E-book readers in higher education

Ebook readers have received a mixed press, with some hailing them as the future of reading and others believing that they will never be popular. The study outlined here aims to understand the attitudes of, and issues of importance to, lecturers in UK academia, with a view to improving the design of ebook readers for education in the future. An evaluation of five portable devices is presented, in which lecturers were given the opportunity to read an ebook and provide feedback via a questionnaire. Results are compared with concerns arising from other experiments in the same field, and recommendations are made for successful ebook design

Investigating Tangible and Hybrid Interactions to Augment the Reading Experience

For thousands of years, we as humans have been passing knowledge and telling stories through tangibly rich methods, beginning with writing on walls and even-tually evolving to printed books of today. However, the introduction of digital documents has recently created a world that has traded tangible richness for digital convenience. This thesis demonstrates innovative, tangible interfaces to help de-velop a possible future where digital documents can incorporate tangible elements. Furthermore, during our research, we discovered a pattern amongst people, where a hybrid approach to documents is becoming adopted. This discovery led to the investigation of hybrid experiences and the development of a system in which users can seamlessly switch between the physical and digital worlds.Each chapter of this thesis investigates a function of reading and its method both physically and digitally. Firstly we investigate the act of turning a page, a simple yet integral task of reading a modern book. This chapter explores materials and methods of bringing a tangible page-turning experience to digital books, followed by a user study and evaluation. Following this, we explore the use of tangible materials for side of device interactions. For example, printed books have many, frequently hundreds of pages, often have their edges felt, ruffled and flicked. Sev-eral interactions can be invoked through page edges, which are entirely removed from digital books. We design, develop and evaluate a guitar string-based system as a metaphor for page edges on a digital device.Many of us in this modern age carry on our person a smartphone, pretty much at all times. Smartphones have given us the ability to retrieve and read books wherever and whenever we please. However, the majority of people still prefer to read using physical methods. Having multiple formats to choose from has introduced a hybrid reading experience, where one might read physically at home and digitally whilst commuting, for example. We explore this experience, and the chapter follows a human-centred design approach to investigate, design, develop, and evaluate a digital bookmark system to switch between digital and physical books seamlessly

What is the problem to which interactive multimedia is the solution?

This is something of an unusual paper. It serves as both the reason for and the result of a small number of leading academics in the field, coming together to focus on the question that serves as the title to this paper: What is the problem to which interactive multimedia is the solution? Each of the authors addresses this question from their own viewpoint, offering informed insights into the development, implementation and evaluation of multimedia. The result of their collective work was also the focus of a Western Australian Institute of Educational Research seminar, convened at Edith Cowan University on 18 October, 1994. The question posed is deliberately rhetorical - it is asked to allow those represented here to consider what they think are the significant issues in the fast-growing field of multimedia. More directly, the question is also asked here because nobody else has considered it worth asking: for many multimedia is done because it is technically possible, not because it offers anything that is of value or provides the solution to a particular problem. The question, then, is answered in various ways by each of the authors involved and each, in their own way, consider a range of fundamental issues concerning the nature, place and use of multimedia - both in education and in society generally. By way of an introduction, the following provides a unifying context for the various contributions made here

Developing key concepts for the design of hypertext for printed books

In the modern world, computers and interactivity are becoming an ever-increasing phenomenon, but this means that the tactile appeal of the printed book is giving way to the increasing popularity of digital interactivity. This research explores how one of the integral concepts of computer interaction, hypertext, can be applied to the medium of print and the advantages that this can bring to the reading environment. The interaction used to read a printed book is different to that of reading material in an electronic form. Books are linear, moving forward, whereas electronic material is laterally associative. However, reading material in an electronic form, such as hypertext, allows the readers to customise and reorder knowledge for their own needs. In comparison, navigation of paper documents is aided by the information being fixed, and readers can easily refer to several documents simultaneously. The considerations that need to be made when combining the benefits of two such contrasting media needs careful attention. Six key design concepts applying hypertext methods to books are discussed to assist the production of effective reading media

A practical review of energy saving technology for ageing populations

Fuel poverty is a critical issue for a globally ageing population. Longer heating/cooling requirements combine with declining incomes to create a problem in need of urgent attention. One solution is to deploy technology to help elderly users feel informed about their energy use, and empowered to take steps to make it more cost effective and efficient. This study subjects a broad cross section of energy monitoring and home automation products to a formal ergonomic analysis. A high level task analysis was used to guide a product walk through, and a toolkit approach was used thereafter to drive out further insights. The findings reveal a number of serious usability issues which prevent these products from successfully accessing an important target demographic and associated energy saving and fuel poverty outcomes. Design principles and examples are distilled from the research to enable practitioners to translate the underlying research into high quality design-engineering solutions

