Interactive spaces for children: gesture elicitation for controlling ground mini-robots

[EN] Interactive spaces for education are emerging as a mechanism for fostering children's natural ways of learning by means of play and exploration in physical spaces. The advanced interactive modalities and devices for such environments need to be both motivating and intuitive for children. Among the wide variety of interactive mechanisms, robots have been a popular research topic in the context of educational tools due to their attractiveness for children. However, few studies have focused on how children would naturally interact and explore interactive environments with robots. While there is abundant research on full-body interaction and intuitive manipulation of robots by adults, no similar research has been done with children. This paper therefore describes a gesture elicitation study that identified the preferred gestures and body language communication used by children to control ground robots. The results of the elicitation study were used to define a gestural language that covers the different preferences of the gestures by age group and gender, with a good acceptance rate in the 6-12 age range. The study also revealed interactive spaces with robots using body gestures as motivating and promising scenarios for collaborative or remote learning activities.This work is funded by the European Development Regional Fund (EDRF-FEDER) and supported by the Spanish MINECO (TIN2014-60077-R). The work of Patricia Pons is supported by a national grant from the Spanish MECD (FPU13/03831). Special thanks are due to the children and teachers of the Col-legi Public Vicente Gaos for their valuable collaboration and dedication.Pons Tomás, P.; Jaén Martínez, FJ. (2020). Interactive spaces for children: gesture elicitation for controlling ground mini-robots. 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Haptic feedback in freehand gesture interaction

In this thesis work, haptic feedback in gesture interaction was studied. More precisely, focus was on vibrotactile feedback and freehand gestural input methods. Vibrotactile feedback methods have been studied extensively in the fields of touch-based interaction, remote control and mid-air gestural input, and mostly positive effects on user performance have been found. An experiment was conducted in order to investigate if vibrotactile feedback has an impact on user performance in a simple data entry task. In the study, two gestural input methods were compared and the effects of visual and vibrotactile feedback added to each method were examined. Statistically significant differences in task performance between input methods were found. Results also showed that less keystrokes per character were required with visual feedback. No other significant differences were found between the types of feedback. However, preference for vibrotactile feedback was observed. The findings indicate that the careful design of an input method primarily has an impact on user performance and the feedback method can enhance this performance in diverse ways

Investigating Selection above a Multitouch Surface

Above-surface interaction is a new and exciting topic in the field of human-computer interaction (HCI). It focuses on the design and evaluation of systems that humans can operate by moving their hands in the space above or in front of interactive displays. While many technologies emerge that make such systems possible, much research is still needed to make this interaction as natural and effortless as possible. First this thesis presents a set of guidelines for designing above-surface interactions, a collection of widgets that were designed based on these guidelines, and a system that can approximate the height of hands above a diffused surface illumination (DSI) device without any additional sensors. Then the thesis focuses on interaction techniques for activating graphical widgets located in this above-surface space. Finally, it presents a pair of studies that were conducted to investigate item selection in the space above a multitouch surface. The first study was conducted to elicit a set of gestures for above-table widget activation from a group of users. Several gestures were proposed by the designers to be compared with the user-generated gestures. The follow-up study was conducted to evaluate and compare these gestures based on their performance. The findings of these studies showed that there was no clear agreement on what gestures should be used to select objects in mid-air, and that performance was better when using gestures that were chosen less frequently, but predicted to be better by the designers, as opposed to those most frequently suggested by participants

SimSense - Gestural Interaction Design for Information Exchange between Large Public Displays and Personal Mobile Devices

Large displays in public and semi-public spaces continuously permeate our everyday lives as the price of display hardware continues to drop. These displays act as sources of information, entertainment and advertisement in public environments such as airports, hotels, universities, retail stores, hospitals, and stadiums, amongst others. The information shown on these displays often varies in form that ranges from simple text to rich interactive content. However, most of this rich information remains in the displays and methods to effectively retrieve them to ones’ mobile devices without the need to explicitly manipulate them remains unexplored. Sensing technologies were used to implement a use case, wherein a person can simply walk up to a public display, retrieve interesting content onto their personal device without having the need to take it out of their pockets or bags. For this purpose a novel system called SimSense, which is capable of automatically detecting and establishing a connection with mobile phones that come in close proximity with the public display was developed. This thesis presents two alternative mid-air hand gesture interaction techniques: ‘Grab & Pull’ and ‘Grab & Drop’ to retrieve content from the public display without explicitly operating the mobile device. The results of a laboratory experiment conducted to evaluate these interaction techniques and gather preliminary impressions on the overall concept, are also presented. The results indicate that participants found ‘Grab & Pull’ to be slightly easier, more confident, and requires less effort to perform in comparison with ‘Grab & Drop’. Participants found the overall concept to be seamless and a useful way to retrieve interesting content

