A survey of pervasive displays for information presentation

Weiser’s seminal vision of ubiquitous computing had calm information presentation at its heart and identified an important challenge in providing pervasive yet unobtrusive information display while avoiding problems of information overload. Since this vision was first articulated, a range of approaches have emerged for presenting information on pervasive displays and digital screens of varying sizes are now an everyday feature of our environments. Such displays provide significant opportunities for presenting information in-situ to support users in a range of activities, and the growing expectation is that there is constant peripheral access to digital information. In this article we review three different pervasive display technologies used for information presentation: traditional 2D display media, urban media facades, and novel display hardware. Our survey identifies five emerging trends that cross all three technologies: an increasing focus on situatedness, a movement towards non-expert users, growing demand for accessible interaction, a potential for new applications of data, and a difficulty in balancing ‘calm’ computing against presentation of data at an appropriate granularity and complexity

TAPAS: A tangible end-user development tool supporting the repurposing of Pervasive Displays

These days we are witnessing a spread of many new digital systems in public spaces featuring easy to use and engaging interaction modalities, such as multi-touch, gestures, tangible, and voice. This new user-centered paradigm | known as the Natural User Interface (NUI) | aims to provide a more natural and rich experience to end users; this supports its adoption in many ubiquitous domains, as it naturally holds for Pervasive Displays: these systems are composed of variously-sized displays and support many-to-many interactions with the same public screens at the same time. Due to their public and moderated nature, users need an easy way of adapting them to heterogeneous usage contexts in order to support their long-term adoption. In this paper, we propose an End-User Development approach to this problem introducing TAPAS, a system that combines a tangible interaction with a puzzle metaphor, allowing users to create work ows on a Pervasive Display to satisfy their needs; its design and visual syntax stem from a study we carried out with designers, whose ndings are also part of this work. We then carried out a preliminary evaluation of our system with second year university students and interaction designers, gathering useful feedback to improve TAPAS and employ it in many other domains

TAPAS : A tangible End-User Development tool supporting the repurposing of Pervasive Displays

This document is the Accepted Manuscript version. Under embargo until 8 June 2018. The final, definitive version is available online at doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jvlc.2016.11.002, published by Elsevier Ltd.These days we are witnessing a spread of many new digital systems in public spaces featuring easy to use and engaging interaction modalities, such as multi-touch, gestures, tangible, and voice. This new user-centered paradigm — known as the NUI — aims to provide a more natural and rich experience to end users; this supports its adoption in many ubiquitous domains, as it naturally holds for Pervasive Displays: these systems are composed of variously-sized displays and support many-to-many interactions with the same public screens at the same time. Due to their public and moderated nature, users need an easy way of adapting them to heterogeneous usage contexts in order to support their long-term adoption. In this paper, we propose an End-User Development approach to this problem introducing TAPAS, a system that combines a tangible interaction with a puzzle metaphor, allowing users to create workflows on a Pervasive Display to satisfy their needs; its design and visual syntax stem from a study we carried out with designers, whose findings are also part of this work. We then carried out a preliminary evaluation of our system with second year university students and interaction designers, gathering useful feedback to improve TAPAS and employ it in many other domains.Peer reviewedFinal Accepted Versio

NFC-Teknologiaan Pohjautuvan Älyilmoitustaulun Konseptin Suunnittelu ja Toteutus

Tampere railway station area is going through a renovation in following decades and thus it is a relevant time to research possibilities to improve the area with smart city technologies. KÄPÄLÄ project which is a collaboration of Tampere University and Tampere University of Technology focusing on smart city technologies initiated a research towards innovative service concepts on railway station area. This thesis describes planning, deployment and evaluation of prototype system titled Smart Bulletin Board which is an electronic Bulletin board with motion detection and NFC interaction which was concluded to be suitable topic of research. The aim for this thesis was to test the SBB concept’s user experience and appeal, map possibilities and problems encountered in the deployment of public display system utilizing motion detection and NFC interaction. The goal is also to explore if the NFC technology is suitable and novel technology to act as a data transfer bridge between public display and personal smartphone. This thesis consists of literary review, description of design and implementation phases and two user evaluation studies. The results of the research suggest that there is promise for the SBB concept as user experience for the system was prominently positive. The user evaluations uncovered multiple interesting usability problems related to combination of public display system, NFC and motion detection interaction which could be researched further. The results of this thesis could be used by parties planning to implement a public display system or parties involved with NFC or motion detection controls to gain insight on issues related to their usage on public setting