Realistic electronic books

People like books. They are convenient and can be accessed easily and enjoyably. In contrast, many view the experience of accessing and exploring electronic documents as dull, cumbersome and disorientating. This thesis claims that modelling digital documents as physical books can significantly improve reading performance. To investigate this claim, a realistic electronic book model was developed and evaluated. In this model, a range of properties associated with physical books---analogue page turning, bookmarks and annotations---are emulated. Advantage is also taken of the digital environment by supporting hyperlinks, multimedia, full-text search over terms and synonyms, automatically cross referencing documents with an online encyclopaedia, and producing a back-of-the-book index. The main technical challenge of simulating physical books is finding a suitable technique for page turning that is sufficiently realistic, yet lightweight, responsive, scalable and accessible. Several techniques were surveyed, implemented and evaluated. The chosen technique allows realistic books to be presented in the Adobe Flash Player, the most widely used browser plug-in on the Web. A series of usability studies were conducted to compare reading performance while performing various tasks with HTML, PDF, physical books, and simulated books. They revealed that participants not only preferred the new interface, but completed the tasks more efficiently, without any loss in accuracy

From Social Simulation to Integrative System Design

As the recent financial crisis showed, today there is a strong need to gain "ecological perspective" of all relevant interactions in socio-economic-techno-environmental systems. For this, we suggested to set-up a network of Centers for integrative systems design, which shall be able to run all potentially relevant scenarios, identify causality chains, explore feedback and cascading effects for a number of model variants, and determine the reliability of their implications (given the validity of the underlying models). They will be able to detect possible negative side effect of policy decisions, before they occur. The Centers belonging to this network of Integrative Systems Design Centers would be focused on a particular field, but they would be part of an attempt to eventually cover all relevant areas of society and economy and integrate them within a "Living Earth Simulator". The results of all research activities of such Centers would be turned into informative input for political Decision Arenas. For example, Crisis Observatories (for financial instabilities, shortages of resources, environmental change, conflict, spreading of diseases, etc.) would be connected with such Decision Arenas for the purpose of visualization, in order to make complex interdependencies understandable to scientists, decision-makers, and the general public.Comment: 34 pages, Visioneer White Paper, see http://www.visioneer.ethz.c

THE UNIVERSAL MEDIA BOOK

We explore the integration of projected imagery with a physical book that acts as a tangible interface to multimedia data. Using a camera and projector pair, a tracking framework is presented wherein the 3D position of planar pages are monitored as they are turned back and forth by a user, and data is correctly warped and projected onto each page at interactive rates to provide the user with an intuitive mixed-reality experience. The book pages are blank, so traditional camera-based approaches to tracking physical features on the display surface do not apply. Instead, in each frame, feature points are independently extracted from the camera and projector images, and matched to recover the geometry of the pages in motion. The book can be loaded with multimedia content, including images and videos. In addition, volumetric datasets can be explored by removing a page from the book and using it as a tool to navigate through a virtual 3D volume

Congeniality of reading on digital devices: Measurement and analysis of reader experience

Reading on digital devices is becoming increasingly common. Large markets have developed for both physical reading devices and web-based reading platforms. Each device and platform offers distinct features and supposed advantages, but the experience of reading a printed book is still considered superior by some reviewers. This study sought to identify the strengths and weaknesses of digital reading and to determine whether, or how, design factors influence the reader\u27s experience. An initial evaluation of digital reading devices identified the most common form factors and established parameters to be evaluated by testing subjects in subsequent surveys. Two surveys were conducted, which involved subjects reading texts on various platforms. The subjects were students, faculty or staff of the Rochester Institute of Technology. The first survey, conducted in the RIT Cary Collection, concentrated on physical devices. The devices selected were an Apple iPad, laptop computer, Apple iPod Touch and Amazon Kindle, with a paper booklet representing traditional reading media. Nineteen subjects read a short story on each device and evaluated their experience on a paper questionnaire. Subjects were asked to identify strengths, weaknesses and difficulties encountered with the interfaces. While reading, subjects were timed and observed to measure average reading speed and interaction with the devices. Reading in a web browser on a laptop was consistently disliked by subjects. This reading platform was considered to have the greatest room for improvement and became the focus of the second survey. The second survey was conducted online and involved subjects reading texts in a web browser. The initial sample for this survey was 52 subjects, though only 12 of those subjects (23%) completed the entire survey. The first portion of this survey involved subjects reading short texts for comprehension at three sizes and evaluating them for reading speed and comfort. The second portion involved subjects reading on three different web-based reading platforms and evaluating their experience with each. Google Books, Treesaver and Open Library reading platforms were selected for the survey because they offered a range of features. Google Books represents a utilitarian design attitude, Treesaver presents content in an editorial design format, and Open Library displays scanned pages of public domain books. In the second survey, text sizes perceived by subjects as read fastest were actually read slowest on average, indicating that readers\u27 perceptions of reading speed do not necessarily correlate with performance. The Open Library reading platform displays scanned pages of books printed before digital reading was conceived and which therefore were not designed for reading on platforms with low resolutions, variable screen sizes, and non-paper substrates. This platform was disliked by a majority of subjects and presented the most interface difficulties. This suggests that large-scale book scanning projects might yield less desirable reading experiences for users. The subjects\u27 reading performance across both surveys was consistent. The range of average reading speeds on devices from Survey 1 closely matched the range of average speeds for the various text sizes in Survey 2. This indicates that varying the size of text affects performance to approximately the same degree as changing the reading devices. The outcome of this study indicates that design factors have a strong effect on the reading experience. Subjects from both surveys formed strong opinions about the interfaces, type sizes and styles and indicated that these influenced their decisions to read books on digital devices