Proxemics mobile collocated interactions

Recent research on mobile collocated interactions has been looking at situations in which collocated users engage in collaborative activities using their mobile devices. However, existing practices fail to fully account for the culturally-dependent spatial relationships between people and their digital devices (i.e. the proxemic relationships). Building on the ideas of proxemic interactions, this workshop is motivated by the concept of 'proxemic mobile collocated interactions', to harness new or existing technologies to create engaging and interactionally relevant experiences. Such approaches would allow devices to not only react to presence and interaction, but also other indicators, such as the interpersonal distance people naturally use in everyday life. The aim of this one-day workshop is to bring together a community of researchers, designers and practitioners who are interested in exploring proxemics and mobile collocated interactions

Proxemic mobile collocated interactions

Funding: EPSRC grants EP/G037574/1 and EP/G065802/1 (MP).Recent research on mobile collocated interactions has been looking at situations in which collocated users engage in collaborative activities using their mobile devices. However, existing practices fail to fully account for the culturally-dependent spatial relationships between people and their digital devices (i.e. the proxemic relationships). Building on the ideas of proxemic interactions, this workshop is motivated by the concept of 'proxemic mobile collocated interactions', to harness new or existing technologies to create engaging and interactionally relevant experiences. Such approaches would allow devices to not only react to presence and interaction, but also other indicators, such as the interpersonal distance people naturally use in everyday life. The aim of this one-day workshop is to bring together a community of researchers, designers and practitioners who are interested in exploring proxemics and mobile collocated interactions.Postprin

Mobile collocated interactions with wearables: past, present, and future

This Special Issue focuses on the emerging use of wearable technologies for mobile collocated interactions. Rather than merely listing off the articles that follow, we wish to introduce this Special Issue by discussing the past, present, and future of this field in HCI through its theories, ongoing designs and research efforts, and emerging frame- works. We conclude by providing an overview of a series of workshops on the topic, and introduce the two main articles that comprise this Special Issue

SenseBelt:a belt-worn sensor to support cross-device interaction

Mobile interaction is shifting from a single device to simultaneous interaction with ensembles of devices such as phones, tablets, or watches. Spatially-aware cross-device interaction between mobile devices typically requires a fixed tracking infrastructure, which lim- its mobility. In this paper, we present SenseBelt – a sensing belt that enhances existing mobile interactions and enables low-cost, ad hoc sensing of cross-device gestures and interactions. SenseBelt enables proxemic interactions between people and their personal devices. SenseBelt also supports cross-device interaction be- tween personal devices and stationary devices, such as public displays. We discuss the design and implementation of SenseBelt together with possible applications. With an initial evaluation, we provide insights into the benefits and drawbacks of a belt-worn mediating sensor to support cross-device interactions

Interaction techniques for mobile collocation

Research on mobile collocated interactions has been exploring situations where collocated users engage in collaborative activities using their personal mobile devices (e.g., smartphones and tablets), thus going from personal/individual toward shared/multiuser experiences and interactions. The proliferation of ever- smaller computers that can be worn on our wrists (e.g., Apple Watch) and other parts of the body (e.g., Google Glass), have expanded the possibilities and increased the complexity of interaction in what we term “mobile collocated” situations. The focus of this workshop is to bring together a community of researchers, designers and practitioners to explore novel interaction techniques for mobile collocated interactions

Bonjour! Greeting Gestures for Collocated Interaction with Wearables

International audienceWearable devices such as smartwatches (SW) and head-worn displays (HWD) are gaining popularity. To improve the collocated capabilities of wearables, we need to facilitate collocated interaction in a socially acceptable manner. In this paper we propose to explore widespread used greeting gestures such as handshakes or head gestures to perform collocated interactions with wearables. These include pairing devices or information exchange. We analyze the properties of greetings and how they can map to different levels of wearable pairing (family, friend, work, stranger). This paper also suggest how these gestures could be detected with SWs and HWDs

Proxemic interactions with multi-artifact systems

Abstract — The artifact ecologies emerging from an increasing number of interactive digital artifacts, capable of communicating with each other wirelessly, have created an interaction space where software applications are no longer limited by the physical boundaries of a single device. With the new opportunities follows an added complexity that interaction designers need to address. Previous work have shown the potential of proxemic interactions as one way of dealing with design challenges of ubicomp systems. However, the work focused on interactions involving multiple digital artifacts is limited. In this paper, we analyze two multi-artifact systems from our prior work within the domain of music consumption and identify four concepts of multi-artifact interactions: Plasticity, migration, complementarity, and multi-user. These concepts forms the basis for a discussion on the potential use of proxemic interactions in the design of multi-artifact systems. Keywords- artifact ecology, multi-artifact systems, proxemic interactions, music systems. I

Measuring interaction proxemics with wearable light tags

The proxemics of social interactions (e.g., body distance, relative orientation) in!uences many aspects of our everyday life: from patients’ reactions to interaction with physicians, successes in job interviews, to effective teamwork. Traditionally, interaction proxemics has been studied via questionnaires and participant observations, imposing high burden on users, low scalability and precision, and often biases. In this paper we present Protractor, a novel wearable technology for measuring interaction proxemics as part of non-verbal behavior cues with# ne granularity. Protractor employs near-infrared light to monitor both the distance and relative body orientation of interacting users. We leverage the characteristics of near-infrared light (i.e., line-of-sight propagation) to accurately and reliably identify interactions; a pair of collocated photodiodes aid the inference of relative interaction angle and distance. We achieve robustness against temporary blockage of the light channel (e.g., by the user’s hand or clothes) by designing sensor fusion algorithms that exploit inertial sensors to obviate the absence of light tracking results. We fabricated Protractor tags and conducted real-world experiments. Results show its accuracy in tracking body distances and relative angles. The framework achieves less than 6 error 95% of the time for measuring relative body orientation and 2.3-cm – 4.9-cm mean error in estimating interaction distance. We deployed Protractor tags to track user’s non-verbal behaviors when conducting collaborative group tasks. Results with 64 participants show that distance and angle data from Protractor tags can help assess individual’s task role with 84.9% accuracy, and identify task timeline with 93.2% accuracy

User experience for multi-device ecosystems: challenges and opportunities

Smart devices have pervaded every aspect of humans' daily lives. Though single device UX products are relatively successful, the experience of cross-device interaction is still far from satisfactory and can be a source of frustration. Inconsistent UI styles, unclear coordination, varying fidelity, pairwise interactions, lack of understanding intent, limited data sharing and security, and other problems typically degrade the experience in a multi-device ecosystem. Redesigning the UX, tailored to multi-device ecosystems to enhance the user experience, turns out to be challenging but at the same time affording many new opportunities. This workshop brings together researchers, practitioners and developers with different backgrounds, including from fields such as computationally design, affective computing, and multimodal interaction to exchange views, share ideas, and explore future directions on UX for distributed scenarios, especially for those heterogeneous cross-device ecosystems. The topics cover but are not limited to distributed UX design, accessibility, cross-device HCI, human factors in distributed scenarios, user-centric interfaces, and multi-device ecosystems