Mechanisms for collaboration: a design and evaluation framework for multi-user interfaces

Multi-user interfaces are said to provide “natural” interaction in supporting collaboration, compared to individual and noncolocated technologies. We identify three mechanisms accounting for the success of such interfaces: high awareness of others' actions and intentions, high control over the interface, and high availability of background information. We challenge the idea that interaction over such interfaces is necessarily “natural” and argue that everyday interaction involves constraints on awareness, control, and availability. These constraints help people interact more smoothly. We draw from social developmental psychology to characterize the design of multi-user interfaces in terms of how constraints on these mechanisms can be best used to promote collaboration. We use this framework of mechanisms and constraints to explain the successes and failures of existing designs, then apply it to three case studies of design, and finally derive from them a set of questions to consider when designing and analysing multi-user interfaces for collaboration

Cruiser and PhoTable: Exploring Tabletop User Interface Software for Digital Photograph Sharing and Story Capture

Digital photography has not only changed the nature of photography and the photographic process, but also the manner in which we share photographs and tell stories about them. Some traditional methods, such as the family photo album or passing around piles of recently developed snapshots, are lost to us without requiring the digital photos to be printed. The current, purely digital, methods of sharing do not provide the same experience as printed photographs, and they do not provide effective face-to-face social interaction around photographs, as experienced during storytelling. Research has found that people are often dissatisfied with sharing photographs in digital form. The recent emergence of the tabletop interface as a viable multi-user direct-touch interactive large horizontal display has provided the hardware that has the potential to improve our collocated activities such as digital photograph sharing. However, while some software to communicate with various tabletop hardware technologies exists, software aspects of tabletop user interfaces are still at an early stage and require careful consideration in order to provide an effective, multi-user immersive interface that arbitrates the social interaction between users, without the necessary computer-human interaction interfering with the social dialogue. This thesis presents PhoTable, a social interface allowing people to effectively share, and tell stories about, recently taken, unsorted digital photographs around an interactive tabletop. In addition, the computer-arbitrated digital interaction allows PhoTable to capture the stories told, and associate them as audio metadata to the appropriate photographs. By leveraging the tabletop interface and providing a highly usable and natural interaction we can enable users to become immersed in their social interaction, telling stories about their photographs, and allow the computer interaction to occur as a side-effect of the social interaction. Correlating the computer interaction with the corresponding audio allows PhoTable to annotate an automatically created digital photo album with audible stories, which may then be archived. These stories remain useful for future sharing -- both collocated sharing and remote (e.g. via the Internet) -- and also provide a personal memento both of the event depicted in the photograph (e.g. as a reminder) and of the enjoyable photo sharing experience at the tabletop. To provide the necessary software to realise an interface such as PhoTable, this thesis explored the development of Cruiser: an efficient, extensible and reusable software framework for developing tabletop applications. Cruiser contributes a set of programming libraries and the necessary application framework to facilitate the rapid and highly flexible development of new tabletop applications. It uses a plugin architecture that encourages code reuse, stability and easy experimentation, and leverages the dedicated computer graphics hardware and multi-core processors of modern consumer-level systems to provide a responsive and immersive interactive tabletop user interface that is agnostic to the tabletop hardware and operating platform, using efficient, native cross-platform code. Cruiser's flexibility has allowed a variety of novel interactive tabletop applications to be explored by other researchers using the framework, in addition to PhoTable. To evaluate Cruiser and PhoTable, this thesis follows recommended practices for systems evaluation. The design rationale is framed within the above scenario and vision which we explore further, and the resulting design is critically analysed based on user studies, heuristic evaluation and a reflection on how it evolved over time. The effectiveness of Cruiser was evaluated in terms of its ability to realise PhoTable, use of it by others to explore many new tabletop applications, and an analysis of performance and resource usage. Usability, learnability and effectiveness of PhoTable was assessed on three levels: careful usability evaluations of elements of the interface; informal observations of usability when Cruiser was available to the public in several exhibitions and demonstrations; and a final evaluation of PhoTable in use for storytelling, where this had the side effect of creating a digital photo album, consisting of the photographs users interacted with on the table and associated audio annotations which PhoTable automatically extracted from the interaction. We conclude that our approach to design has resulted in an effective framework for creating new tabletop interfaces. The parallel goal of exploring the potential for tabletop interaction as a new way to share digital photographs was realised in PhoTable. It is able to support the envisaged goal of an effective interface for telling stories about one's photos. As a serendipitous side-effect, PhoTable was effective in the automatic capture of the stories about individual photographs for future reminiscence and sharing. This work provides foundations for future work in creating new ways to interact at a tabletop and to the ways to capture personal stories around digital photographs for sharing and long-term preservation

