Design Strategies for Playful Technologies to Support Light-intensity Physical Activity in the Workplace

Moderate to vigorous intensity physical activity has an established preventative role in obesity, cardiovascular disease, and diabetes. However recent evidence suggests that sitting time affects health negatively independent of whether adults meet prescribed physical activity guidelines. Since many of us spend long hours daily sitting in front of a host of electronic screens, this is cause for concern. In this paper, we describe a set of three prototype digital games created for encouraging light-intensity physical activity during short breaks at work. The design of these kinds of games is a complex process that must consider motivation strategies, interaction methodology, usability and ludic aspects. We present design guidelines for technologies that encourage physical activity in the workplace that we derived from a user evaluation using the prototypes. Although the design guidelines can be seen as general principles, we conclude that they have to be considered differently for different workplace cultures and workspaces. Our study was conducted with users who have some experience playing casual games on their mobile devices and were able and willing to increase their physical activity.Comment: 11 pages, 5 figures. Video: http://living.media.mit.edu/projects/see-saw

MetaSpace II: Object and full-body tracking for interaction and navigation in social VR

MetaSpace II (MS2) is a social Virtual Reality (VR) system where multiple users can not only see and hear but also interact with each other, grasp and manipulate objects, walk around in space, and get tactile feedback. MS2 allows walking in physical space by tracking each user's skeleton in real-time and allows users to feel by employing passive haptics i.e., when users touch or manipulate an object in the virtual world, they simultaneously also touch or manipulate a corresponding object in the physical world. To enable these elements in VR, MS2 creates a correspondence in spatial layout and object placement by building the virtual world on top of a 3D scan of the real world. Through the association between the real and virtual world, users are able to walk freely while wearing a head-mounted device, avoid obstacles like walls and furniture, and interact with people and objects. Most current virtual reality (VR) environments are designed for a single user experience where interactions with virtual objects are mediated by hand-held input devices or hand gestures. Additionally, users are only shown a representation of their hands in VR floating in front of the camera as seen from a first person perspective. We believe, representing each user as a full-body avatar that is controlled by natural movements of the person in the real world (see Figure 1d), can greatly enhance believability and a user's sense immersion in VR.Comment: 10 pages, 9 figures. Video: http://living.media.mit.edu/projects/metaspace-ii

``Listenin'' to domestic enviroments from remote locations

Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Auditory Display (ICAD), Boston, MA, July 7-9, 2003.This paper describes ListenIn, work in progress using audio as a monitoring medium, with emphasis on domestic environments inhabited by elder parents. The primary goal of this monitoring is to provide a continuous but peripheral awareness of the monitored site and a remote location, or to a mobile user. Sound gathering and classification in the home is done in a distributed architecture server with multiple components. At transitions of activity, as measured by change in sound, a remote server receives and plays a few seconds of an ``iconic'' sound, the actual sound, or a ``garbled'' version of the actual sound, depending on confidence in the classification and whether speech is detected

Personal and Ubiquitous Computing

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/45920/1/779_2004_Article_306.pd

Phoneshell: the Telephone as Computer Terminal

This paper describes Phoneshell, a telephone based application providing remote voice access to personal desktop databases such as voice mail, email, calendar, and rolodex. Several forms of information can also be faxed on demand. Phoneshell offers its users numerous opportunities to record voice entries into its underlying databases; this new utility for stored voice as a data type, necessitates multimedia support for the traditional graphical user interfaces to these same databases. The experiences of a small Phoneshell user community are discussed, with emphasis on key features which are most important to its success. The underlying software architecture used by Phoneshell includes a toolkit for building interactive telephone-based services

Employing Voice Back Channels to Facilitate Audio Document Retrieval

Human listeners use voice back channels to indicate their comprehension of a talker’s remarks. This paper describes an attempt to build a user interface capable of employing these back channel responses for flow control purposes while presenting a variety of audio information to a listener. Acoustic evidence based on duration and prosody (rhythm and melody) of listeners ’ utterances is employed as a means of discriminating responses by discourse function without using word recognition. Such an interface has been applied to three tasks: speech synthesis of driving directions, speech synthesis of electronic mail, and retrieval of recorded voice messages. 1 Audio document access This paper describes research in progress to develop a user interface to facilitate voice retrieval of on-line information over a telephone connection. Information may be synthesized from text such as human authored electronic mail or a response to a database query, or it may be recorded, for example a telephone message or a dictated document. We need to control the rate and order of presentation of such audio information for an efficient interaction. We desire to exploit those aspects of human dialog behavior whereby the listener gives cues to the information provider indicating comprehension and ability to keep up. We are attempting to build an intuitive and robust user interface based on the duration and prosody (rhythm and melody) of the listener’s voice responses independent of any word recognition

Ubiquitous audio: Capturing spontaneous collaboration

Although talkhtg is an integral part of collaborative activity, there has been little computer support for acquiring and accessing the contents of conversations. Our approach has focused on ubiquitous audio, or the unobtrusive capture of voice interactions in everyday work environments. Because the words themselves are not available for organizing the captured interactions, structure is derived from acoustical information inherent in the stored voice and augmented by user interaction during or after capture. This paper describes applications for capturing and structuring audio from office discussions and telephone calls, and mechanisms for later retrieval of these stored interactions

Nomadic Radio: Speech and Audio Interaction for Contextual Messaging in Nomadic Environments

This article discusses the interaction techniques developed for Nomadic Radio, a wearable computing platform for managing voice and text-based messages in a nomadic environment. Nomadic Radio employs an auditory user interface, which synchronizes speech recognition, speech synthesis, nonspeech audio, and spatial presentation of digital audio, for navigating among messages as well as asynchronous notification of newly arrived messages. Emphasis is placed on an auditory modality as Nomadic Radio is designed to be used while performing other tasks in a user's everyday environment; a range of auditory cues provides peripheral awareness of incoming messages. Notification is adaptive and context sensitive; messages are presented as more or less obtrusive based on importance inferred from content filtering, whether the user is engaged in conversation and his or her own recent responses to prior messages. Auditory notifications are dynamically scaled from ambient sound through recorded voice cues up to message summaries. Iterative design and a preliminary user evaluation suggest that audio is an appropriate medium for mobile messaging, but that care must be taken to minimally intrude on the wearer's social and physical environmen