final version of the seminar paper (now not X-rated anymore) is „Neue Formen der entfernten Kommunikation“ by Martin Schrittenloher. He continued in his MSc Project on the topic and worked with Morten Fjeld  on sliders that give remote feedback, see [1].

Another topic closely related is to new forms of communication are exertion interfaces (we looked at the 2002/2003 work Florian ‚Floyd‘ Mueller in the UIE lecture yesterday – even with the Nintendo Wii around the work is highly inspiring and impressive, see [2]). The communication example given in Breakout for Two is showing the potential of including the whole body in communication tasks. Watching the video  is really to recommend 🙂
[1] Jenaro, J., Shahrokni, A., Schrittenloher, and M., Fjeld, M. 2007. One-Dimensional Force Feedback Slider: Digital platform. In Proc. Workshop at the IEEE Virtual Reality 2007 Conference: Mixed Reality User Interfaces: Specification, Authoring, Adaptation (MRUI07), 47-51
[2] Mueller, F., Agamanolis, S., and Picard, R. 2003. Exertion interfaces: sports over a distance for social bonding and fun. InProceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, USA, April 05 – 10, 2003). CHI ’03. ACM, New York, NY, 561-568. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/642611.642709  

Mechanical Computing, Beauty of Calculating Machines

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Instead of covering the history of calculating machines in the DSD lecture, we took the train and went to the Arithmeum in Bonn to the see the artefacts live and to play with some of them.
We started with early means for counting and record keeping. The tokens and early writings did not use numbers as abstract concepts, rather as representatives of concrete objects – this is very inspiring, especially from a tangible interaction point of view. The knots, as used in south America, show impressively how the tools for calculation have to fit the context people live in. Interestingly all these artefacts highliht how the ability to calculate and store information is related to the ability to do trade – quite a good motivation for the setup we have in Essen business studies and computer science within one faculty.
I was again impressed by the ingenuity by the early inventers of calculating tools and machines. There is an interesting separation between calculating tools and machines – the first ones require the user to take care of the carry and the second do it by themselves. We tried out replicas of Napier’s calculating tool and Schickard’s calculating machine.
The beauty and the mechanical precision required of those early machines is impressive. These prototypes (most of them took years and massive funds to be built complete) can teach us something for research today. These inventors had visions and the will to get it implemented, even without a clear application or business model in mind. They were excited by the creating of systems than can do things, machines could not do before. From the professions of the inventors (e.g. Philipp Matthäus Hahn was a clergyman)  it becomes apparent that at these times some considered religion and calculation as closely related – which to mondern understanding is very very alien.

Seeing the Hollerith machine that was used for the US census more than 100 years ago can teach you a lot about data processing. Punch cards, electrical reading and electrical counters (using mainly relays) were the basis for this technology. Looking at the labels on the counters showed that the US has a long tradition in collecting data that is after some time is not seen as political correct 😉
Having learned binary calculations during the DSD course it was nice to see a machine that did binary additions, using small steel balls and gravity. On each place (1,2,4,8, …) there is space for one ball. If a second one comes to this place one moves up to the next place (carry) and one is discarded. This is implemented with very simple mechanics and the working prototype (recently build) is based on designs of Schickard (but he never built – if I am correct).
Moving on with binary systems and finally to silicon, we got to see the Busicom 141 – a desk calculator that uses the Intel 4004. It is impressive to see that this is not even 40 years ago – starting with 2300 transistors and 180kHz. 
you can find the full set of photos at: http://foto.ubisys.org/dsd0809/

Nicolas Villar visiting

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Nicolas, who was the first BSc student I worked with in Lancaster, is now after finishing his PhD with Microsoft Research in Cambridge, UK. He came on Friday to Essen to see the lab and he brought us a Voodoo I/O box [1] – we are really excited!

He stayed for the weekend and I learned a lot about interesting technologies and ideas. Looking at his iREX ebook and Vivien’s new USB Microscope (30€ from Aldi 😉 we had to do some research into the screen quality of different devices. It is interesting to see that e-Ink moves closer to newspaper and that in comparison to it an iPhone screen is pretty coarse.

Some references to remember:

[1] Spiessl, W., Villar, N., Gellersen, H., and Schmidt, A. 2007. VoodooFlash: authoring across physical and digital form. In Proceedings of the 1st international Conference on Tangible and Embedded interaction (Baton Rouge, Louisiana, February 15 – 17, 2007). TEI ’07. ACM, New York, NY, 97-100. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1226969.1226989

Integration of Location into Photos, Tangible Interaction

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Recently I came across a device that tracks the GPS position and has additionally a card reader (http://photofinder.atpinc.com/). If you plug in a card with photos it will integrate location data into the jpgs using time as common reference.

It is a further interesting example where software moves away from the generic computer/PC (where such programs that use a GPS track an combine it with photos are available, e.g. GPS photo linker) into a appliance and hence the usage complexity (on principle, did not try it out so far this specific device so far) can be massively reduced and the usability can be increased. See the simple analysis:

Tangible Interaction using the appliance:

  • buying the device
  • plug-in a card
  • wait till it is ready

vs.

GUI Interaction:

  • starting a PC
  • buy/download the application
  • install the application
  • finding an application
  • locating the images in a folder
  • locating the GPS track in a folder
  • wait till it is ready

.. could become one of my future examples where tangible UIs work 😉

Tanja Döring joined our group

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Today Tanja Döring started with our group in Essen. She did her MSc at the University of Hamburg with Steffi Beckhaus and Horst Oberquelle. I met her first last year at TEI’07 in Baton Rouge, where she presented work on a table for art historians [1]. This year Tanja was a student volunteer at TEI’08 in Bonn.

[1] Döring, T. and Beckhaus, S. 2007. The card box at hand: exploring the potentials of a paper-based tangible interface for education and research in art history. In Proceedings of the 1st international Conference on Tangible and Embedded interaction (Baton Rouge, Louisiana, February 15 – 17, 2007). TEI ’07. ACM, New York, NY, 87-90. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1226969.1226986