Direct Manipulation-like Tools for Designing Intelligent Virtual Agents

If intelligent virtual agents are to become widely adopted it is vital that they can be designed using the user friendly graphical tools that are used in other areas of graphics. However, extending this sort of tool to autonomous, interactive behaviour, an area with more in common with artificial intelligence, is not trivial. This paper discusses the issues involved in creating user-friendly design tools for IVAs and proposes an extension of the direct manipulation methodology to IVAs. It also presents an initial implementation of this methodology

Tangible user interfaces : past, present and future directions

In the last two decades, Tangible User Interfaces (TUIs) have emerged as a new interface type that interlinks the digital and physical worlds. Drawing upon users' knowledge and skills of interaction with the real non-digital world, TUIs show a potential to enhance the way in which people interact with and leverage digital information. However, TUI research is still in its infancy and extensive research is required in or- der to fully understand the implications of tangible user interfaces, to develop technologies that further bridge the digital and the physical, and to guide TUI design with empirical knowledge. This paper examines the existing body of work on Tangible User In- terfaces. We start by sketching the history of tangible user interfaces, examining the intellectual origins of this field. We then present TUIs in a broader context, survey application domains, and review frame- works and taxonomies. We also discuss conceptual foundations of TUIs including perspectives from cognitive sciences, phycology, and philoso- phy. Methods and technologies for designing, building, and evaluating TUIs are also addressed. Finally, we discuss the strengths and limita- tions of TUIs and chart directions for future research

Full-body motion-based game interaction for older adults

Older adults in nursing homes often lead sedentary lifestyles, which reduces their life expectancy. Full-body motion-control games provide an opportunity for these adults to remain active and engaged; these games are not designed with age-related impairments in mind, which prevents the games from being leveraged to increase the activity levels of older adults. In this paper, we present two studies aimed at developing game design guidelines for full-body motion controls for older adults experiencing age-related changes and impairments. Our studies also demonstrate how full-body motion-control games can accommodate a variety of user abilities, have a positive effect on mood and, by extension, the emotional well-being of older adults. Based on our studies, we present seven guidelines for the design of full-body interaction in games. The guidelines are designed to foster safe physical activity among older adults, thereby increasing their quality of life. Copyright 2012 ACM

Multiple Media Interfaces for Music Therapy

This article describes interfaces (and the supporting technological infrastructure) to create audiovisual instruments for use in music therapy. In considering how the multidimensional nature of sound requires multidimensional input control, we propose a model to help designers manage the complex mapping between input devices and multiple media software. We also itemize a research agenda

Exploring the Affective Loop

Research in psychology and neurology shows that both body and mind are involved when experiencing emotions (Damasio 1994, Davidson et al. 2003). People are also very physical when they try to communicate their emotions. Somewhere in between beings consciously and unconsciously aware of it ourselves, we produce both verbal and physical signs to make other people understand how we feel. Simultaneously, this production of signs involves us in a stronger personal experience of the emotions we express. Emotions are also communicated in the digital world, but there is little focus on users' personal as well as physical experience of emotions in the available digital media. In order to explore whether and how we can expand existing media, we have designed, implemented and evaluated /eMoto/, a mobile service for sending affective messages to others. With eMoto, we explicitly aim to address both cognitive and physical experiences of human emotions. Through combining affective gestures for input with affective expressions that make use of colors, shapes and animations for the background of messages, the interaction "pulls" the user into an /affective loop/. In this thesis we define what we mean by affective loop and present a user-centered design approach expressed through four design principles inspired by previous work within Human Computer Interaction (HCI) but adjusted to our purposes; /embodiment/ (Dourish 2001) as a means to address how people communicate emotions in real life, /flow/ (Csikszentmihalyi 1990) to reach a state of involvement that goes further than the current context, /ambiguity/ of the designed expressions (Gaver et al. 2003) to allow for open-ended interpretation by the end-users instead of simplistic, one-emotion one-expression pairs and /natural but designed expressions/ to address people's natural couplings between cognitively and physically experienced emotions. We also present results from an end-user study of eMoto that indicates that subjects got both physically and emotionally involved in the interaction and that the designed "openness" and ambiguity of the expressions, was appreciated and understood by our subjects. Through the user study, we identified four potential design problems that have to be tackled in order to achieve an affective loop effect; the extent to which users' /feel in control/ of the interaction, /harmony and coherence/ between cognitive and physical expressions/,/ /timing/ of expressions and feedback in a communicational setting, and effects of users' /personality/ on their emotional expressions and experiences of the interaction

Augmented reality meeting table: a novel multi-user interface for architectural design

Immersive virtual environments have received widespread attention as providing possible replacements for the media and systems that designers traditionally use, as well as, more generally, in providing support for collaborative work. Relatively little attention has been given to date however to the problem of how to merge immersive virtual environments into real world work settings, and so to add to the media at the disposal of the designer and the design team, rather than to replace it. In this paper we report on a research project in which optical see-through augmented reality displays have been developed together with prototype decision support software for architectural and urban design. We suggest that a critical characteristic of multi user augmented reality is its ability to generate visualisations from a first person perspective in which the scale of rendition of the design model follows many of the conventions that designers are used to. Different scales of model appear to allow designers to focus on different aspects of the design under consideration. Augmenting the scene with simulations of pedestrian movement appears to assist both in scale recognition, and in moving from a first person to a third person understanding of the design. This research project is funded by the European Commission IST program (IST-2000-28559)

Systems for the Nineties - Distributed Multimedia Systems

We live at the dawn of the information age. The capabilities of computers to store and look up information are only just beginning to be exploited. As little as ten years ago, practically all the information stored in computers was entered and retrieved in the form of text. Today, we are just starting to use other means of communicating information between people and machines -- computers can now scan images, they can record sound, they can produce synthesized speech, and they can show two- and three-dimensional images of spatial data. The realization that we are still at the beginning of the information age comes when we notice the vast difference between the way in which people interact with each other and the way in which people can interact with (or through) machines. When people communicate, they tend to use speech, gestures, touch, even smell; they draw pictures on the white board, they use text, pictures, photos, graphs, sometimes even video presentations. nterpersonal communication is truly multimedia communication in that it makes use of all our senses