Personalization platform for multimodal ubiquitous computing applications

Dissertação para obtenção do Grau de Mestre em Engenharia InformáticaWe currently live surrounded by a myriad of computing devices running multiple applications. In general, the user experience on each of those scenarios is not adapted to each user’s specific needs, without personalization and integration across scenarios. Moreover, developers usually do not have the right tools to handle that in a standard and generic way. As such, a personalization platform may provide those tools. This kind of platform should be readily available to be used by any developer. Therefore, it must be developed to be available over the Internet. With the advances in IT infrastructure, it is now possible to develop reliable and scalable services running on abstract and virtualized platforms. Those are some of the advantages of cloud computing, which offers a model of utility computing where customers are able to dynamically allocate the resources they need and are charged accordingly. This work focuses on the creation of a cloud-based personalization platform built on a previously developed generic user modeling framework. It provides user profiling and context-awareness tools to third-party developers. A public display-based application was also developed. It provides useful information to students, teachers and others in a university campus as they are detected by Bluetooth scanning. It uses the personalization platform as the basis to select the most relevant information in each situation, while a mobile application was developed to be used as an input mechanism. A user study was conducted to assess the usefulness of the application and to validate some design choices. The results were mostly positive

Model-driven Personalisation of Human-Computer Interaction across Ubiquitous Computing Applications

Personalisation is essential to Ubiquitous Computing (Ubicomp), which focuses on a human-centred paradigm aiming to provide interaction with adaptive content, services, and interfaces towards each one of its users, according to the context of the applications’ scenarios. However, the provision of that appropriated personalised interaction is a true challenge due to different reasons, such as the user interests, heterogeneous environments and devices, dynamic user behaviour and data capture. This dissertation focuses on a model-driven personalisation solution that has the main goal of facili-tating the implementation of a personalised human-computer interaction across different Ubicomp scenarios and applications. The research reported here investigates how a generic and interoperable model for personalisation can be used, shared and processed by different applications, among diverse devices, and across different scenarios, studying how it can enrich human-computer interaction. The research started by the definition of a consistent user model with the integration of context to end in a pervasive model for the definition of personalisations across different applications. Besides the model proposal, the other key contributions within the solution are the modelling frame-work, which encapsulates the model and integrates the user profiling module, and a cloud-based platform to pervasively support developers in the implementation of personalisation across different applications and scenarios. This platform provides tools to put end users in control of their data and to support developers through web services based operations implemented on top of a personalisa-tion API, which can also be used independently of the platform for testing purposes, for instance. Several Ubicomp applications prototypes were designed and used to evaluate, at different phases, both the solution as a whole and each one of its components. Some were specially created with the goal of evaluating specific research questions of this work. Others were being developed with a pur-pose other than for personalisation evaluation, but they ended up as personalised prototypes to better address their initial goals. The process of applying the personalisation model to the design of the latter should also work as a proof of concept on the developer side. On the one hand, developers have been probed with the implementation of personalised applications using the proposed solution, or a part of it, to assess how it works and can help them. The usage of our solution by developers was also important to assess how the model and the platform respond to the developers’ needs. On the other hand, some prototypes that implement our model-driven per-sonalisation solution have been selected for end user evaluation. Usually, user testing was conducted at two different stages of the development, using: (1) a non-personalised version; (2) the final per-sonalised version. This procedure allowed us to assess if personalisation improved the human-com-puter interaction. The first stage was also important to know who were the end users and gather interaction data to come up with personalisation proposals for each prototype. Globally, the results of both developers and end users tests were very positive. Finally, this dissertation proposes further work, which is already ongoing, related to the study of a methodology to the implementation and evaluation of personalised applications, supported by the development of three mobile health applications for rehabilitation

Scheduling Content in Pervasive Display Systems

Digital displays are a ubiquitous feature of public spaces; London recently deployed a whole network of new displays in its Underground stations, and the screens on One Time Square (New York) allow for presentation of over $16,000$ square feet of digital media. However, despite decades of research into pervasive displays, the problem of scheduling content is under-served and there is little forward momentum in addressing the challenges brought with large-scale and open display networks. This paper presents the first comprehensive architectural model for scheduling in current and anticipated pervasive display systems. In contrast to prior work, our three-stage model separates out the process of high level goal setting from content filtering and selection. Our architecture is motivated by an extensive review of the literature and a detailed consideration of requirements. The architecture is realised with an implementation designed to serve the world's largest and longest-running research testbed of pervasive displays. A mixed-methods evaluation confirms the viability of the architecture from three angles: demonstrating capability to meet the articulated requirements, performance that comfortably fits within the demands of typical display deployments, and evidence of its ability to serve as the day-to-day scheduling platform for the previously described research testbed. Based on our evaluation and a reflection on paper as a whole, we identify ten implications that will shape future research and development in pervasive display scheduling

