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

Multi-touch For General-purpose Computing An Examination Of Text Entry

In recent years, multi-touch has been heralded as a revolution in humancomputer interaction. Multi-touch provides features such as gestural interaction, tangible interfaces, pen-based computing, and interface customization – features embraced by an increasingly tech-savvy public. However, multi-touch platforms have not been adopted as everyday computer interaction devices; that is, multi-touch has not been applied to general-purpose computing. The questions this thesis seeks to address are: Will the general public adopt these systems as their chief interaction paradigm? Can multi-touch provide such a compelling platform that it displaces the desktop mouse and keyboard? Is multi-touch truly the next revolution in human-computer interaction? As a first step toward answering these questions, we observe that generalpurpose computing relies on text input, and ask: Can multi-touch, without a text entry peripheral, provide a platform for efficient text entry? And, by extension, is such a platform viable for general-purpose computing? We investigate these questions through four user studies that collected objective and subjective data for text entry and word processing tasks. The first of these studies establishes a benchmark for text entry performance on a multi-touch platform, across a variety of input modes. The second study attempts to improve this performance by iv examining an alternate input technique. The third and fourth studies include mousestyle interaction for formatting rich-text on a multi-touch platform, in the context of a word processing task. These studies establish a foundation for future efforts in general-purpose computing on a multi-touch platform. Furthermore, this work details deficiencies in tactile feedback with modern multi-touch platforms, and describes an exploration of audible feedback. Finally, the thesis conveys a vision for a general-purpose multi-touch platform, its design and rationale

Making Spatial Information Accessible on Touchscreens for Users who are Blind and Visually Impaired

Touchscreens have become a de facto standard of input for mobile devices as they most optimally use the limited input and output space that is imposed by their form factor. In recent years, people who are blind and visually impaired have been increasing their usage of smartphones and touchscreens. Although basic access is available, there are still many accessibility issues left to deal with in order to bring full inclusion to this population. One of the important challenges lies in accessing and creating of spatial information on touchscreens. The work presented here provides three new techniques, using three different modalities, for accessing spatial information on touchscreens. The first system makes geometry and diagram creation accessible on a touchscreen through the use of text-to-speech and gestural input. This first study is informed by a qualitative study of how people who are blind and visually impaired currently access and create graphs and diagrams. The second system makes directions through maps accessible using multiple vibration sensors without any sound or visual output. The third system investigates the use of binaural sound on a touchscreen to make various types of applications accessible such as physics simulations, astronomy, and video games

Practical, appropriate, empirically-validated guidelines for designing educational games

There has recently been a great deal of interest in the potential of computer games to function as innovative educational tools. However, there is very little evidence of games fulfilling that potential. Indeed, the process of merging the disparate goals of education and games design appears problematic, and there are currently no practical guidelines for how to do so in a coherent manner. In this paper, we describe the successful, empirically validated teaching methods developed by behavioural psychologists and point out how they are uniquely suited to take advantage of the benefits that games offer to education. We conclude by proposing some practical steps for designing educational games, based on the techniques of Applied Behaviour Analysis. It is intended that this paper can both focus educational games designers on the features of games that are genuinely useful for education, and also introduce a successful form of teaching that this audience may not yet be familiar with

Detecting Surface Interactions via a Wearable Microphone to Improve Augmented Reality Text Entry

This thesis investigates whether we can detect and distinguish between surface interaction events such as tapping or swiping using a wearable mic from a surface. Also, what are the advantages of new text entry methods such as tapping with two fingers simultaneously to enter capital letters and punctuation? For this purpose, we conducted a remote study to collect audio and video of three different ways people might interact with a surface. We also built a CNN classifier to detect taps. Our results show that we can detect and distinguish between surface interaction events such as tap or swipe via a wearable mic on the user\u27s head

Clip-on Gadgets: Expanding Multi-touch Interaction Area with Unpowered Tactile Controls

ABSTRACT Virtual keyboards and controls, commonly used on mobile multi-touch devices, occlude content of interest and do not provide tactile feedback. Clip-on Gadgets solve these issues by extending the interaction area of multi-touch devices with physical controllers. Clip-on Gadgets use only conductive materials to map user input on the controllers to touch points on the edges of screens; therefore, it is batteryfree, lightweight, and low-cost. In addition, it can be used in combination with multi-touch gestures. We present several hardware designs and a software toolkit, which enable users to simply attach Clip-on Gadgets to an edge of a device and start interacting with it

What does touch tell us about emotions in touchscreen-based gameplay?

This is the post-print version of the Article. The official published version can be accessed from the link below - Copyright @ 2012 ACM. It is posted here by permission of ACM for your personal use. Not for redistribution.Nowadays, more and more people play games on touch-screen mobile phones. This phenomenon raises a very interesting question: does touch behaviour reflect the player’s emotional state? If possible, this would not only be a valuable evaluation indicator for game designers, but also for real-time personalization of the game experience. Psychology studies on acted touch behaviour show the existence of discriminative affective profiles. In this paper, finger-stroke features during gameplay on an iPod were extracted and their discriminative power analysed. Based on touch-behaviour, machine learning algorithms were used to build systems for automatically discriminating between four emotional states (Excited, Relaxed, Frustrated, Bored), two levels of arousal and two levels of valence. The results were very interesting reaching between 69% and 77% of correct discrimination between the four emotional states. Higher results (~89%) were obtained for discriminating between two levels of arousal and two levels of valence