In this paper we present a lamp prototype that projects controllable shadows to create an ambient backdrop for dialogic reading between parents and their children. The lamp uses four electrochromic displays that allow masking the light and thereby control the shadows that are projected upward onto the ceiling. The displays can switch between general ambience picture and a certain story point in a Smurf book. These displays were used in a reading study with parents reading for their children and a focus group session. The results indicate that the lamp helped in spurring interest and a dialog about the story being read. The used technology proved to be implicitly triggering questions and discussion about the story by creating suspension when switching between the different shadows.
In this paper we present a lamp prototype that projects controllable shadows to create an ambient backdrop for dialogic reading between parents and their children. The lamp uses four electrochromic displays that allow masking the light and thereby control the shadows that are projected upward onto the ceiling. The displays can switch between general ambience picture and a certain story point in a Smurf book. These displays were used in a reading study with parents reading for their children and a focus group session. The results indicate that the lamp helped in spurring interest and a dialog about the story being read. The used technology proved to be implicitly triggering questions and discussion about the story by creating suspension when switching between the different shadows.
Interactive public displays are becoming increasingly commonplace. Two important challenges for these displays exist: 1) how interactivity is communicated to the passer-by and 2) once the audience have engaged, how the interactive affordances are communicated. We explore these challenges through the lens of a new emerging interaction modality - contactless mid-air gesture controlled public displays. This paper presents several solutions to the problems above, inspired by the findings existing within the related research on public displays. These solutions are deployed in an in-the-wild setting - a cinema for an 8 week duration - and evaluated through observational and quantitative research. The data forms a set of design guidelines for successfully attracting the passer-by and conveying the affordances of the contactless gestural public displays.
Self-moving robots may soon be ubiquitous in urban spaces, thereby enabling a wide range of use cases. To increase their social acceptance, previous work has explored how non-humanoid robots can express emotional states through various modalities, such as lights and movement. However, the majority of research has been carried out in controlled lab experiments, raising questions about their ecological validity. In this work, we present the design of emotional expressions for an urban robot via low-resolution lighting patterns and motion cues. We present an in-the-wild evaluation using questionnaires and interviews (N=72). Our findings suggest that a range of contextual aspects can influence the perception of the robot and its emotional expressions, such as overall choreography and interactional context, immediate impact of the environment, coupled with people's own emotions and past experiences. Our analysis thus outlines challenges and provides guidance for designers and researchers working with urban robots.
Research has begun to investigate the interruption of VR users but lacks an understanding of how social factors (setting / relationship to the VR user) might impact the interruption and why bystanders interrupt as they do. We conducted a survey (N=100) into bystander comfort when interrupting a VR user (known / unknown) in 4 settings (private spaces, public spaces, private transport, public transport) and their willingness to use a range of interruption strategies. Our results suggest relationship to the VR user is more influential than setting when considering comfort and acceptability of interruption strategy. A follow-up lab study (N=16) investigated bystander interruption of a known VR user in a private setting. Most used a combination of speech and touch to interrupt though a subset used unconventional, improvised strategies we term playful interruptions. With the recent inclusion of open ear audio in VR headsets and preference towards verbal interruptions in our results we conducted a survey (N=76) into the consumer response to open ear audio in VR headsets. We report open ear audio was used regularly by 52.6% of our respondents 60% of who rate their experience with it positively.
Useful and easy-to-use digital passenger services are one component for increasing the overall attractiveness of public transportation. In this paper, we provide an overview and a critical review of the current state of interactive passenger services through a case study involving mobile apps as well as situated public screens at two major stations. By relating the identified key features to prior research in the field, we identify trends and opportunities for impactful future research. We found that intermodal routing and ticketing in today's mobile apps are sophisticated, yet socializing features and interactive applications on public screens lag behind research in this field. Promising future research opportunities include improving personalization and investigating trust in public transportation and its digital services.
