Target Acquisition in Multiscale Electronic Worlds

Since the advent of graphical user interfaces, electronic information has grown exponentially, whereas the size of screen displays has stayed almost the same. Multiscale interfaces were designed to address this mismatch, allowing users to adjust the scale at which they interact with information objects. Although the technology has progressed quickly, the theory has lagged behind. Multiscale interfaces pose a stimulating theoretical challenge, reformulating the classic target-acquisition problem from the physical world into an infinitely rescalable electronic world. We address this challenge by extending Fitts’ original pointing paradigm: we introduce the scale variable, thus defining a multiscale pointing paradigm. This article reports on our theoretical and empirical results. We show that target-acquisition performance in a zooming interface must obey Fitts’ law, and more specifically, that target-acquisition time must be proportional to the index of difficulty. Moreover, we complement Fitts’ law by accounting for the effect of view size on pointing performance, showing that performance bandwidth is proportional to view size, up to a ceiling effect. The first empirical study shows that Fitts’ law does apply to a zoomable interface for indices of difficulty up to and beyond 30 bits, whereas classical Fitts’ law studies have been confined in the 2-10 bit range. The second study demonstrates a strong interaction between view size and task difficulty for multiscale pointing, and shows a surprisingly low ceiling. We conclude with implications of these findings for the design of multiscale user interfaces

Instrumental Interaction in Multisurface Environments

Position paper for the TEI 2015 workshop on Interactive InfrastructuresFor the past few years, we have been working on developing infrastructure and applications for interactive rooms that include large, wall-sized displays, tabletops, laptops, tablets and other interaction devices, such motion tracking devices. Our goal is to create the next generation of interactive systems that will support collaborative, distributed interaction over a range of devices and environments. We have worked extensively with " extreme " users who need such environments to deal with large and complex datasets, using participatory design to understand their need and prototype solutions. Our WILD 1 room [5] features a 130-million pixel wall-sized display made of 32 30 " monitors and powered by a 16-computer cluster, a 10-camera VICON motion tracking system, an FTIR tabletop and a variety of devices such as tablets, smartphones and wireless pointing devices. WILD is part of a network of 10 interactive rooms developed by the Digiscope project. All rooms feature large display surfaces and rich interaction devices. Two are immersive CAVEs; the others feature power walls with varying resolutions and sizes. Some have 3D capability; others are touch-enabled. The 10 rooms are interconnected with a telepresence system designed to support rich remote collaboration. This unique infrastructure provides us with a rich testbed for experimenting with interaction techniques and interaction models for distributed interfaces. It also raises challenging technical issues for environments where devices interoperate smoothly and where configurations can be easily defined, stored and recalled

L'usage du son dans les systèmes interactifs

Cet article a pour objet de montrer les usages possibles du son dans les systèmes interactifs et les moyens de sa mise en œuvre. La première partie est une analyse de l'existant. La seconde partie propose un modèle de son structuré et son implémentation dans un serveur audio, permettant d'offrir aux développeurs d'interfaces des services comparables à ceux offerts par les boîtes à outils graphiques aujourd'hui largement utilisées pour la construction d'interfaces graphiques

Cracking the Cocoa Nut: User Interface Programming at Runtime

International audienceThis article introduces runtime toolkit overloading, a novel approach to help third-party developers modify the interaction and behavior of existing software applications without access to their underlying source code. We describe the abstractions provided by this approach as well as the mechanisms for implementing them in existing environments. We describe Scotty, a prototype implementation for Mac OS X Cocoa that enables developers to modify existing applications at runtime, and we demonstrate a collection of interaction and functional transformations on existing off-the-shelf applications. We show how Scotty helps a developer make sense of unfamiliar software, even without access to its source code. We further discuss what features of future environments would facilitate this kind of runtime software development

La conception de techniques d interaction expressives adaptées aux novices et inspirées par des activités expertes (le cas de la pratique musicale)

