Extending the ICT Technological Culturation Model: The Role of Accessibility and Perceived Socio-Economic Prospects on ICT Diffusion

This study extends the Technological culturation (TC) model proposed by Straub et al. by examining the influences of two additional constructs - accessibility of technology (AT) and perceived socio-economic prospects (PSEP) - on the usage (U) of information and communications technologies (ICTs). Research question was: In addition to technological culturation, do “accessibility of ICTs” and “individuals’ perceptions of the socio-economic prospects” influence the usage of ICTs? The instrument measured the extent to which respondents are influenced by advanced technology cultures, accessibility to ICTs, and their perceptions of the long-term socio-economic outlook of their country. It also allowed them to rank their usage of ICTs. Using partial least squares (PLS), the research model tested the impacts of AT on TC and, and TC, AT, PSEP on ICT usage. Findings show strong supports for all tested links. Inferences from these findings and their implications on research and practice are also provided

SimSense - Gestural Interaction Design for Information Exchange between Large Public Displays and Personal Mobile Devices

Large displays in public and semi-public spaces continuously permeate our everyday lives as the price of display hardware continues to drop. These displays act as sources of information, entertainment and advertisement in public environments such as airports, hotels, universities, retail stores, hospitals, and stadiums, amongst others. The information shown on these displays often varies in form that ranges from simple text to rich interactive content. However, most of this rich information remains in the displays and methods to effectively retrieve them to ones’ mobile devices without the need to explicitly manipulate them remains unexplored. Sensing technologies were used to implement a use case, wherein a person can simply walk up to a public display, retrieve interesting content onto their personal device without having the need to take it out of their pockets or bags. For this purpose a novel system called SimSense, which is capable of automatically detecting and establishing a connection with mobile phones that come in close proximity with the public display was developed. This thesis presents two alternative mid-air hand gesture interaction techniques: ‘Grab & Pull’ and ‘Grab & Drop’ to retrieve content from the public display without explicitly operating the mobile device. The results of a laboratory experiment conducted to evaluate these interaction techniques and gather preliminary impressions on the overall concept, are also presented. The results indicate that participants found ‘Grab & Pull’ to be slightly easier, more confident, and requires less effort to perform in comparison with ‘Grab & Drop’. Participants found the overall concept to be seamless and a useful way to retrieve interesting content