Prior work on clothing with integrated displays has typically presented catwalk-style garments, with light output from hundreds of LEDs. In contrast, we present the IdleStripes shirt, a garment for normal daily office wear, that encourages the wearer to avoid long sedentary periods through an integrated ambient display. Rather than adding the display functionality to an existing shirt, we present a process where a clothing designer designed the smart garment from scratch, in this way creating a more aesthetic and comfortable garment. A display element in the upper chest area of the shirt utilises cloth with embedded optical fibers, stripes of which illuminate based on the wearer's inactivity. Taking a short walk then resets the display. Participants in an in-the-wild user study wore the shirt during their normal working day, and, e.g., report positively on the design of the garment and their willingness to wear it. Those that were not already frequently active during their working day, reported that the shirt encouraged them to break their sedentary behaviour and take short walks.
We present an initial study of an emerging digital street infrastructure in London, UK - InLinkUK kiosk network, which consist of connected screens and communication services. Early findings suggest that 1) different stakeholders behaved and reacted differently towards the kiosks and 2) tensions exist between the perceived of value and demands of the kiosks different stakeholders.
Augmented Reality (AR) devices and applications are gaining in popularity, and - with recent trends such as Pokemon Go - are venturing into public spaces where they become more and more pervasive. In consequence, public AR displays might soon be part of our cityscapes and may impact on our everyday view of the world. In this work, we present ChalkboARd, a prototype of an AR-enabled public display that seamlessly integrates into its environment. We investigate the influence of our system on the attention of bystanders in a field study (N=20). The field deployment of ChalkboARd provides evidence that AR for public displays needs to be interactive and adaptive to their surroundings, while at the same time taking privacy issues into account. Nevertheless, ChalkboARd was received positively by the participants, which points out the (hidden) potential of public AR displays.
Information overload from voluminous lifelogs hinders effective comprehension and sense-making. Despite extensive prior work to summarize such datasets, selection of important moments is an ongoing research challenge. An alternative is to redesign interaction techniques and visualizations to leverage the human cognition to interact with complete datasets. In this work, we present and evaluate LifeRewinder , a prototype for sequentially reviewing lifelogs as a time-lapse video with controllable speed using a knob.
Interactive public displays have matured into highly capable two-way interfaces. They can be used for efficiently delivering information to people as well as for collecting insights from their users. While displays have been used for harvesting opinions and other content from users, surprisingly little work has looked into exploiting such screens for the consensual collection of tagged data that might be useful beyond one application. We present a field study where we collected biometrically tagged data using public kiosk-sized interactive screens. During 61 days of deployment time, we collected 199 selfie videos, cost-efficiently and with consent to leverage the videos in any non-profit research. 78 of the videos also had metadata attached to them. Overall, our studies indicate that people are willing to donate even highly sensitive data about themselves in public but that, at the same time, the participants had specific ethical and privacy concerns over the future of their data. Our study paves the way forward toward a future where volunteers can ethically help advance innovations in computer vision research across a variety of exciting application domains, such as health monitoring and care.
Interactive public displays have been exploited and studied for engaging interaction in several previous studies. In this context, applications have been focused on supporting learning or entertainment activities, specifically designed for people with special needs. This includes, for example, those with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). In this paper, we present a comparison study aimed at understanding the difference in terms of usability, effectiveness, and enjoyment perceived by users with ASD between two interaction modalities usually supported by interactive displays: touch-based and touchless gestural interaction. We present the outcomes of a within-subject setup involving 8 ASD users (age 18-25 y.o., IQ 40-60), based on the use of two similar user interfaces, differing only by the interaction modality. We show that touch interaction provides higher usability level and results in more effective actions, although touchless interaction is more effective in terms of enjoyment and engagement.
