The Video Window: My Life with a Ludic System

The Video Window is a video screen hanging next to a window on my bed-room wall, showing the image from a camera mounted to show the skyline from outside that same window. This paper describes the appeal of living with such a system, and the intermingled aesthetic, utilitarian and practical issues involved in its creation and the experience it offers

Abstract sounds and their applications in audio and perception research

International audienceRecognition of sound sources and events is an important pro- cess in sound perception and has been studied in many research domains. Conversely sounds that cannot be recognized are not often studied except by electroacoustic music composers. Besides, considerations on recogni- tion of sources might help to address the problem of stimulus selection and categorization of sounds in the context of perception research. This paper introduces what we call abstract sounds with the existing musical background and shows their relevance for different applications

Research Project as Boundary Object: negotiating the conceptual design of a tool for International Development

This paper reflects on the relationship between who one designs for and what one designs in the unstructured space of designing for political change; in particular, for supporting “International Development” with ICT. We look at an interdisciplinary research project with goals and funding, but no clearly defined beneficiary group at start, and how amorphousness contributed to impact. The reported project researched a bridging tool to connect producers with consumers across global contexts and show players in the supply chain and their circumstances. We explore how both the nature of the research and the tool’s function became contested as work progressed. To tell this tale, we invoke the idea of boundary objects and the value of tacking back and forth between elastic meanings of the project’s artefacts and processes. We examine the project’s role in India, Chile and other arenas to draw out ways that it functioned as a catalyst and how absence of committed design choices acted as an unexpected strength in reaching its goals

Reenacting sensorimotor features of drawing movements from friction sounds

International audienceEven though we generally don't pay attention to the friction sounds produced when we are writing or drawing, these sounds are recordable, and can even evoke the underlying gesture. In this paper, auditory perception of such sounds, and the internal representations they evoke when we listen to them, is considered from the sensorimotor learning point of view. The use of synthesis processes of friction sounds makes it possible to investigate the perceptual influence of each gestures parameter separately. Here, the influence of the velocity profile on the mental representation of the gesture induced by a friction sound was investigated through 3 experiments. The results reveal the perceptual relevance of this parameter, and particularly a specific morphology corresponding to biological movements, the so-called 1/3-power law. The experiments are discussed according to the sensorimotor theory and the invariant taxonomy of the ecological approach

Auditory emoticons: Iterative design and acoustic characteristics of emotional auditory icons and Earcons

In recent decades there has been an increased interest in sonification research. Two commonly used sonification techniques, auditory icons and earcons, have been the subject of a lot of study. However, despite this there has been relatively little research investigating the relationship between these sonification techniques and emotions and affect. Additionally, despite their popularity, auditory icons and earcons are often treated separately and are rarely compared directly in studies. The current paper shows iterative design procedures to create emotional auditory icons and earcons. The ultimate goal of the study is to compare auditory icons and earcons in their ability to represent emotional states. The results show that there are some strong user preferences both within sonification categories and between sonfication categories. The implications and extensions of this work are discussed

Beyond the limits of real-time realism : moving from stimulation correspondence to information correspondence

no abstract

Designing in Virtual Reality: Perception-Action Coupling and Form Semantics Short Papers (Talks): Visual Languages and Virtual Reality

In this paper, we describe work on a CAD package we are developing for use in virtual reality. Although this research is only preliminary, it demonstrates some advantages of designing in virtual reality. We describe these advantages in terms of ecological approach to perception, focusing on two of the implications of this approach: the role of perception-action coupling in producing true direct manipulation, and the desirability of providing perceptual information about the affordances of objects in the design environment

Exploring interactive systems using peripheral sounds

Our everyday interaction in and with the physical world, has facilitated the development of auditory perception skills that enable us to selectively place one auditory channel in the center of our attention and simultaneously monitor others in the periphery. We search for ways to leverage these auditory perception skills in interactive systems. In this paper, we present three working demonstrators that use sound to subtly convey information to users in an open office. To qualitatively evaluate these demonstrators, each of them has been implemented in an office for three weeks. We have seen that such a period of time, sounds can start shifting from the center to the periphery of the attention. Furthermore, we found several issues to be addressed when designing such systems, which can inform future work in this area. © 2010 Springer-Verlag