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

Advances on Mechanics, Design Engineering and Manufacturing III

This open access book gathers contributions presented at the International Joint Conference on Mechanics, Design Engineering and Advanced Manufacturing (JCM 2020), held as a web conference on June 2–4, 2020. It reports on cutting-edge topics in product design and manufacturing, such as industrial methods for integrated product and process design; innovative design; and computer-aided design. Further topics covered include virtual simulation and reverse engineering; additive manufacturing; product manufacturing; engineering methods in medicine and education; representation techniques; and nautical, aeronautics and aerospace design and modeling. The book is organized into four main parts, reflecting the focus and primary themes of the conference. The contributions presented here not only provide researchers, engineers and experts in a range of industrial engineering subfields with extensive information to support their daily work; they are also intended to stimulate new research directions, advanced applications of the methods discussed and future interdisciplinary collaborations

Advances on Mechanics, Design Engineering and Manufacturing III

This open access book gathers contributions presented at the International Joint Conference on Mechanics, Design Engineering and Advanced Manufacturing (JCM 2020), held as a web conference on June 2–4, 2020. It reports on cutting-edge topics in product design and manufacturing, such as industrial methods for integrated product and process design; innovative design; and computer-aided design. Further topics covered include virtual simulation and reverse engineering; additive manufacturing; product manufacturing; engineering methods in medicine and education; representation techniques; and nautical, aeronautics and aerospace design and modeling. The book is organized into four main parts, reflecting the focus and primary themes of the conference. The contributions presented here not only provide researchers, engineers and experts in a range of industrial engineering subfields with extensive information to support their daily work; they are also intended to stimulate new research directions, advanced applications of the methods discussed and future interdisciplinary collaborations

Computational visual attention systems and their cognitive foundation: A survey

Permission to make digital/hard copy of all or part of this material without fee for personal or classroom use provided that the copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage, the ACM copyright/server notice, the title of the publication, and its date appear, and notice is given that copying is by permission of the ACM, Inc. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers, or to redistribute to lists requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. (c) 2010 ACMBased on concepts of the human visual system, computational visual attention systems aim to detect regions of interest in images. Psychologists, neurobiologists, and computer scientists have investigated visual attention thoroughly during the last decades and profited considerably from each other. However, the interdisciplinarity of the topic holds not only benefits but also difficulties: concepts of other fields are usually hard to access due to differences in vocabulary and lack of knowledge of the relevant literature. This paper aims to bridge this gap and bring together concepts and ideas from the different research areas. It provides an extensive survey of the grounding psychological and biological research on visual attention as well as the current state of the art of computational systems. Furthermore, it presents a broad range of applications of computational attention systems in fields like computer vision, cognitive systems and mobile robotics. We conclude with a discussion on the limitations and open questions in the field

South African sign language recognition using feature vectors and Hidden Markov Models

Masters of ScienceThis thesis presents a system for performing whole gesture recognition for South African Sign Language. The system uses feature vectors combined with Hidden Markov models. In order to constuct a feature vector, dynamic segmentation must occur to extract the signer's hand movements. Techniques and methods for normalising variations that occur when recording a signer performing a gesture, are investigated. The system has a classification rate of 69%.South Afric

Computational visual attention systems and their cognitive foundation: A survey

Permission to make digital/hard copy of all or part of this material without fee for personal or classroom use provided that the copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage, the ACM copyright/server notice, the title of the publication, and its date appear, and notice is given that copying is by permission of the ACM, Inc. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers, or to redistribute to lists requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. (c) 2010 ACMBased on concepts of the human visual system, computational visual attention systems aim to detect regions of interest in images. Psychologists, neurobiologists, and computer scientists have investigated visual attention thoroughly during the last decades and profited considerably from each other. However, the interdisciplinarity of the topic holds not only benefits but also difficulties: concepts of other fields are usually hard to access due to differences in vocabulary and lack of knowledge of the relevant literature. This paper aims to bridge this gap and bring together concepts and ideas from the different research areas. It provides an extensive survey of the grounding psychological and biological research on visual attention as well as the current state of the art of computational systems. Furthermore, it presents a broad range of applications of computational attention systems in fields like computer vision, cognitive systems and mobile robotics. We conclude with a discussion on the limitations and open questions in the field

Migrating Through the Web: Interactive Practices About Migration, Flight and Exile

How to study a media object on the web that is at the same time a documentary, a reportage, and a game which combines both fiction and non-fiction elements? The author digs into the discursive and material structures and infrastructures of serious games, text-adventures, newsgames, interactive maps, and data visualizations, in which refugees and migrants become the subject of humanitarian discourse. Although the goal is to arouse empathy towards migrants, these "interactive practices" distinguish who is vulnerable and who is not. It supports the idea of a "migratory crisis", which, the author argues, is actually the symptom of a deeper crisis of the humanitarian system itself

Cultural Heritage in a Changing World

Cultural Heritage; Cultural Economics; Cultural Studies; Archaeology; Information Storage and Retrieval; Information Systems Applications (incl. Internet

The Object of Platform Studies: Relational Materialities and the Social Platform (the case of the Nintendo Wii)

Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System,by Ian Bogost and Nick Montfort, inaugurated thePlatform Studies series at MIT Press in 2009.We’ve coauthored a new book in the series, Codename: Revolution: the Nintendo Wii Video Game Console. Platform studies is a quintessentially Digital Humanities approach, since it’s explicitly focused on the interrelationship of computing and cultural expression. According to the series preface, the goal of platform studies is “to consider the lowest level of computing systems and to understand how these systems relate to culture and creativity.”In practice, this involves paying close attentionto specific hardware and software interactions--to the vertical relationships between a platform’s multilayered materialities (Hayles; Kirschenbaum),from transistors to code to cultural reception. Any given act of platform-studies analysis may focus for example on the relationship between the chipset and the OS, or between the graphics processor and display parameters or game developers’ designs.In computing terms, platform is an abstraction(Bogost and Montfort), a pragmatic frame placed around whatever hardware-and-software configuration is required in order to build or run certain specificapplications (including creative works). The object of platform studies is thus a shifting series of possibility spaces, any number of dynamic thresholds between discrete levels of a system