Designing a Situational Awareness Information Display: Adopting an Affordance-Based Framework to Amplify User Experience in Environmental Interaction Design

User experience remains a crucial consideration when assessing the successfulness of information visualization systems. The theory of affordances provides a robust framework for user experience design. In this article, we demonstrate a design case that employs an affordance-based framework and evaluate the information visualization display design. SolarWheels is an interactive information visualization designed for large display walls in computer network control rooms to help cybersecurity analysts become aware of network status and emerging issues. Given the critical nature of this context, the status and performance of a computer network must be precisely monitored and remedied in real time. In this study, we consider various aspects of affordances in order to amplify the user experience via visualization and interaction design. SolarWheels visualizes the multilayer multidimensional computer network issues with a series of integrated circular visualizations inspired by the metaphor of the solar system. To amplify user interaction and experience, the system provides a three-zone physical interaction that allows multiple users to interact with the system. Users can read details at different levels depending on their distance from the display. An expert evaluation study, based on a four-layer affordance framework, was conducted to assess and improve the interactive visualization design

The WADER Environment: Facilitating Systematic Design of Touchless Interactions with Wall-sized Displays

poster abstractMeeting rooms, design studios, and laboratories in the industry as well as academia are increasingly adopting ultra-large, Wall-Size Displays (WSD). Such adoption is expected only to increase due to the dropping cost of large display technology and the growing need to visualize large volumes of data. To facilitate interaction and collaboration around WSDs, next-generation interaction modalities like touchless have opened up new, unprecedented opportunities. Yet to explore this uncharted design space, there is a lack of controlled, experimental environments that can support rapid and flexible design iterations and user-evaluations of touchless interaction techniques. To address this problem, we propose the Wall Display Experience Research (WADER) environment, a reliable, reusable and easily modifiable experimental environment that supports user studies on touchless interaction prototypes. The current deployment of WADER leverages off-the-shelf markerless sensors, Kinect™ and the 160” X 60”, ultra-high resolution, wall-sized display (15.3 million pixels) available at UITS in IUPUI. By varying design parameters, WADER enables batteries of experiments to be carried out very quickly and efficiently. It evaluates user experience by recording performance metrics. In a time span of one month, we have successfully conducted an 18-participant empirical study to investigate alternate visual feedback designs for touchless selection and movement tasks. During this study, we iteratively designed and incrementally developed prototypes for different design alternatives and conducted eight empirical experiments. In a more-recent RSFG-funded project, HCI researchers are leveraging WADER to explore and evaluate novel interaction techniques to enhance collaboration on WSDs in a context, where users are sitting comfortably at a distance from the display. The establishment of WADER environemnt is a significant step towards fast pacing the iterative design of touchless user interactions for the next-generation of wall-display interfaces

Advanced Visualization and Interaction Techniques for Large High-Resolution Displays

Large high-resolution displays combine the images of multiple smaller display devices to form one large display area. A total resolution that can easily comprise several hundred megapixels makes them suited for the visualization of data sets that could not be perceived entirely on desktop PCs or laptops due to their size. At the same time, user collaboration benefits from an extended screen area that facilitates interaction with screen contents as well as interaction among users. This paper discusses the challenges and opportunities of large high-resolution displays and examines ways to set up display clusters both in terms of hardware and underlying software technology. Furthermore, it investigates how to effectively harness the computational power and resources of rendering clusters to visualize giga-scale data sets. Last but not least, traditional interaction metaphors and their scalability to large displays as well as the effect of new techniques on the user experience are discussed

Molecular Dynamics Visualization (MDV): Stereoscopic 3D Display of Biomolecular Structure and Interactions Using the Unity Game Engine

Molecular graphics systems are visualization tools which, upon integration into a 3D immersive environment, provide a unique virtual reality experience for research and teaching of biomolecular structure, function and interactions. We have developed a molecular structure and dynamics application, the Molecular Dynamics Visualization tool, that uses the Unity game engine combined with large scale, multi-user, stereoscopic visualization systems to deliver an immersive display experience, particularly with a large cylindrical projection display. The application is structured to separate the biomolecular modeling and visualization systems. The biomolecular model loading and analysis system was developed as a stand-alone C# library and provides the foundation for the custom visualization system built in Unity. All visual models displayed within the tool are generated using Unity-based procedural mesh building routines. A 3D user interface was built to allow seamless dynamic interaction with the model while being viewed in 3D space. Biomolecular structure analysis and display capabilities are exemplified with a range of complex systems involving cell membranes, protein folding and lipid droplets