Expanding tangible tabletop interfaces beyond the display

L’augment de popularitat de les taules i superfícies interactives està impulsant la recerca i la innovació en una gran varietat d’àrees, incloent-­‐hi maquinari, programari, disseny de la interacció i noves tècniques d’interacció. Totes, amb l’objectiu de promoure noves interfícies dotades d’un llenguatge més ric, potent i natural. Entre totes aquestes modalitats, la interacció combinada a sobre i per damunt de la superfície de la taula mitjançant tangibles i gestos és actualment una àrea molt prometedora. Aquest document tracta d’expandir les taules interactives més enllà de la superfície per mitjà de l’exploració i el desenvolupament d’un sistema o dispositiu enfocat des de tres vessants diferents: maquinari, programari i disseny de la interacció. Durant l’inici d’aquest document s’estudien i es resumeixen els diferents trets característics de les superfícies interactives tangibles convencionals o 2D i es presenten els treballs previs desenvolupats per l’autor en solucions de programari que acaben resultant en aplicacions que suggereixen l’ús de la tercera dimensió a les superfícies tangibles. Seguidament, es presenta un repàs del maquinari existent en aquest tipus d’interfícies per tal de concebre un dispositiu capaç de detectar gestos i generar visuals per sobre de la superfície, per introduir els canvis realitzats a un dispositiu existent, desenvolupat i cedit per Microsoft Reseach Cambridge. Per tal d’explotar tot el potencial d’aquest nou dispositiu, es desenvolupa un nou sistema de visió per ordinador que estén el seguiment d’objectes i mans en una superfície 2D a la detecció de mans, dits i etiquetes amb sis graus de llibertat per sobre la superfície incloent-­‐hi la interacció tangible i tàctil convencional a la superfície. Finalment, es presenta una eina de programari per a generar aplicacions per al nou sistema i es presenten un seguit d’aplicacions per tal de provar tot el desenvolupament generat al llarg de la tesi que es conclou presentant un seguit de gestos tant a la superfície com per sobre d’aquesta i situant-­‐los en una nova classificació que alhora recull la interacció convencional 2D i la interacció estesa per damunt de la superfície desenvolupada.The rising popularity of interactive tabletops and surfaces is spawning research and innovation in a wide variety of areas, including hardware and software technologies, interaction design and novel interaction techniques, all of which seek to promote richer, more powerful and more natural interaction modalities. Among these modalities, combined interaction on and above the surface, both with gestures and with tangible objects, is a very promising area. This dissertation is about expanding tangible and tabletops surfaces beyond the display by exploring and developing a system from the three different perspectives: hardware, software, and interaction design. This dissertation, studies and summarizes the distinctive affordances of conventional 2D tabletop devices, with a vast literature review and some additional use cases developed by the author for supporting these findings, and subsequently explores the novel and not yet unveiled potential affordances of 3D-­‐augmented tabletops. It overviews the existing hardware solutions for conceiving such a device, and applies the needed hardware modifications to an existing prototype developed and rendered to us by Microsoft Research Cambridge. For accomplishing the interaction purposes, it is developed a vision system for 3D interaction that extends conventional 2D tabletop tracking for the tracking of hand gestures, 6DoF markers and on-­‐surface finger interaction. It finishes by conceiving a complete software framework solution, for the development and implementation of such type of applications that can benefit from these novel 3D interaction techniques, and implements and test several software prototypes as proof of concepts, using this framework. With these findings, it concludes presenting continuous tangible interaction gestures and proposing a novel classification for 3D tangible and tabletop gestures

Understanding interaction mechanics in touchless target selection

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI)We use gestures frequently in daily life—to interact with people, pets, or objects. But interacting with computers using mid-air gestures continues to challenge the design of touchless systems. Traditional approaches to touchless interaction focus on exploring gesture inputs and evaluating user interfaces. I shift the focus from gesture elicitation and interface evaluation to touchless interaction mechanics. I argue for a novel approach to generate design guidelines for touchless systems: to use fundamental interaction principles, instead of a reactive adaptation to the sensing technology. In five sets of experiments, I explore visual and pseudo-haptic feedback, motor intuitiveness, handedness, and perceptual Gestalt effects. Particularly, I study the interaction mechanics in touchless target selection. To that end, I introduce two novel interaction techniques: touchless circular menus that allow command selection using directional strokes and interface topographies that use pseudo-haptic feedback to guide steering–targeting tasks. Results illuminate different facets of touchless interaction mechanics. For example, motor-intuitive touchless interactions explain how our sensorimotor abilities inform touchless interface affordances: we often make a holistic oblique gesture instead of several orthogonal hand gestures while reaching toward a distant display. Following the Gestalt theory of visual perception, we found similarity between user interface (UI) components decreased user accuracy while good continuity made users faster. Other findings include hemispheric asymmetry affecting transfer of training between dominant and nondominant hands and pseudo-haptic feedback improving touchless accuracy. The results of this dissertation contribute design guidelines for future touchless systems. Practical applications of this work include the use of touchless interaction techniques in various domains, such as entertainment, consumer appliances, surgery, patient-centric health settings, smart cities, interactive visualization, and collaboration