From Codes to Patterns: Designing Interactive Decoration for Tableware

ABSTRACT We explore the idea of making aesthetic decorative patterns that contain multiple visual codes. We chart an iterative collaboration with ceramic designers and a restaurant to refine a recognition technology to work reliably on ceramics, produce a pattern book of designs, and prototype sets of tableware and a mobile app to enhance a dining experience. We document how the designers learned to work with and creatively exploit the technology, enriching their patterns with embellishments and backgrounds and developing strategies for embedding codes into complex designs. We discuss the potential and challenges of interacting with such patterns. We argue for a transition from designing ‘codes to patterns’ that reflects the skills of designers alongside the development of new technologies

El reactable: interfaz tangible de mesa para interpretación musical multihilos.

En años recientes se han visto una proliferación de mesas musicales, partiendo del hecho que esto no es solo una moda de mesas. Este artículo discute las razones por las cuales las interfaces de mesa son interfaces musicales promisorias; luego, se presenta el reactable, un instrumento musical basado en una interfaz de mesa que ejemplifica varios de estos logros potenciales

Exploring large-scale interactive public illustrations

We present a research-through-design exploration of transforming large-scale public illustrations into interactive media. We collaborated with creative practitioners to extend an existing visual marker technology to support spatial and layered interaction with wall-sized images. We document how these techniques were used to design interactive illustrations and how visitors to an exhibition engaged with these. We conclude that it is feasible to combine spatial and layered interactions to attach complex narratives to public illustrations, and highlight challenges around instruction giving, sociality and repeat experiences.Work has been supported by the UK EPSRC (EP/L023717/1 and EP/M02315X/1). Our ethics approval does not allow for the release of transcripts collected during the design process, and hence access will not be provided to third parties. High-resolution versions of the illustrations are available from http://www.artcodes.co.uk/

Enabling hand-crafted visual markers at scale

As locative media and augmented reality spread into the everyday world so it becomes important to create aesthetic visual markers at scale. We explore a designer-centred approach in which skilled designers handcraft seed designs that are automatically recombined to create many markers as subtle variants of a common theme. First, we extend the d-touch topological approach to creating visual markers that has previously been shown to support creative design with two new techniques: area order codes and visual checksums. We then show how the topological structure of such markers provides the basis for recombining designs to generate many variations. We demonstrate our approach through the creation of beautiful, personalized and interactive wallpaper. We reflect on how technologies must enable designers to balance goals of scalability, aesthetics and reliability in creating beautiful interactive decoration. Copyright is held by the owner/author(s).This research has been supported by the Horizon Digital Economy Research Institute (EPSRC Grant No. EP/G065802/1 and EP/M02315X/1) and the ‘Living With Interactive Decorative Patterns’ project (EPSRC Grant No. EP/L023717/1)

A Social Approach for Target Localization: Simulation and Implementation in the marXbot Robot

Foraging is a common benchmark problem in collective robotics in which a robot (the forager) explores a given environment while collecting items for further deposition at specific locations. A typical real-world application of foraging is garbage collection where robots collect garbage for further disposal in pre-defined locations. This work proposes a method to cooperatively perform the task of finding such locations: instead of using local or global localization strategies relying on pre-installed infrastructure, the proposed approach takes advantage of the knowledge gathered by a population about the localization of the targets. In our approach, robots communicate in an intrinsic way the estimation about how near they are from a target; these estimations are used by neighbour robots for estimating their proximity, and for guiding the navigation of the whole population when looking for these specific areas. We performed several tests in a simulator, and we validated our approach on a population of real robots. For the validation tests we used a mobile robot called marXbot. In both cases (i.e., simulation and implementation on real robots), we found that the proposed approach efficiently guides the robots towards the pre-specified targets while allowing the modulation of their speed

Light on horizontal interactive surfaces: Input space for tabletop computing

In the last 25 years we have witnessed the rise and growth of interactive tabletop research, both in academic and in industrial settings. The rising demand for the digital support of human activities motivated the need to bring computational power to table surfaces. In this article, we review the state of the art of tabletop computing, highlighting core aspects that frame the input space of interactive tabletops: (a) developments in hardware technologies that have caused the proliferation of interactive horizontal surfaces and (b) issues related to new classes of interaction modalities (multitouch, tangible, and touchless). A classification is presented that aims to give a detailed view of the current development of this research area and define opportunities and challenges for novel touch- and gesture-based interactions between the human and the surrounding computational environment. © 2014 ACM.This work has been funded by Integra (Amper Sistemas and CDTI, Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation) and TIPEx (TIN2010-19859-C03-01) projects and Programa de Becas y Ayudas para la Realización de Estudios Oficiales de Máster y Doctorado en la Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, 2010

Reconocimiento visual de juguetes en una mesa de interacción tangible

La idea principal de este proyecto fin de carrera (PFC) consiste en conseguir que los niños muy pequeños puedan interactuar con software y elementos informáticos de una manera más natural a través del uso de juguetes convencionales. Para lograr este propósito, este PFC se centró en el estudio y ampliación del framework de reconocimiento visual para dispositivos tabletop, Reactivision. El trabajo se realiza sobre NIKvision, una mesa de interacción tangible especialmente diseñada para su uso por niños pequeños. En primer lugar se ha realizado un estudio de las limitaciones que presenta Reactivision en el reconocimiento de objetos, para posteriormente, realizar varias fases de análisis e implementación de las distintas funcionalidades necesarias para mejorar las limitaciones analizadas. La primera fase consiste en mejorar el reconocimiento de fiduciales, marcadores que adheridos a los juguetes permiten su identificación. Esta fase comprende la creación de una nueva colección de fiduciales que permitan ser acoplados a juguetes pequeños y la posterior implementación de los algoritmos para su reconocimiento. La siguiente fase consiste en la modificación del framework Reactivision para permitir la extracción de características geométricas de los objetos planos (juguetes que no lleven fiduciales en su base) reconocidos de manera que aumenten las posibilidades de los juegos adesarrollar. La tercera fase consiste en la mejora del sistema de comunicación utilizado por Reactivision y los juegos, creando un protocolo de comunicación que permita el envío de volúmenes grandes de datos con estructuras de todo tipo. La última fase consiste en mejorar la interfaz de usuario de Reactivision, incorporando controles que permitan manejar los parámetros de las nuevas funcionalidades implementadas y en modificar los ficheros de configuración de manera que se puedan automatizar las operaciones de inicialización de parámetros