35,356 research outputs found
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
Teaching programming at a distance: the Internet software visualization laboratory
This paper describes recent developments in our approach to teaching computer programming in the context of a part-time Masters course taught at a distance. Within our course, students are sent a pack which contains integrated text, software and video course material, using a uniform graphical representation to tell a consistent story of how the programming language works. The students communicate with their tutors over the phone and through surface mail.
Through our empirical studies and experience teaching the course we have identified four current problems: (i) students' difficulty mapping between the graphical representations used in the course and the programs to which they relate, (ii) the lack of a conversational context for tutor help provided over the telephone, (iii) helping students who due to their other commitments tend to study at 'unsociable' hours, and (iv) providing software for the constantly changing and expanding range of platforms and operating systems used by students.
We hope to alleviate these problems through our Internet Software Visualization Laboratory (ISVL), which supports individual exploration, and both synchronous and asynchronous communication. As a single user, students are aided by the extra mappings provided between the graphical representations used in the course and their computer programs, overcoming the problems of the original notation. ISVL can also be used as a synchronous communication medium whereby one of the users (generally the tutor) can provide an annotated demonstration of a program and its execution, a far richer alternative to technical discussions over the telephone. Finally, ISVL can be used to support asynchronous communication, helping students who work at unsociable hours by allowing the tutor to prepare short educational movies for them to view when convenient. The ISVL environment runs on a conventional web browser and is therefore platform independent, has modest hardware and bandwidth requirements, and is easy to distribute and maintain. Our planned experiments with ISVL will allow us to investigate ways in which new technology can be most appropriately applied in the service of distance education
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The telematic dress: Evolving garments and distributed proprioception in streaming media and fashion performance
Centered around several short films from streaming performances created in 2005, this paper
explores new ideas for movement technologies and garment design in an arts and digital research
context. The "telematic dress" project, developed at the DAP Lab in Nottingham, involves
transdisciplinary intersections between fashion and live performance, interactive system architecture,
electronic textiles, wearable technologies, choreography, and anthropology.
The concept on an evolving garment design that is materialized (moved) in live performance
originates from DAP Lab's experimentation with telematics and distributed media (http://art.ntu.ac.
uk/performance_research/birringer/dap.htm] addressing "connective tissues" through a study of
perception/proprioception in the wearer (tactile sensory processing) and the dancer/designer/viewer
relationship. This study is conducted as cross-cultural communication with online performance
partners in Europe, the US, Brazil and Japan. The inter-active space is predicated on transcultural
questions: how does the movement with an evolving design and wearable interactive sensors travel,
how does movement - and capturing of movement - allow the design to emerge toward a garment
statement, and how are bodies-in-relation-to sensory fabrics affected by the multidimensional
kinesthetics of a media-rich, responsive environment
Collaborative video searching on a tabletop
Almost all system and application design for multimedia systems is based around a single user working in isolation to perform some task yet much of the work for which we use computers to help us, is based on working collaboratively with colleagues. Groupware systems do support user collaboration but typically this is supported through software and users still physically work independently. Tabletop systems, such as the DiamondTouch from MERL, are interface devices which support direct user collaboration on a tabletop. When a tabletop is used as the interface for a multimedia system, such as a video search system, then this kind of direct collaboration raises many questions for system design. In this paper we present a tabletop system for supporting a pair of users in a video search task and we evaluate the system not only in terms of search performance but also in terms of userâuser interaction and how different user personalities within each pair of searchers impacts search performance and user interaction. Incorporating the user into the system evaluation as we have done here reveals several interesting results and has important ramifications for the design of a multimedia search system
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