Cruiser and PhoTable: Exploring Tabletop User Interface Software for Digital Photograph Sharing and Story Capture

Digital photography has not only changed the nature of photography and the photographic process, but also the manner in which we share photographs and tell stories about them. Some traditional methods, such as the family photo album or passing around piles of recently developed snapshots, are lost to us without requiring the digital photos to be printed. The current, purely digital, methods of sharing do not provide the same experience as printed photographs, and they do not provide effective face-to-face social interaction around photographs, as experienced during storytelling. Research has found that people are often dissatisfied with sharing photographs in digital form. The recent emergence of the tabletop interface as a viable multi-user direct-touch interactive large horizontal display has provided the hardware that has the potential to improve our collocated activities such as digital photograph sharing. However, while some software to communicate with various tabletop hardware technologies exists, software aspects of tabletop user interfaces are still at an early stage and require careful consideration in order to provide an effective, multi-user immersive interface that arbitrates the social interaction between users, without the necessary computer-human interaction interfering with the social dialogue. This thesis presents PhoTable, a social interface allowing people to effectively share, and tell stories about, recently taken, unsorted digital photographs around an interactive tabletop. In addition, the computer-arbitrated digital interaction allows PhoTable to capture the stories told, and associate them as audio metadata to the appropriate photographs. By leveraging the tabletop interface and providing a highly usable and natural interaction we can enable users to become immersed in their social interaction, telling stories about their photographs, and allow the computer interaction to occur as a side-effect of the social interaction. Correlating the computer interaction with the corresponding audio allows PhoTable to annotate an automatically created digital photo album with audible stories, which may then be archived. These stories remain useful for future sharing -- both collocated sharing and remote (e.g. via the Internet) -- and also provide a personal memento both of the event depicted in the photograph (e.g. as a reminder) and of the enjoyable photo sharing experience at the tabletop. To provide the necessary software to realise an interface such as PhoTable, this thesis explored the development of Cruiser: an efficient, extensible and reusable software framework for developing tabletop applications. Cruiser contributes a set of programming libraries and the necessary application framework to facilitate the rapid and highly flexible development of new tabletop applications. It uses a plugin architecture that encourages code reuse, stability and easy experimentation, and leverages the dedicated computer graphics hardware and multi-core processors of modern consumer-level systems to provide a responsive and immersive interactive tabletop user interface that is agnostic to the tabletop hardware and operating platform, using efficient, native cross-platform code. Cruiser's flexibility has allowed a variety of novel interactive tabletop applications to be explored by other researchers using the framework, in addition to PhoTable. To evaluate Cruiser and PhoTable, this thesis follows recommended practices for systems evaluation. The design rationale is framed within the above scenario and vision which we explore further, and the resulting design is critically analysed based on user studies, heuristic evaluation and a reflection on how it evolved over time. The effectiveness of Cruiser was evaluated in terms of its ability to realise PhoTable, use of it by others to explore many new tabletop applications, and an analysis of performance and resource usage. Usability, learnability and effectiveness of PhoTable was assessed on three levels: careful usability evaluations of elements of the interface; informal observations of usability when Cruiser was available to the public in several exhibitions and demonstrations; and a final evaluation of PhoTable in use for storytelling, where this had the side effect of creating a digital photo album, consisting of the photographs users interacted with on the table and associated audio annotations which PhoTable automatically extracted from the interaction. We conclude that our approach to design has resulted in an effective framework for creating new tabletop interfaces. The parallel goal of exploring the potential for tabletop interaction as a new way to share digital photographs was realised in PhoTable. It is able to support the envisaged goal of an effective interface for telling stories about one's photos. As a serendipitous side-effect, PhoTable was effective in the automatic capture of the stories about individual photographs for future reminiscence and sharing. This work provides foundations for future work in creating new ways to interact at a tabletop and to the ways to capture personal stories around digital photographs for sharing and long-term preservation

Practical, appropriate, empirically-validated guidelines for designing educational games

