Human-display interaction technology: Emerging remote interfaces for pervasive display environments

This is the author's accepted manuscript. The final published article is available from the link below. Copyright @ 2010 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other users, including reprinting/ republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted components of this work in other works.We're living in a world where information processing isn't confined to desktop computers - it's being integrated into everyday objects and activities. Pervasive computation is human centered: it permeates our physical world, helping us achieve goals and fulfill our needs with minimum effort by exploiting natural interaction styles. Remote interaction with screen displays requires a sensor-based, multimodal, touchless approach. For example, by processing user hand gestures, this paradigm removes constraints requiring physical contact and permits natural interaction with tangible digital information. Such touchless interaction can be multimodal, exploiting the visual, auditory, and olfactory senses.Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia and Amper Sistemas, SA

Academical and Research Wiimote Applications

IADIS MULTI CONFERENCE ON COMPUTER SCIENCE AND INFORMATION SYSTEMS 2008 Amsterdam, The Netherlands JULY 22 - 24, 2008This paper proposes the employment of the Wii Remote controller, better known as Wiimote, as an useful tool for educators and researchers. The quick development on fields such as Wireless Sensors and Actuators Networks or Hybrid Systems, and their applications, requires engineers with a solid knowledge in these areas. To achieve this goal the Wiimote becomes a great alternative to other options due to its great variety of analog and digital components, for a very low price, and the good documentation about it existing in Internet. As will be seen in this paper, the possible academical and research uses of the Wiimote are almost endless and cover many interesting problems in control engineering

SurfaceCast: Ubiquitous, Cross-Device Surface Sharing

Real-time online interaction is the norm today. Tabletops and other dedicated interactive surface devices with direct input and tangible interaction can enhance remote collaboration, and open up new interaction scenarios based on mixed physical/virtual components. However, they are only available to a small subset of users, as they usually require identical bespoke hardware for every participant, are complex to setup, and need custom scenario-specific applications. We present SurfaceCast, a software toolkit designed to merge multiple distributed, heterogeneous end-user devices into a single, shared mixed-reality surface. Supported devices include regular desktop and laptop computers, tablets, and mixed-reality headsets, as well as projector-camera setups and dedicated interactive tabletop systems. This device-agnostic approach provides a fundamental building block for exploration of a far wider range of usage scenarios than previously feasible, including future clients using our provided API. In this paper, we discuss the software architecture of SurfaceCast, present a formative user study and a quantitative performance analysis of our framework, and introduce five example application scenarios which we enhance through the multi-user and multi-device features of the framework. Our results show that the hardware- and content-agnostic architecture of SurfaceCast can run on a wide variety of devices with sufficient performance and fidelity for real-time interaction

ISAR: Ein Autorensystem für Interaktive Tische

Developing augmented reality systems involves several challenges, that prevent end users and experts from non-technical domains, such as education, to experiment with this technology. In this research we introduce ISAR, an authoring system for augmented reality tabletops targeting users from non-technical domains. ISAR allows non-technical users to create their own interactive tabletop applications and experiment with the use of this technology in domains such as educations, industrial training, and medical rehabilitation.Die Entwicklung von Augmented-Reality-Systemen ist mit mehreren Herausforderungen verbunden, die Endbenutzer und Experten aus nicht-technischen Bereichen, wie z.B. dem Bildungswesen, daran hindern, mit dieser Technologie zu experimentieren. In dieser Forschung stellen wir ISAR vor, ein Autorensystem für Augmented-Reality-Tabletops, das sich an Benutzer aus nicht-technischen Bereichen richtet. ISAR ermöglicht es nicht-technischen Anwendern, ihre eigenen interaktiven Tabletop-Anwendungen zu erstellen und mit dem Einsatz dieser Technologie in Bereichen wie Bildung, industrieller Ausbildung und medizinischer Rehabilitation zu experimentieren

Comparing Graphical and Tangible User Interfaces for a Tower Defense Game

This paper presents the design and test results of a tabletop Tangible User Interface (TUI) for a real-time strategy game. An experiment was conducted comparing the TUI and Graphical User Interface (GUI) versions of the same tower defense game application. The results show that users performed better with the GUI and found it easier to use, but reported more interest and enjoyment with the TUI. Overall, however, preference was split evenly between the two interface types. Analysis of qualitative user feedback provided further insight into these results, and based on this, suggestions are made for future research in the area of Tangible User Interfaces

Kolab: appropriation & improvisation in mobile tangible collaborative interaction

Current design guidelines for conventional tangible systems suggest that the representational significance of tangible tokens is an important consideration in the design of tangible interaction, especially in collaborative contexts. Such advice might be assumed to imply that nomadic tangible systems that employ improvised tokens are liable to have highly impaired usability. In this paper we describe a proof of concept experiment for Kolab, a nomadic tangible interaction system that permits any surface to be appropriated as a collaborative tabletop, and which affords the use of a wide range of appropriated artifacts as improvised tangibles. We demonstrate an approach for realizing the necessary interaction techniques combining tangibles and hand gestures using a fusion of image and depth sensing. We present the results of a user study showing that while users' choices of artifacts were seen to follow an unexpected pattern, various artifacts were appropriated and improvised as tangibles, and the system was found to be both usable and well able to support user collaboration