GlobalFestival: Evaluating Real World Interaction on a Spherical Display

Spherical displays present compelling opportunities for interaction in public spaces. However, there is little research into how touch interaction should control a spherical surface or how these displays are used in real world settings. This paper presents an in the wild deployment of an application for a spherical display called GlobalFestival that utilises two different touch interaction techniques. The first version of the application allows users to spin and tilt content on the display, while the second version only allows spinning the content. During the 4-day deployment, we collected overhead video data and on-display interaction logs. The analysis brings together quantitative and qualitative methods to understand how users approach and move around the display, how on screen interaction compares in the two versions of the application, and how the display supports social interaction given its novel form factor

Analysing Pedestrian Traffic Around Public Displays

This paper presents a powerful approach to evaluating public technologies by capturing and analysing pedestrian traffic using computer vision. This approach is highly flexible and scales better than traditional ethnographic techniques often used to evaluate technology in public spaces. This technique can be used to evaluate a wide variety of public installations and the data collected complements existing approaches. Our technique allows behavioural analysis of both interacting users and non-interacting passers-by. This gives us the tools to understand how technology changes public spaces, how passers-by approach or avoid public technologies, and how different interaction styles work in public spaces. In the paper, we apply this technique to two large public displays and a street performance. The results demonstrate how metrics such as walking speed and proximity can be used for analysis, and how this can be used to capture disruption to pedestrian traffic and passer-by approach patterns

Quantum magnetism with ultracold molecules

This article gives an introduction to the realization of effective quantum magnetism with ultracold molecules in an optical lattice, reviews experimental and theoretical progress, and highlights future opportunities opened up by ongoing experiments. Ultracold molecules offer capabilities that are otherwise difficult or impossible to achieve in other effective spin systems, such as long-ranged spin-spin interactions with controllable degrees of spatial and spin anisotropy and favorable energy scales. Realizing quantum magnetism with ultracold molecules provides access to rich many-body behaviors, including many exotic phases of matter and interesting excitations and dynamics. Far-from-equilibrium dynamics plays a key role in our exposition, just as it did in recent ultracold molecule experiments realizing effective quantum magnetism. In particular, we show that dynamical probes allow the observation of correlated many-body spin physics, even in polar molecule gases that are not quantum degenerate. After describing how quantum magnetism arises in ultracold molecules and discussing recent observations of quantum magnetism with polar molecules, we survey prospects for the future, ranging from immediate goals to long-term visions.Comment: 21 pages, 6 figures, 1 table. Review articl

The Emerging Nature of Participation in Multispecies Interaction Design

Interactive technology has become integral part of daily life for both humans and animals, with animals often interacting with technologized environments on behalf of humans. For some, animals' participation in the design process is essential to design technology that can adequately support their activities. For others, animals' inability to understand and control design activities inevitably stands in the way of multispecies participatory practices. Here, we consider the essential elements of participation within interspecies interactions and illustrate its emergence, in spite of contextual constraints and asymmetries. To move beyond anthropomorphic notions of participation, and consequent anthropocentric practices, we propose a broader participatory model based on indexical semiosis, volition and choice; and we highlight dimensions that could define inclusive participatory practices more resilient to the diversity of understandings and goals among part-taking agents, and better able to account for the contribution of diverse, multispecies agents in interaction design and beyond

Universality in one-dimensional fermions at finite temperature: Density, pressure, compressibility, and contact

We present finite-temperature, lattice Monte Carlo calculations of the particle number density, compressibility, pressure, and Tan's contact of an unpolarized system of short-range, attractively interacting spin-1/2 fermions in one spatial dimension, i.e., the Gaudin-Yang model. In addition, we compute the second-order virial coefficients for the pressure and the contact, both of which are in excellent agreement with the lattice results in the low-fugacity regime. Our calculations yield universal predictions for ultracold atomic systems with broad resonances in highly constrained traps. We cover a wide range of couplings and temperatures and find results that support the existence of a strong-coupling regime in which the thermodynamics of the system is markedly different from the noninteracting case. We compare and contrast our results with identical systems in higher dimensions.Comment: 6 pages, 7 figures; improved, published versio

Orbital selective Mott transition in multi-band systems: slave-spin representation and dynamical mean-field theory

We examine whether the Mott transition of a half-filled, two-orbital Hubbard model with unequal bandwidths occurs simultaneously for both bands or whether it is a two-stage process in which the orbital with narrower bandwith localizes first (giving rise to an intermediate `orbital-selective' Mott phase). This question is addressed using both dynamical mean-field theory, and a representation of fermion operators in terms of slave quantum spins, followed by a mean-field approximation (similar in spirit to a Gutzwiller approximation). In the latter approach, the Mott transition is found to be orbital-selective for all values of the Coulomb exchange (Hund) coupling J when the bandwidth ratio is small, and only beyond a critical value of J when the bandwidth ratio is larger. Dynamical mean-field theory partially confirms these findings, but the intermediate phase at J=0 is found to differ from a conventional Mott insulator, with spectral weight extending down to arbitrary low energy. Finally, the orbital-selective Mott phase is found, at zero-temperature, to be unstable with respect to an inter-orbital hybridization, and replaced by a state with a large effective mass (and a low quasiparticle coherence scale) for the narrower band.Comment: Discussion on the effect of hybridization on the OSMT has been extende