Storage bins: mobile storage for collaborative tabletop displays

The ability to store resource items anywhere in the workspace and move them around can be critical for coordinating task and group interactions on a table. However, existing casual storage techniques for digital workspaces only provide access to stored items at the periphery of the workspace, potentially compromising collaborative interactions at a digital tabletop display. To facilitate this storage behavior in a digital tabletop workspace, we developed the storage bin mobile storage mechanism, which combines the space-preserving features of existing peripheral storage mechanisms with the capability to relocate stored items in the workspace. A user study explores the utility of storage bins on tabletop display collaboration.     

Exploring casual point-and-tilt interactions for mobile geo-blogging

People record and share their experiences through text, audio and video. Increasingly they do this blogging from mobile devices. We illustrate a novel, mobile, low interaction cost approach to support the creation of a rich record of journeys made and places encountered: by pointing and tilting a mobile, users indicate their interests in a location. We built three mobile prototypes to explore the approach—the first one combines gestures and visual map feedback; the second provides a simpler visual interface; the third supports eyes-free interaction, allowing the user to simply point-and-tilt, with no visual display required. We describe two field studies undertaken to understand the value of the interaction styles afforded, then continue with a further user study to assess the interaction speed and accuracy between these interaction methods. We present the results of these studies and raise issues relevant to their design and to the wider class of devices and services concerned with mobile spatial information access.     

Opportunistic mobile games using public transportation systems: a deployability study

With the growing availability of personal communication devices, we are witnessing a tremendous increase in the demand for mobile services based on location and context. Mobile gaming as a service is, of course, no exception. Unfortunately, differently from other services, location- and context-based gaming strictly requires near-field communication to interact with nearby players to create teams and arenas. Since currently adopted technologies suffer from scalability (Bluetooth) or energy (WiFi) constraints, opportunistic networks (ONs) have already been addressed as a viable solution to involve a considerable number of players on a wider area. Nevertheless, it is not yet clear how player experience will be affected by the increased delay and probabilistic message forwarding introduced by an ON. In this paper, we address the aforementioned problems by studying, by means of simulations, the feasibility to deploy a contact-based game on top of the ON provided by the public transportation systems (PTSs) of three cities: Milan (Italy), Edmonton (AB, Canada), and Chicago (IL, USA). Furthermore, to provide playability and scalability considerations, we also study an opportunistic collaborative version of a famous standalone game. The focus on this specific game is functional to foster the use of the PTS itself. The contribution of this paper is twofold. Firstly, we provide simulation results hinting that deployment on a PTS is feasible when targeting users commuting inside the city. Secondly, we provide a number of considerations and guidelines for game designers to actually deliver a compelling and intriguing experience.     

Exploring the relationship between impulsivity and decision-making on mobile devices

Mobile devices offer a common platform for both leisure and work-related tasks, but this has resulted in a blurred boundary between home and work. In this paper, we explore the security implications of this blurred boundary, both for the worker and the employer. Mobile workers may not always make optimal security-related choices when “on the go” and more impulsive individuals may be particularly affected as they are considered more vulnerable to distraction. In this study, we used a task scenario, in which 104 users were asked to choose a wireless network when responding to work demands while out of the office. Eye-tracking data was obtained from a subsample of 40 of these participants in order to explore the effects of impulsivity on attention. Our results suggest that impulsive people are more frequent users of public devices and networks in their day-to-day interactions and are more likely to access their social networks on a regular basis. However, they are also likely to make risky decisions when working on-the-go, processing fewer features before making those decisions. These results suggest that those with high impulsivity may make more use of the mobile Internet options for both work and private purposes, but they also show attentional behavior patterns that suggest they make less considered security-sensitive decisions. The findings are discussed in terms of designs that might support enhanced deliberation, both in the moment and also in relation to longer term behaviors that would contribute to a better work–life balance.     

Modelling on mobile devices

Software and Systems Modeling - Modelling is central to many disciplines in engineering and the natural and social sciences. A wide variety of modelling languages and tools have been proposed along...     