Les systèmes interactifs étant utilisés pour réaliser des tâches toujours plus complexes et variées, les utilisateurs ont besoin de systèmes qui soient à la fois expressifs, efficaces et utilisables. Si des systèmes simples peuvent être instantanément utilisables, l expressivité accessible avec des systèmes complexes est souvent considérée comme réservée aux experts. Cependant, notre approche, inspirée par la recherche en phénoménologie et en psychologie, souligne que certaines activités expertes ayant une portée sociale, comme les activités artistiques, permettent aussi aux non-experts d acquérir des compétences et une connaissance considérables de façon implicite. Dans ce manuscrit, nous évoquerons notamment la connaissance et les compétences avancées développées par les non-musiciens lors de l écoute de la musique et de l observation du jeu instrumental. Nous défendons deux idées. Premièrement, les concepteurs de systèmes interactifs peuvent profiter de ces compétences et de cette connaissance implicites pour créer des systèmes expressifs qui soient utilisables. Deuxièmement, les méthodes d'apprentissage expertes et les outils experts, qui ont été perfectionnés à travers le temps et ont fait leurs preuves dans des situations complexes, peuvent servir de sources d'inspiration pour améliorer l utilisabilité des systèmes complexes pour les utilisateurs novices. Nous proposons un cadre de conception pour étudier l'utilisabilité et l'expressivité des techniques d'interaction, comme deux nouvelles mesures de la qualité de l'interaction, et présentons les trois projets de cette thèse. Dans le premier, nous étudions l'utilisation de motifs rythmiques pour l'interaction, et nous montrons que des utilisateurs novices sont capables de reproduire et de mémoriser efficacement de grands vocabulaires de motifs rythmiques. Une telle interaction tire parti des capacités naturelles des non-musiciens pour percevoir et reproduire des structures rythmiques. Nous définissons des règles pour créer des motifs rythmiques adaptés à l interaction, et montrons qu ils peuvent être utilisés efficacement pour déclencher des commandes. Dans le deuxième projet, nous étudions la conception et l apprentissage de postures multi-doigt sur des écrans multi-tactiles. Nous prenons en compte les contraintes mécaniques et les degrés de liberté de la main pour créer des vocabulaires expressifs de postures multi-doigt, dont nous évaluons l utilisabilité lors d une expérimentation. Nous présentons une méthode d apprentissage adaptée aux postures les plus complexes, inspirée par l apprentissage des accords en musique, et nous montrons qu elle peut améliorer la compréhension et la mémorisation. Dans le dernier projet, nous nous intéressons aux applications de création musicale en temps réel, et tentons de les faire profiter des qualités instrumentales des instruments acoustiques. Nous voulons créer des applications qui permettent un jeu virtuose et expressif, et dont les fonctionnalités élémentaires sont accessibles aux novices (comme on peut jouer quelques accords au piano sans apprentissage). Nous proposons un cadre de conception et une architecture logicielle qui aident à considérer la conception d applications musicales comme une lutherie à part entière. Avec ces projets, nous montrons que, dans ces cas : (i) la connaissance et les compétences implicites des non-experts peuvent être réutilisées en interaction ; (ii) les méthodes d apprentissage expertes peuvent permettre de rendre les systèmes expressifs plus utilisables ; (iii) s inspirer des outils experts peut aider à concevoir des systèmes interactifs expressifs et utilisables. Nous proposons l étude de l utilisabilité comme une alternative à l immédiateté prônée par les entreprises d informatique, et nous présentons des méthodes pour tirer parti de la richesse des activités expertes et de la connaissance implicite des non-experts pour créer des systèmes interactifs expressifs et utilisables par les novices.As interactive systems are now used to perform a variety of complex tasks, users need systems that are at the same time expressive, efficient and usable. Although simple interactive systems can be easily usable, interaction designers often consider that only expert practitioners can benefit from the expressiveness of more complex systems. Our approach, inspired by studies in phenomenology and psychology, underscores that non-experts have sizeable knowledge and advanced skills related to various expert activities having a social dimension such as artistic activities , which they gain implicitly through their engagement as perceivers. For example, we identify various music-related skills mastered by non-musicians, which they gain when listening to music or attending performances. We have two main arguments. First, interaction designers can reuse such implicit knowledge and skills to design interaction techniques that are both expressive and usable by novice users. Second, as expert artifacts and expert learning methods have evolved over time and have shown efficient to overcome the complexity of expert activities, they can be used as a source of inspiration to make expressive systems more easily usable by novice users. We provide a design framework for studying the usability and expressiveness of interaction techniques as two new aspects of the user experience, and explore this framework with three projects. In the first project we study the use of rhythmic patterns as an input method, and show that novice users are able to reproduce and memorize large vocabularies of patterns. This is made possible by the natural abilities of non-musicians to perceive, reproduce and make sense of rhythmic structures. We define a method to create expressive vocabularies of patterns, and show that novice users are able to efficiently use them as command triggers. In the second project, we study the design and learning of chording gestures on multitouch screens. We introduce design guidelines to create expressive chord vocabularies taking the mechanical constraints and the degrees of freedom of the human hand into account. We evaluate the usability of such gestures in an experiment and we present an adapted learning method inspired by the teaching of chords in music. We show that novice users are able to reproduce and memorize our vocabularies of chording gestures, while our learning method can improve long-term memorization. The final project focuses on music software used for live performances and proposes a framework for designing instrumental software allowing expert musical playing and having its elementary functionalities accessible to novices, as it is the case with acoustic instruments (for example, one can easily play a few chords on a piano without practice). We define a design framework inspired by a functional decomposition of acoustic instruments and present an adapted software architecture, both aiming to ease the design of such software and to make it match with instrument-making. These projects show that, in these cases: (i) the implicit knowledge novices have about some expert activities can be reused for interaction; (ii) expert learning methods can inspire ways to make expressive systems more usable novices; (iii) taking expert artifacts as a source of inspiration can help creating usable and expressive interactive systems. In this dissertation, we propose the study of usability as an alternative to the focus on immediacy that characterizes current commercial interactive systems. We also propose methods to benefit from the richness of expert activities and from the implicit knowledge of non-experts to design interactive systems that are at the same time expressive and usable by novice users.PARIS11-SCD-Bib. électronique (914719901) / SudocSudocFranceF