Interactive public displays have matured into highly capable two-way interfaces. They can be used for efficiently delivering information to people as well as for collecting insights from their users. While displays have been used for harvesting opinions and other content from users, surprisingly little work has looked into exploiting such screens for the consensual collection of tagged data that might be useful beyond one application. We present a field study where we collected biometrically tagged data using public kiosk-sized interactive screens. During 61 days of deployment time, we collected 199 selfie videos, cost-efficiently and with consent to leverage the videos in any non-profit research. 78 of the videos also had metadata attached to them. Overall, our studies indicate that people are willing to donate even highly sensitive data about themselves in public but that, at the same time, the participants had specific ethical and privacy concerns over the future of their data. Our study paves the way forward toward a future where volunteers can ethically help advance innovations in computer vision research across a variety of exciting application domains, such as health monitoring and care.
Interactive public displays have been exploited and studied for engaging interaction in several previous studies. In this context, applications have been focused on supporting learning or entertainment activities, specifically designed for people with special needs. This includes, for example, those with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). In this paper, we present a comparison study aimed at understanding the difference in terms of usability, effectiveness, and enjoyment perceived by users with ASD between two interaction modalities usually supported by interactive displays: touch-based and touchless gestural interaction. We present the outcomes of a within-subject setup involving 8 ASD users (age 18-25 y.o., IQ 40-60), based on the use of two similar user interfaces, differing only by the interaction modality. We show that touch interaction provides higher usability level and results in more effective actions, although touchless interaction is more effective in terms of enjoyment and engagement.
This paper presents a conceptual application of drone-based in-situ projections to support people when crossing busy roads that lack dedicated pedestrian crossings. To overcome technical, legal and risk challenges of evaluating these kinds of speculative pervasive display applications, we introduce the concept of hyperreal prototypes. We describe the layers that contribute to a hyperreal prototype and how such prototypes allow the evaluation of HCI solutions in high-risk scenarios in a virtual-reality environment.
Interactive installations that are controlled with gestures and body movements have been widely used in museums due to their tremendous educational potential. The design of such systems, however, remains problematic. In this paper, we reflect on two open research challenges that we observed when crafting a Kinect-based prototype installation for data exploration at a science museum: (1) making the user aware that the system is interactive; and, (2) increasing the discoverability of hand gestures and body movements.
We explore how pervasive displays could offer unique opportunities for enhancing discovery and learning with "big data". In 2012-2014, our collaboration across three universities undertook a series of design exercises investigating approaches for collaborative, interactive, tangibles, and multitouch-engaged visualizations of genomic and related scientific datasets. These exercises led to several envisionments of tangible interfaces that employ active tokens and interactive surfaces to facilitate colocated and distributed engagement with large datasets. We describe some of the motivation and background for these envisioned interfaces; consider key aspects linking and distinguishing the designs; and relate these to the present and near-future state of the art for tangible and multitouch engagement with pervasive displays toward collaborative science.
In his vision of "calm technology", Weiser thought of people being surrounded by devices and displays that only come to the user's attention when needed. Non-light emitting electrochromic (EC) displays are one approach to conveying information in a calm and unobtrusive way. The dynamic graphical segment based EC displays are extremely low power, require no special driving electronics, and are not limited to rectangular form factors. In our demo, we present four prototypes exploring the design space for EC displays in different application domains for information presentation and decorative aesthetics.
This paper is focused on the design of a tangible interface to be installed in a public space for improving children's awareness of climate change and permitting them to understand the relation between CO2 and other environmental variables. The interface was developed in the context of an EU project targeted at re-populating the flora of selected sea shores of Northeast Italy and measuring the results of this work - in terms of CO2 concentration - using a network of sensors gathering a set of environmental parameters. A prototype of the tangible interface, which allows young citizens to access the collected data and understand the relations between them, was implemented and experimented with a class of children of the Primary School, in order to understand its benefits in terms of engagement and learning.
POLAR is a platform to create and test unique geometric display configurations combining light with kinetic expressions in an adaptable modular system. It enables the utilization of light and motion in spatial contexts to create integrated ambient displays within many different environments. The intention of the study is providing a framework to facilitate the exploration of physical motion combined with light for creating new dynamic spatial displays in public or semi-public spaces. The system consists of controllable movable light modules which can be arranged spatially in different configurations combined with a software authoring and playback workflow to create and test motion choreographies.
