Content and Context-Aware Interfaces for Smarter Media Control

Since the arrival of the computer at home during the '80s, the importance of the digital world in our daily lives has hugely increased. First centralized on a unique computer, the digital world spread over several devices that surround us: smartphones, tablets, cameras, music players, etc. However, despite the increasing number of devices around our digital lives, the way we interact with them has barely evolved. Digital devices are not aware of their surrounding environment, and they often use interfaces and mechanisms which are computer-oriented. The next step in the evolution of our digital life will be centered on a better integration of the digital world with the ecosystem of devices that surrounds it. In this work, we illustrate this upcoming evolution through the development and evaluation of original interfaces dedicated to the control of digital media. Based on our research, we organize these interfaces in three areas of improvement: unification, automation and familiarity. This thesis is divided in four main chapters. The first chapter presents the evolution of our digital world over the last 30 years. The next three chapters are centered on the three areas of improvement that we defined: unification, automation and familiarity. Unification corresponds to the fusion of digital worlds as a unique and coherent whole that devices should interact with. Automation consists in using information obtained from the user and her environment in order to simplify or automate the interaction with the digital world. Finally, familiarity allows benefiting of users' past experiences in order to create friendly and intuitive interfaces

Thanks to geolocalized remote control : the sound will follow

Dematerialized music and MP3 players offer to the user the possibility of carrying his musical content everywhere. However, at home, the music collection is generally not centralized, split between different rooms and audio supports (CDs, MP3s, etc). In this paper, we propose a multi-room sound system based on several sound satellites distributed among the rooms of the house, and on a remote control which is able to localize itself with the help of available Wi-Fi networks. The user only has to choose his favorite music on the remote control, and then the music will automatically start on the nearest satellites. Our goal is to offer an Ambient Intelligence audio system, inspired by the latest multi-room sound systems, which takes advantage of an indoor localization system based on Wi-Fi in order to propose a new experience to the user

Design and Implementation of a wearable, context-aware MR framework for the Chloe@University application

In this paper, we present the technical details and the challenges we faced during the development and evaluation phases of our wearable indoor guiding system which consists of a virtual personal assistant guiding the user to his/her desired destination. The main issues that will be discussed can be classified in three categories: context detection, real-time 3D rendering and user interaction

Chloe@University: An indoor, HMD-based mobile mixed reality guide

This paper describes an indoors, mobile mixed reality guide system: Chloe@University. With a see-through head-mounted display (HMD) connected to a hidden small computing device, Chloe@University provides users with an efficient way of guiding in a building. Augmented 3D virtual character in front of a user guides him/her to destination so that he/she can just follow the virtual guide after the user gives a voice command with desired destination to it. The most suitable virtual character is selected depending on a user’s preference for personalized service. For adapting to different indoor environments, the proposed system integrates various localization approaches. In addition, it supports different access right to a building map based on user profiles and security level

Tangible drag-and-drop: Transferring digital content with a remote control

Despite the fact that dematerialization of all our multimedia content brings advantages, the absence of physical medium brings also a lack of tangibility. This paper presents a gesture-based interface to bring back tangibility in our dematerialized multimedia content. Our concept is to apply the drag-and-drop paradigm in the real world, using a remote control as a portal between virtual content and physical devices. In order to validate our concept, we designed a prototype focused on the transfer of digital pictures between two different devices: from a TV screen to a digital photo frame. User experiment has proven that our concept brings efficiency, easiness and a natural way to interact with digital multimedia content

Natural Activation for Gesture Recognition Systems

Gesture recognition is becoming a popular way of interaction, but still suffers of important drawbacks to be integrated in everyday life devices. One of these drawbacks is the activation of the recognition system – trigger gesture - which is generally tiring and unnatural. In this paper, we propose two natural solutions to easily activate the gesture interaction. The first one requires a single action from the user: grasping a remote control to start interacting. The second one is completely transparent for the user: the gesture system is only activated when the user’s gaze points to the screen, i.e. when s/he is looking at it. Our first evaluation with the 2 proposed solutions plus a default implementation suggests that the gaze estimation activation is efficient enough to remove the need of a trigger gesture in order to activate the recognition system