HCITools:strategies and best practices for designing, evaluating and sharing technical HCI toolkits

Over the years, toolkits have been designed to facilitate the rapid prototyping of novel designs for graphical user interfaces, physical computing, fabrication, tangible interfaces and ubiquitous computing. However, although evaluation methods for HCI are widely available, particular techniques and approaches to evaluate technical toolkit research are less well developed. Moreover, it is unclear what kind of contribution and impact technical toolkits can bring to the larger HCI community. In this workshop we aim to bring together leading researchers in the field to discuss challenges and opportunities to develop new methods and approaches to design, evaluate, disseminate and share toolkits. Furthermore, we will discuss the technical, methodological and enabling role of toolkits for HCI research

New Mexico Lobo, Volume 046, No 32, 3/10/1944

New Mexico Lobo, Volume 046, No 32, 3/10/1944https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/daily_lobo_1944/1006/thumbnail.jp

An anatomy of interaction: co-occurrences and entanglements

International audienceWe present a new taxonomy for describing the conditions and implementation of interactions. Current mechanisms for embedding interaction in software promote a hard separation between the programmers who produce the software, and the communities who go on to use it. In order to support open ecologies of function and fabrication, where this separation is negotiated by communities of users and designers, we need to reconceive those mechanisms. We describe interaction in two phases: Co-occurrence, the prerequisite conditions for an interaction to take place; and entanglement, the temporary coupling and interplay between elements participating in the interaction. We then sketch a blueprint of a system where those phases and their adjacent mechanisms enable communities of users to build and use interactive software. There are many ways of conceiving this new design space, and we present three dominant metaphors which we have employed so far, based on chemical reactions , quantum physics and cooking. We exhibit different systems which we have implemented based on these metaphors, and sketch how future systems will further empower citizens to design and inhabit their own interactions, express ownership over them and share them with communities of interest

Context matters: Evaluating Interaction Techniques with the CIS Model

International audienceThis article introduces the Complexity of Interaction Sequences model (CIS). CIS describes the structure of interaction techniques and the SimCIS simulator uses these descriptions to predict their performance in the context of an interaction sequence. The model defines the complexity of an interaction technique as a measure of its effectiveness within a given context. We tested CIS to compare three interaction techniques: fixed unimanual palettes, fixed bimanual palettes and toolglasses. The model predicts that the complexity of both palettes depends on interaction sequences, while toolglasses are less context-dependent. CIS also predicts that fixed bimanual palettes outperform the other two techniques. Predictions were tested empirically with a controlled experiment and confirmed the hypotheses. We argue that, in order to be generalizable, experimental comparisons of interaction techniques should include the concept of context sensitivity. CIS is a step in this direction as it helps predict the performance of interaction techniques according to the context of use