Designing Media for Visually-Impaired Users of Refreshable Touch Displays: Possibilities and Pitfalls

This paper discusses issues of importance to designers of media for visually impaired users. The paper considers the influence of human factors on effectiveness of presentation as well as the strengths and weaknesses of tactile, vibrotactile, static pins, haptic, force feedback, and multimodal methods of rendering maps, graphs and models. The authors, all of whom are visually-impaired researchers in this domain, present findings from their own work and work of many others who have contributed to the current understanding of how to prepare and render images for both hard-copy and technology-mediated presentation of Braille and tangible graphics.©2015 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other users, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted components of this work in other works

Recognition of Audified Data in Untrained Listeners

Presented at the 18th International Conference on Auditory Display (ICAD2012) on June 18-21, 2012 in Atlanta, Georgia.Reprinted by permission of the International Community for Auditory Display, http://www.icad.org.The effective navigation and analysis of large data sets is a persistent challenge within the scientific community. The objective of this experiment was to determine whether participants who received no training were able to identify audified data sets at a rate above chance in a forced-choice listening task. Nineteen participants with various levels of musical and scientific expertise were asked to place audio examples into one of the five following categories: Digitally Generated Sound - White Noise, Solar Wind Data, Neuron Firing Data from a Human Brain, Seismic Data (Earthquake Activity), and Digitally Generated Sound - Sinusoidal Waveform. At no time were participants made aware of the accuracy of their responses during the experiment. Participants who had never been exposed to audified data sets were able to recognize audification examples at a rate that was 23 percentage points above chance performance; however, the sample size of individuals with no previous exposure to audified data was not large enough to determine statistical significance. When controlling for previous exposure to any of the provided listening examples, all participants performed well above the statistical likelihood of chance responses in the recognition of digitally generated white noise and sinusoidal waveforms. This indicates that participants with no previous exposure to audified data were able to discriminate between audified data and digitally generated sounds.NASA Jenkins Pre-doctoral Fellowship Projec

Music and HCI

Music is an evolutionarily deep-rooted, abstract, real-time, complex, non-verbal, social activity. Consequently, interaction design in music can be a valuable source of challenges and new ideas for HCI. This workshop will reflect on the latest research in Music and HCI (Music Interaction for short), with the aim of strengthening the dialogue between the Music Interaction community and the wider HCI community. We will explore recent ideas from Music Interaction that may contribute new perspectives to general HCI practice, and conversely, recent HCI research in non-musical domains with implications for Music Interaction. We will also identify any concerns of Music Interaction that may require unique approaches. Contributors engaged in research in any area of Music Interaction or HCI who would like to contribute to a sustained widening of the dialogue between the distinctive concerns of the Music Interaction community and the wider HCI community will be welcome

Object Design Considerations for Tangible Musical Interfaces

In this paper we describe object design considerations for the reacTable* project, a novel tangible musical instrument, developed at the Audiovisual Institute at the Universiat Pompeu Fabra. The work presented in this paper is the result of a collaboration with the Palpable Machines Group at Media Lab Europe, which focussed on haptic design aspects of the reacTable* instrument. We present a simple haptic encoding scheme for the mapping of abstract sound synthesis objects onto tangible proxy objects