Visualizing information on mobile devices

Visualization can make a wide range of mobile applications more intuitive and productive. The mobility context and technical limitations such as small screen size make it impossible to simply port visualization applications from desktop computers to mobile devices, but researchers are starting to address these challenges. From a purely technical point of view, building more sophisticated mobile visualizations become easier due to new, possibly standard, software APIs such as OpenGLES and increasingly powerful devices. Although ongoing improvements would not eliminate most device limitations or alter the mobility context, they make it easier to create and experiment with alternative approaches.     

手机游戏开发架构的研究

传统手机游戏开发架构中存在着3个亟待解决的问题:一是单个服务器资源易于衰竭;二是多线程间的同步和互斥耗费资源严重;三是服务器不能弹性地管理线程资源.为解决这些问题,提出了一种新的手机游戏开发架构,并详细说明这一架构中的负荷迁徙模块、基于I/O完成端口的线程池模块和消息模块.该架构较好地解决了传统开发架构中单个服务器资源易于衰竭,多线程间的同步和互斥所引起巨大的系统资源开销,及服务器不能弹性地管理线程资源等问题.实验结果表明,新的架构具有较好的效果.     

基于微博交互关系算法的敏感舆情研究

传统的敏感舆情模型中,不论是基于文本或是数据挖掘的分析方法都是直接处理网络舆情,未结合网络传播特性分析.针对上述问题,研究并采用基于微博交互关系算法:通过量化微博的敏感程度,分析用户的交互关系来构建微博敏感舆论传播模型.实验基于新浪微博,搜索到一定数量的敏感用户,对用户的交互行为进行分析,得到未来有发表敏感舆论倾向的用户并进行监控.实验结果证明,与传统的舆情模型相比,该方法可行且有效,开拓了舆情分析思路,适用于当前网络舆情研究.     

Interacting with mouse and touch devices on horizontal interactive displays

This article presents and discusses findings on collaborative interaction on horizontal interactive displays using touch and mouse input devices. Tabletop interaction environments are suitable for small computer-supported group collaboration, and usually allow for concurrent interaction by multiple users. The appropriate support of interaction on horizontal interactive displays is crucial to the successful design and adoption of digital tabletops for work, education and entertainment. A study was conducted investigating interactions of users on tabletops operating with mouse and touch input devices, and shedding light on the differences and commonalities from different perspectives. This laboratory study was designed to allow for as much ecological validity and to provide good experimental control at the same time. The study builds on the standard digital puzzle, or mosaic task, by adding a hidden or implicit task, for the participants to discover and work on. Without solving the hidden task, participants were not able to solve the primary puzzle task. This approach was chosen to trigger spontaneous and natural collaborative work amongst the participants in the lab setting. The analysis of the interaction is based on system-logged interaction data, questionnaires and observations focused on the participants’ selection and usage of input devices during the task execution. The study revealed, amongst others, that participants did not change their initially preferred input device even when they became more engaged in coordination and communication with their partner during the course of the study.     

Automatic form filling on mobile devices

Filling out forms for web based services on mobile devices is a very time consuming and frustrating task for users because of the limited text input capabilities. This is a critical bottleneck to obtaining a wide acceptance of such services, especially mobile commerce that often requires filling user data. We developed an architecture based on a local proxy on a mobile device and a lightweight algorithm for a comprehensive analysis of forms, which leads to the most probable user data to be filled in, driven by an initial rule set [Chie Noda, John Hamard, Enrico Rukzio, Alexander De Luca, Method and Apparatus for Automatic Form Filling on Mobile Devices, Patent. Publication number EP1777629, Publication date 2007-04-25]. We further discuss our implementation and the evaluation results for the algorithm as well as the usability of the prototype.     

Flexible point-based rendering on mobile devices

We have seen the growing deployment of ubiquitous computing devices and the proliferation of complex virtual environments. As demand for detailed and high-quality geometric models increases, typical scene size (often including scanned 3D objects) easily reaches millions of geometric primitives. Traditionally, vertices and polygons (faces) represent 3D objects. These representations, coupled with the traditional rendering pipeline, don't adequately support display of complex scenes on different types of platforms with heterogeneous rendering capabilities. To accommodate these constraints, we use a packed hierarchical point-based representation for rendering. Point-based rendering offers a simple-to-use level-of-detail mechanism in which we can adapt the number of points rendered to the underlying object's screen size. Our work strives for flexible rendering - that is, rendering only the interior hierarchy nodes as representatives of the subtree. In particular, we avoid traversal of the entire hierarchy and reconstruction of model attributes (such as normals and color information) for interior nodes because both operations can be prohibitively expensive. Flexible rendering also lets us traverse the hierarchy in a specific order, resulting in a fast, one-pass shadow-mapping algorithm.     