Design of Web-Based Cashier and Spare Part Warehouse Application Display (Case Study at Surya Motor Shop)

A cashier and spare parts warehouse application is an information system facilitating financial reporting and items inventory systems. This has become a necessity in almost all fields of large and small-scale businesses in every country. The information system that belongs to Surya Motor Shop does not have a display that can facilitate users in operating the company's financial and transaction systems in accordance with company needs. This information system uses Bootstrap with HTML, CSS, and Javascript programming languages. In this paper, an interactive display was developed, so as to be able to accommodate web users' responses, by developing a prototype using Bootstrap at the Surya Motor Shop. This was carried out to digitize the transaction system, making it easier to report the items inventory and financial reporting of the company. The prototype development was developed using the The Elements of User Experience method, a user-centered design process. After developing the prototype, a test was carried out to determine the quality of the user experience. The test employed the User Experience Questionnaire (UEQ) method. UEQ testing shown that the prototype interface developed had a positive level of user experience. Compared with the benchmarks set by UEQ, the test results were above the mean benchmark, except for the pull factor which was still below the benchmark average

WormBase: a multi-species resource for nematode biology and genomics

WormBase (http://www.wormbase.org/) is the central data repository for information about Caenorhabditis elegans and related nematodes. As a model organism database, WormBase extends beyond the genomic sequence, integrating experimental results with extensively annotated views of the genome. The WormBase Consortium continues to expand the biological scope and utility of WormBase with the inclusion of large-scale genomic analyses, through active data and literature curation, through new analysis and visualization tools, and through refinement of the user interface. Over the past year, the nearly complete genomic sequence and comparative analyses of the closely related species Caenorhabditis briggsae have been integrated into WormBase, including gene predictions, ortholog assignments and a new synteny viewer to display the relationships between the two species. Extensive site-wide refinement of the user interface now provides quick access to the most frequently accessed resources and a consistent browsing experience across the site. Unified single-page views now provide complete summaries of commonly accessed entries like genes. These advances continue to increase the utility of WormBase for C.elegans researchers, as well as for those researchers exploring problems in functional and comparative genomics in the context of a powerful genetic system

Predicting Audio Advertisement Quality

Online audio advertising is a particular form of advertising used abundantly in online music streaming services. In these platforms, which tend to host tens of thousands of unique audio advertisements (ads), providing high quality ads ensures a better user experience and results in longer user engagement. Therefore, the automatic assessment of these ads is an important step toward audio ads ranking and better audio ads creation. In this paper we propose one way to measure the quality of the audio ads using a proxy metric called Long Click Rate (LCR), which is defined by the amount of time a user engages with the follow-up display ad (that is shown while the audio ad is playing) divided by the impressions. We later focus on predicting the audio ad quality using only acoustic features such as harmony, rhythm, and timbre of the audio, extracted from the raw waveform. We discuss how the characteristics of the sound can be connected to concepts such as the clarity of the audio ad message, its trustworthiness, etc. Finally, we propose a new deep learning model for audio ad quality prediction, which outperforms the other discussed models trained on hand-crafted features. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first large-scale audio ad quality prediction study.Comment: WSDM '18 Proceedings of the Eleventh ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining, 9 page

Tethered Smart Glasses

A device and system are disclosed for providing a better AR user experience with a phone, using tethered smart glasses. The system includes a display on a glasses form-factor device with a high resolution camera, a USB cable connecting the device with a phone via USB port. The device uses drivers with pluggable components running on the phone and utilizes the phone’s battery. The device can be used in different applications like gaming, video chat, live streaming, notifications, advertisement, etc. The advantages of the device are that it accesses the large battery and the CPU and graphics processing powers of the phone that are multiple times higher than typical VR glasses. Also the smart glasses used are lighter, providing a better user experience