272,092 research outputs found
Are e-readers suitable tools for scholarly work?
This paper aims to offer insights into the usability, acceptance and
limitations of e-readers with regard to the specific requirements of scholarly
text work. To fit into the academic workflow non-linear reading, bookmarking,
commenting, extracting text or the integration of non-textual elements must be
supported. A group of social science students were questioned about their
experiences with electronic publications for study purposes. This same group
executed several text-related tasks with the digitized material presented to
them in two different file formats on four different e-readers. Their
performances were subsequently evaluated by means of frequency analyses in
detail. Findings - e-Publications have made advances in the academic world;
however e-readers do not yet fit seamlessly into the established chain of
scholarly text-processing focusing on how readers use material during and after
reading. Our tests revealed major deficiencies in these techniques. With a
small number of participants (n=26) qualitative insights can be obtained, not
representative results. Further testing with participants from various
disciplines and of varying academic status is required to arrive at more
broadly applicable results. Practical implications - Our test results help to
optimize file conversion routines for scholarly texts. We evaluated our data on
the basis of descriptive statistics and abstained from any statistical
significance test. The usability test of e-readers in a scientific context
aligns with both studies on the prevalence of e-books in the sciences and
technical test reports of portable reading devices. Still, it takes a
distinctive angle in focusing on the characteristics and procedures of textual
work in the social sciences and measures the usability of e-readers and
file-features against these standards.Comment: 22 pages, 6 figures, accepted for publication in Online Information
Revie
Smart Signs: Showing the way in Smart Surroundings
This paper presents a context-aware guidance and messaging
system for large buildings and surrounding venues. Smart Signs are
a new type of electronic door- and way-sign based on wireless sensor networks.
Smart Signs present in-situ personalized guidance and messages,
are ubiquitous, and easy to understand. They combine the easiness of
use of traditional static signs with the flexibility and reactiveness of navigation
systems. The Smart Signs system uses context information such
as userâs mobility limitations, the weather, and possible emergency situations
to improve guidance and messaging.
Minimal infrastructure requirements and a simple deployment tool make
it feasible to easily deploy a Smart Signs system on demand.
An important design issue of the Smart Signs system is privacy: the
system secures communication links, does not track users, allow almost
complete anonymous use, and prevent the system to be used as a tool
for spying on users
Establishing the design knowledge for emerging interaction platforms
While awaiting a variety of innovative interactive products and services to appear in the market in the near future such as interactive tabletops, interactive TVs, public multi-touch walls, and other embedded appliances, this paper calls for preparation for the arrival of such interactive platforms based on their interactivity. We advocate studying, understanding and establishing the foundation for interaction characteristics and affordances and design implications for these platforms which we know will soon emerge and penetrate our everyday lives. We review some of the archetypal interaction platform categories of the future and highlight the current status of the design knowledge-base accumulated to date and the current rate of growth for each of these. We use example designs illustrating design issues and considerations based on the authorsâ 12-year experience in pioneering novel applications in various forms and styles
Messy Tabletops: Clearing Up The Occlusion Problem
When introducing interactive tabletops into the home and office, lack of space will often mean that these devices play two roles: interactive display and a place for putting things. Clutter on the table surface may occlude information on the display, preventing the user from noticing it or interacting with it. We present a technique for dealing with clutter on tabletops which finds a suitable unoccluded area of the display in which to show content. We discuss the implementation of this technique and some design issues which arose during implementation
Tactons: structured tactile messages for non-visual information display
Tactile displays are now becoming available in a form that can be easily used in a user interface. This paper describes a new form of tactile output. Tactons, or tactile icons, are structured, abstract messages that can be used to communicate messages non-visually. A range of different parameters can be used for Tacton construction including: frequency, amplitude and duration of a tactile pulse, plus other parameters such as rhythm and location. Tactons have the potential to improve interaction in a range of different areas, particularly where the visual display is overloaded, limited in size or not available, such as interfaces for blind people or in mobile and wearable devices. This paper describes Tactons, the parameters used to construct them and some possible ways to design them. Examples of where Tactons might prove useful in user interfaces are given
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Information visualization for mobile devices: A novel approach based on the MagicEyeView
Visualization on mobile devices not only means
accommodating to a small screen space, but also
widely different aspect ratios. Improving on the
MagicEyeView algorithm, this paper presents a
visualization technique that is better suited to screens with skewed aspects ratios. The presented approach is a focus+context visualization effort which employs distortion of coordinate scales and a "fisheye" technique. The visualization algorithm is evaluated in the problem domain of business management and the presentation of "Key Performance Indicators"
Scalable Interactive Volume Rendering Using Off-the-shelf Components
This paper describes an application of a second generation implementation of the Sepia architecture (Sepia-2) to interactive volu-metric visualization of large rectilinear scalar fields. By employingpipelined associative blending operators in a sort-last configuration a demonstration system with 8 rendering computers sustains 24 to 28 frames per second while interactively rendering large data volumes (1024x256x256 voxels, and 512x512x512 voxels). We believe interactive performance at these frame rates and data sizes is unprecedented. We also believe these results can be extended to other types of structured and unstructured grids and a variety of GL rendering techniques including surface rendering and shadow map-ping. We show how to extend our single-stage crossbar demonstration system to multi-stage networks in order to support much larger data sizes and higher image resolutions. This requires solving a dynamic mapping problem for a class of blending operators that includes Porter-Duff compositing operators
The Design of a System Architecture for Mobile Multimedia Computers
This chapter discusses the system architecture of a portable computer, called Mobile Digital Companion, which provides support for handling multimedia applications energy efficiently. Because battery life is limited and battery weight is an important factor for the size and the weight of the Mobile Digital Companion, energy management plays a crucial role in the architecture. As the Companion must remain usable in a variety of environments, it has to be flexible and adaptable to various operating conditions. The Mobile Digital Companion has an unconventional architecture that saves energy by using system decomposition at different levels of the architecture and exploits locality of reference with dedicated, optimised modules. The approach is based on dedicated functionality and the extensive use of energy reduction techniques at all levels of system design. The system has an architecture with a general-purpose processor accompanied by a set of heterogeneous autonomous programmable modules, each providing an energy efficient implementation of dedicated tasks. A reconfigurable internal communication network switch exploits locality of reference and eliminates wasteful data copies
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