EyePACT: eye-based parallax correction on touch-enabled interactive displays

The parallax effect describes the displacement between the perceived and detected touch locations on a touch-enabled surface. Parallax is a key usability challenge for interactive displays, particularly for those that require thick layers of glass between the screen and the touch surface to protect them from vandalism. To address this challenge, we present EyePACT, a method that compensates for input error caused by parallax on public displays. Our method uses a display-mounted depth camera to detect the user's 3D eye position in front of the display and the detected touch location to predict the perceived touch location on the surface. We evaluate our method in two user studies in terms of parallax correction performance as well as multi-user support. Our evaluations demonstrate that EyePACT (1) significantly improves accuracy even with varying gap distances between the touch surface and the display, (2) adapts to different levels of parallax by resulting in significantly larger corrections with larger gap distances, and (3) maintains a significantly large distance between two users' fingers when interacting with the same object. These findings are promising for the development of future parallax-free interactive displays

EyeScout: Active Eye Tracking for Position and Movement Independent Gaze Interaction with Large Public Displays

While gaze holds a lot of promise for hands-free interaction with public displays, remote eye trackers with their confined tracking box restrict users to a single stationary position in front of the display. We present EyeScout, an active eye tracking system that combines an eye tracker mounted on a rail system with a computational method to automatically detect and align the tracker with the user's lateral movement. EyeScout addresses key limitations of current gaze-enabled large public displays by offering two novel gaze-interaction modes for a single user: In "Walk then Interact" the user can walk up to an arbitrary position in front of the display and interact, while in "Walk and Interact" the user can interact even while on the move. We report on a user study that shows that EyeScout is well perceived by users, extends a public display's sweet spot into a sweet line, and reduces gaze interaction kick-off time to 3.5 seconds -- a 62% improvement over state of the art solutions. We discuss sample applications that demonstrate how EyeScout can enable position and movement-independent gaze interaction with large public displays

The coordinated entry into service encounters in food shops : managing interactional space, availability, and service during openings

This article studies openings of service encounters in food shops. Based on video data in Catalan, Swiss German, Finland Swedish, and Finnish, it contributes to the general understanding of openings of face-to-face encounters by highlighting the systematic multimodal and sequential organization of sighting, gazing, greeting, walking, and moving into the reason for the encounter. More specifically, the article casts light on openings in institutional settings by investigating the methodic, coordinated achievement of entry into business and the contingencies involved. The article shows how the availability of the salesperson is displayed for the customer and how s/he orients to it, rendering visible how service is accountably offered and recognized.Peer reviewe

Strolling through the (post)modern city: Modes of being a flaneur in picture books

The city and the urban condition, popular subjects of art, literature, and film, have been commonly represented as fragmented, isolating, violent, with silent crowds moving through the hustle and bustle of a noisy, polluted cityspace. Included in this diverse artistic field is children’s literature—an area of creative and critical inquiry that continues to play a central role in illuminating and shaping perceptions of the city, of city lifestyles, and of the people who traverse the urban landscape. Fiction’s textual representations of cities, its sites and sights, lifestyles and characters have drawn on traditions of realist, satirical, and fantastic writing to produce the protean urban story—utopian, dystopian, visionary, satirical—with the goal of offering an account or critique of the contemporary city and the urban condition. In writing about cities and urban life, children’s literature variously locates the child in relation to the social (urban) space. This dialogic relation between subject and social space has been at the heart of writings about/of the flâneur: a figure who experiences modes of being in the city as it transforms under the influences of modernism and postmodernism. Within this context of a changing urban ontology brought about by (post)modern styles and practices, this article examines five contemporary picture books: The Cows Are Going to Paris by David Kirby and Allen Woodman; Ooh-la-la (Max in love) by Maira Kalman; Mr Chicken Goes to Paris and Old Tom’s Holiday by Leigh Hobbs; and The Empty City by David Megarrity. I investigate the possibility of these texts reviving the act of flânerie, but in a way that enables different modes of being a flâneur, a neo-flâneur. I suggest that the neo-flâneur retains some of the characteristics of the original flâneur, but incorporates others that take account of the changes wrought by postmodernity and globalization, particularly tourism and consumption. The dual issue at the heart of the discussion is that tourism and consumption as agents of cultural globalization offer a different way of thinking about the phenomenon of flânerie. While the flâneur can be regarded as the precursor to the tourist, the discussion considers how different modes of flânerie, such as the tourist-flâneur, are an inevitable outcome of commodification of the activities that accompany strolling through the (post)modern urban space

A comparison of addressee detection methods for multiparty conversations

Several algorithms have recently been proposed for recognizing addressees in a group conversational setting. These algorithms can rely on a variety of factors including previous conversational roles, gaze and type of dialogue act. Both statistical supervised machine learning algorithms as well as rule based methods have been developed. In this paper, we compare several algorithms developed for several different genres of muliparty dialogue, and propose a new synthesis algorithm that matches the performance of machine learning algorithms while maintaning the transparancy of semantically meaningfull rule-based algorithms

A Review of Verbal and Non-Verbal Human-Robot Interactive Communication

In this paper, an overview of human-robot interactive communication is presented, covering verbal as well as non-verbal aspects of human-robot interaction. Following a historical introduction, and motivation towards fluid human-robot communication, ten desiderata are proposed, which provide an organizational axis both of recent as well as of future research on human-robot communication. Then, the ten desiderata are examined in detail, culminating to a unifying discussion, and a forward-looking conclusion