Real-time facial animation on mobile devices

We present a performance-based facial animation system capable of running on mobile devices at real-time frame rates. A key component of our system is a novel regression algorithm that accurately infers the facial motion parameters from 2D video frames of an ordinary web camera. Compared with the state-of-the-art facial shape regression algorithm [1], which takes a two-step procedure to track facial animations (i.e., first regressing the 3D positions of facial landmarks, and then computing the head poses and expression coefficients), we directly regress the head poses and expression coefficients. This one-step approach greatly reduces the dimension of the regression target and significantly improves the tracking performance while preserving the tracking accuracy. We further propose to collect the training images of the user under different lighting environments, and make use of the data to learn a user-specific regressor, which can robustly handle lighting changes that frequently occur when using mobile devices.     

Situated and mobile displays for reflection on shopping and nutritional choices

In this paper, we explore the use of peoples’ shopping data to raise awareness and to enable reflection about nutrition. In order to ground our Nutriflect approach, we conducted 125 structured interviews in grocery stores. Informed by the results of this exploratory study, we designed a system that shows a household’s collective food consumption patterns via situated displays in the home and through mobile devices in-store. The system aimed to minimize the need for manual entry of nutrition-related data by the users. To evaluate our system, we conducted a 4-week field study in eight households with 21 inhabitants and situated in-store shopping inquiries with a subset of 9 of these users, using actual shopping data from participants. In these studies, we identified issues regarding the interaction design of Internet of Things applications and explored the use of complementary distributed displays to provide tailored cues in context. The approach taken showed the potential to foster reflection about shopping and nutritional choices and for integration with people’s everyday practices.     

Motion sickness, console video games, and head-mounted displays

OBJECTIVE: We evaluated the nauseogenic properties of commercial console video games (i.e., games that are sold to the public) when presented through a head-mounted display. BACKGROUND: Anecdotal reports suggest that motion sickness may occur among players of contemporary commercial console video games. METHODS: Participants played standard console video games using an Xbox game system. We varied the participants' posture (standing vs. sitting) and the game (two Xbox games). Participants played for up to 50 min and were asked to discontinue if they experienced any symptoms of motion sickness. RESULTS: Sickness occurred in all conditions, but it was more common during standing. During seated play there were significant differences in head motion between sick and well participants before the onset of motion sickness. CONCLUSION: The results indicate that commercial console video game systems can induce motion sickness when presented via a head-mounted display and support the hypothesis that motion sickness is preceded by instability in the control of seated posture. APPLICATION: Potential applications of this research include changes in the design of console video games and recommendations for how such systems should be used.     

Problem solving and collaboration using mobile serious games

This paper presents the results obtained with the implementation of a series of learning activities based on Mobile Serious Games (MSGs) for the development of problem solving and collaborative skills in Chilean 8th grade students. Three MSGs were developed and played by teams of four students in order to solve problems collaboratively. A quasi-experimental design was used. The data shows that the experimental group achieved a higher perception of their own collaboration skills and a higher score in the plan execution dimension of the problem solving cycle than did the non-equivalent control group, revealing that MSG-based learning activities may contribute to such learning improvements. This challenges future research to identify under which conditions learning activities based on mobile serious games can promote the development of higher order skills.     

PDAs and shared public displays: Making personal information public, and public information personal

We are investigating how people move from individual to group work through the use of both personal digital assistants (PDAs) and a shared public display. Our scenario of this work covers the following activities. First, mobile individuals can create personal notes on their PDAs. Second, when individuals meet in real time, they can selectively publicise notes by moving them to a shared public display. Third, the group can manipulate personal and public items in real time through both PDAs and the shared public display, where the notes contained on both PDAs and public display are automatically synchronised. Finally, people leave a meeting with a common record of their activity. We describe our SharedNotes system that illustrates how people move through this scenario. We also highlight a variety of problematic design issues that result from having different devices and from having the system enforce a rigid distinction between personal and public information.