There has recently been a great deal of interest in the potential of computer games to function as innovative educational tools. However, there is very little evidence of games fulfilling that potential. Indeed, the process of merging the disparate goals of education and games design appears problematic, and there are currently no practical guidelines for how to do so in a coherent manner. In this paper, we describe the successful, empirically validated teaching methods developed by behavioural psychologists and point out how they are uniquely suited to take advantage of the benefits that games offer to education. We conclude by proposing some practical steps for designing educational games, based on the techniques of Applied Behaviour Analysis. It is intended that this paper can both focus educational games designers on the features of games that are genuinely useful for education, and also introduce a successful form of teaching that this audience may not yet be familiar with

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

Rethinking 'multi-user': an in-the-wild study of how groups approach a walk-up-and-use tabletop interface

Multi-touch tabletops have been much heralded as an innovative technology that can facilitate new ways of group working. However, there is little evidence of these materialising outside of research lab settings. We present the findings of a 5-week in-the-wild study examining how a shared planning application – designed to run on a walk-up- and-use tabletop – was used when placed in a tourist information centre. We describe how groups approached, congregated and interacted with it and the social interactions that took place – noting how they were quite different from research findings describing the ways groups work around a tabletop in lab settings. We discuss the implications of such situated group work for designing collaborative tabletop applications for use in public settings

Evaluating a tactile and a tangible multi-tablet gamified quiz system for collaborative learning in primary education

[EN] Gamification has been identified as an interesting technique to foster collaboration in educational contexts. However, there are not many approaches that tackle this in primary school learning environments. The most popular technologies in the classroom are still traditional video consoles and desktop computers, which complicate the design of collaborative activities since they are essentially mono-user. The recent popularization of handheld devices such as tablets and smartphones has made it possible to build affordable, scalable, and improvised collaborative gamifled activities by creating a multi-tablet environment. In this paper we present Quizbot, a collaborative gamifled quiz application to practice different subjects, which can be defined by educators beforehand. Two versions of the system are implemented: a tactile for tablets laid on a table, in which all the elements are digital; and a tangible in which the tablets are scattered on the floor and the components are both digital and physical objects. Both versions of Quizbot are evaluated and compared in a study with eighty primary-schooled children in terms of user experience and quality of collaboration supported. Results indicate that both versions of Quizbot are essentially equally fun and easy to use, and can effectively support collaboration, with the tangible version outperforming the other one with respect to make the children reach consensus after a discussion, split and parallelize work, and treat each other with more respect, but also presenting a poorer time management.We would like to thank Universitat Politecnica de Valencia's Summer School for their collaboration during the development of this study, as well as Colegio Internacional Ausias March for their support in the development of educational content.This work is supported by Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness and funded by the European Development Regional Fund (EDRF-FEDER) with Project TIN2014-60077-R. It is also supported by fellowship ACIF/2014/214 within the VALi+d program from Conselleria d’Educació, Cultura i Esport (Generalitat Valenciana), and by fellowship FPU14/00136 within the FPU program from Spanish Ministry of Education, Culture, and SportGarcía Sanjuan, F.; El Jurdi, S.; Jaén Martínez, FJ.; Nácher-Soler, VE. (2018). Evaluating a tactile and a tangible multi-tablet gamified quiz system for collaborative learning in primary education. Computers & Education. 123:65-84. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2018.04.011S658412

Children s Acceptance of a Collaborative Problem Solving Game Based on Physical Versus Digital Learning Spaces

[EN] Collaborative problem solving (CPS) is an essential soft skill that should be fostered from a young age. Research shows that a good way of teaching such skills is through video games; however, the success and viability of this method may be affected by the technological platform used. In this work we propose a gameful approach to train CPS skills in the form of the CPSbot framework and describe a study involving 80 primary school children on user experience and acceptance of a game, Quizbot, using three different technological platforms: two purely digital (tabletop and handheld tablets) and another based on tangible interfaces and physical spaces. The results show that physical spaces proved to be more effective than the screen-based platforms in several ways, as well as being considered more fun and easier to use by the children. Finally, we propose a set of design considerations for future gameful CPS systems based on the observations made during this study.Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness and the European Regional Development Fund (project TIN2014-60077-R); Spanish Ministry of Education, Culture and Sport (with fellowship FPU14/00136) and Conselleria d'Educacio, Cultura i Esport (Generalitat Valenciana, Spain) (grant ACIF/2014/214).Jurdi, S.; García Sanjuan, F.; Nácher-Soler, VE.; Jaén Martínez, FJ. (2018). Children s Acceptance of a Collaborative Problem Solving Game Based on Physical Versus Digital Learning Spaces. Interacting with Computers. 30(3):187-206. https://doi.org/10.1093/iwc/iwy006S18720630