iiD: Interactive Informative Display

Dissertação de mestrado em Engenharia de InformáticaThe use of small displays at Home is not new and has mainly been explored in the context of specific services, such as Home automation or energy meters. The interactive informative display described in this work di ers from previous approaches in its use of o -the-shelf photo frames as generic displays for accessing a broad range of interactive services. This dissertation describes and evaluates a service for supporting generic interactive content on standard photo frames. The proposed service enables photo frames to present content from several information services such as, the user favorite online newspaper, the ambient assisted living system of the house or dedicated applications. Interaction is based only the standard photo frame controls, but by decoupling interaction events from specific actions, the system enables those basic controls to be used to support a broad range of interaction situations. Evaluation results have shown that the proposed approach is able to support the multiple interaction modes, but has also highlighted some technical challenges associated with cache management in some photo frame models. This work is a contribution towards enabling digital photo frames to become generic interaction device for the Home. Their o -the-shelf nature and the simplicity of their interaction model means that there is a great application potential to explore this possibilities.A ideia de um pequeno ecrã ser usado na vida diária em casa não é uma novidade, e já é bastante explorada em vários serviços com utilidade muito especifica. Este serviços encontram-se na área da medidores de energia e automatização da casa, ou como recentemente se tem sido apelidado, domótica. O interactive informative display é um pouco diferente. Este projecto usa molduras digitais como ecrãs interactivos para acesso a serviços genéricos de informação. Esta dissertação explora uma abordagem que possibilita utilizar molduras digitais como dispositivos de interacção para o ambiente caseiro. Este serviço permite o uso das molduras digitais para apresentação de conteúdo proveniente de diversas fontes de informação, tais como um jornal online, o sistema de vida assistida da casa ou aplicações dedicadas. A interacção com o serviço e feita a partir da moldura digital, e usa apenas os seu controlos. O sistema funciona ao utilizar estas simples acções de interacção dando-lhes um novo significado permitindo assim um amplo leque de interacções com o conteúdo por parte do utilizador. Os resultados da avaliação mostraram que esta proposta permite a utilização de vários modos de interacção, mas também permitiu detectar varias dificuldades técnicas associadas a gestão da cache de algumas molduras digitais. Este trabalho é uma contribuição para o esforço desenvolvido no sentido de permitir que as molduras digitais se tornem no dispositivo de informação genérico para a casa. A natureza genérica destas molduras digitais e a simplicidade do modo de interacção resulta num grande potencial para possíveis novas aplicações para este tipos de dispositivos

Information technology for active ageing: A review of theory and practice

Active Ageing aims to foster a physically, mentally and socially active lifestyle as a person ages. It is a complex, multi-faceted problem that involves a variety of different actors, such as policy makers, doctors, care givers, family members, friends and, of course, older adults. This review aims to understand the role of a new actor, which increasingly plays the role of enabler and facilitator, i.e., that of the technology provider. The review specifically focuses on Information Technology (IT), with a particular emphasis on software applications, and on how IT can prevent decline, compensate for lost capabilities, aid care, and enhance existing capabilities. The analysis confirms the crucial role of IT in Active Ageing, shows that Active Ageing requires a multidisciplinary approach, and identifies the need for better integration of hardware, software, the environment and the involved actors

Prototyping tangibles : exploring form and interaction

In order to better explore the opportunities for tangible interaction in new areas such as the home or cultural heritage sites, we used multiple rapidly-developed prototypes that take advantage of existing technology. Physical prototypes allow us to give form to ideas and to evaluate the integration of form and function, two core components of tangible interaction. We discuss potentials and pitfalls when using off-the-shelf digital devices (by embedding a device, cracking it open and building on it, or collating board and parts) through six prototypes developed in two studies. Hacking devices to materialize our ideas proved excellent for fast prototyping. Technology imposed constraints and prompted different design solutions than initially intended offering unexpected ways to engage. On the basis of this experience we outline a process and offer guidelines for the fast prototyping of tangible interactions

Social networks for lonely objects

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2010.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 115-119).Visions of ubiquitous computing describe a network of devices that quietly supports human goals, but this may also add complexity to an already frustrating relationship between humans and their electronic objects. As we move from vision to reality, there is an opportunity to rethink how we interact with our objects and networks of objects, and close the communication gap between man and machine. 'This thesis defines social and super-mechanical affordances for products which may consist of many physical and digital objects. These new objects will not look like stripped-down contemporary computers, but augmented ordinary objects that are focused on input and output, exposed on Twitter. Apps in the cloud use Twitter to marshall the appropriate objects to execute human tasks. Using a social network as transport allows apps and their owners to manage a large network of computing objects with the same constructs that we use to manage many human relationships. From this direction, we take a step toward a consumer-amenable implementation of ubiquitous computing.by John Anthony Kestner.S.M

TAP-Vid: A Benchmark for Tracking Any Point in a Video

Generic motion understanding from video involves not only tracking objects, but also perceiving how their surfaces deform and move. This information is useful to make inferences about 3D shape, physical properties and object interactions. While the problem of tracking arbitrary physical points on surfaces over longer video clips has received some attention, no dataset or benchmark for evaluation existed, until now. In this paper, we first formalize the problem, naming it tracking any point (TAP). We introduce a companion benchmark, TAP-Vid, which is composed of both real-world videos with accurate human annotations of point tracks, and synthetic videos with perfect ground-truth point tracks. Central to the construction of our benchmark is a novel semi-automatic crowdsourced pipeline which uses optical flow estimates to compensate for easier, short-term motion like camera shake, allowing annotators to focus on harder sections of video. We validate our pipeline on synthetic data and propose a simple end-to-end point tracking model TAP-Net, showing that it outperforms all prior methods on our benchmark when trained on synthetic data.Comment: Published in NeurIPS Datasets and Benchmarks track, 202

How and Why to Read and Create Children's Digital Books

How and Why to Read and Create Children's Digital Books outlines effective ways of using digital books in early years and primary classrooms, and specifies the educational potential of using digital books and apps in physical spaces and virtual communities. With a particular focus on apps and personalised reading, Natalia Kucirkova combines theory and practice to argue that personalised reading is only truly personalised when it is created or co-created by reading communities. Divided into two parts, Part I suggests criteria to evaluate the educational quality of digital books and practical strategies for their use in the classroom. Specific attention is paid to the ways in which digital books can support individual children’s strengths and difficulties, digital literacies, language and communication skills. Part II explores digital books created by children, their caregivers, teachers and librarians, and Kucirkova also offers insights into how smart toys, tangibles and augmented/virtual reality tools can enrich children’s reading for pleasure

How and Why to Read and Create Children's Digital Books

How and Why to Read and Create Children's Digital Books outlines effective ways of using digital books in early years and primary classrooms, and specifies the educational potential of using digital books and apps in physical spaces and virtual communities. With a particular focus on apps and personalised reading, Natalia Kucirkova combines theory and practice to argue that personalised reading is only truly personalised when it is created or co-created by reading communities. Divided into two parts, Part I suggests criteria to evaluate the educational quality of digital books and practical strategies for their use in the classroom. Specific attention is paid to the ways in which digital books can support individual children’s strengths and difficulties, digital literacies, language and communication skills. Part II explores digital books created by children, their caregivers, teachers and librarians, and Kucirkova also offers insights into how smart toys, tangibles and augmented/virtual reality tools can enrich children’s reading for pleasure