Applications across Co-located Devices

We live surrounded by many computing devices. However, their presence has yet to be fully explored to create a richer ubiquitous computing environment. There is an opportunity to take better advantage of those devices by combining them into a unified user experience. To realize this vision, we studied and explored the use of a framework, which provides the tools and abstractions needed to develop applications that distribute UI components across co-located devices. The framework comprises the following components: authentication and authorization services; a broker to sync information across multiple application instances; background services that gather the capabilities of the devices; and a library to integrate web applications with the broker, determine which components to show based on UI requirements and device capabilities, and that provides custom elements to manage the distribution of the UI components and the multiple application states. Collaboration between users is supported by sharing application states. An indoor positioning solution had to be developed in order to determine when devices are close to each other to trigger the automatic redistribution of UI components. The research questions that we set out to respond are presented along with the contributions that have been produced. Those contributions include a framework for crossdevice applications, an indoor positioning solution for pervasive indoor environments, prototypes, end-user studies and developer focused evaluation. To contextualize our research, we studied previous research work about cross-device applications, proxemic interactions and indoor positioning systems. We presented four application prototypes. The first three were used to perform studies to evaluate the user experience. The last one was used to study the developer experience provided by the framework. The results were largely positive with users showing preference towards using multiple devices under some circumstances. Developers were also able to grasp the concepts provided by the framework relatively well.Vivemos rodeados de dispositivos computacionais. No entanto, ainda não tiramos partido da sua presença para criar ambientes de computação ubíqua mais ricos. Existe uma oportunidade de combiná-los para criar uma experiência de utilizador unificada. Para realizar esta visão, estudámos e explorámos a utilização de uma framework que forneça ferramentas e abstrações que permitam o desenvolvimento de aplicações que distribuem os componentes da interface do utilizador por dispositivos co-localizados. A framework é composta por: serviços de autenticação e autorização; broker que sincroniza informação entre várias instâncias da aplicação; serviços que reúnem as capacidades dos dispositivos; e uma biblioteca para integrar aplicações web com o broker, determinar as componentes a mostrar com base nos requisitos da interface e nas capacidades dos dispositivos, e que disponibiliza elementos para gerir a distribuição dos componentes da interface e dos estados de aplicação. A colaboração entre utilizadores é suportada através da partilha dos estados de aplicação. Foi necessário desenvolver um sistema de posicionamento em interiores para determinar quando é que os dispositivos estão perto uns dos outros para despoletar a redistribuição automática dos componentes da interface. As questões de investigação inicialmente colocadas são apresentadas juntamente com as contribuições que foram produzidas. Essas contribuições incluem uma framework para aplicações multi-dispositivo, uma solução de posicionamento em interiores para computação ubíqua, protótipos, estudos com utilizadores finais e avaliação com programadores. Para contextualizar a nossa investigação, estudámos trabalhos anteriores sobre aplicações multi-dispositivo, interação proxémica e sistemas de posicionamento em interiores. Apresentámos quatro aplicações protótipo. As primeiras três foram utilizadas para avaliar a experiência de utilização. A última foi utilizada para estudar a experiência de desenvolvimento com a framework. Os resultados foram geralmente positivos, com os utilizadores a preferirem utilizar múltiplos dispositivos em certas circunstâncias. Os programadores também foram capazes de compreender a framework relativamente bem

Fostering computational thinking skills with tangible user interfaces

This thesis was submitted for the award of Doctor of Philosophy and was awarded by Brunel University LondonGiven how technology surrounds our whole life, learning to code is becoming more and more crucial for the general public: think for example of the amount of software involved in managing a flight, or when you just turn on the engine of your car. People want to play an increasingly active role in their life and there is already evidence in an overall heightened interest in coding from the many successful public initiatives aiming at introducing coding skills to a wide audience. Nonetheless, coding skills are not just about programming but require an ability of problem-solving, abstraction, pattern recognition to name but a few; in a word, the so-called Computational Thinking (CT) skills, namely a set of thinking skills, habits, and approaches that are integral to solving complex problems using a computer and widely applicable in today’s information society. Due to this sudden global interest in promoting CT skills to many broad and diverse audiences, several tools and methods have been designed with the aim of supporting the introduction of programming concepts in more effective and less daunting ways than the past. A popular theory of learning that can come to the aid on this matter is Piaget’s constructivism, which argues that people produce knowledge and form new meanings based upon their experiences in the real world and social interactions. Thus, exploiting human’s natural ability for objects manipulation in the physical world and its afforded interactions could be an effective way of supporting users in learning abstract concepts such as the ones underpinning CT. Tangible User Interfaces are an interaction paradigm that was devised to foster collaborative learning and exploit humans’ natural dexterity for physical objects manipulation to provide an easy to use interface that can be used even by inexperienced people. They exploit the physical world to offer a concrete representation of the abstract concepts learners usually struggle with and thus employing them to teach those concepts underpinning CT might represent an effective and engaging way of supporting the learning of such skills. This thesis investigates this claim through the development of a software platform combining its digital and physical features to promote CT skills in different domains. The platform design is informed by a review of related work, a workshop with domain experts, and was validated through a series of studies in different application scenarios which reported promising results in terms of CT support