Abstract: We report on an alternative OCGM interface for a bulletin board, where a user can pin a note or a drawing, and actually shares contents. Exploiting direct and continuous manipulations, opposite to discrete gestures, to explore containers, the proposed interface supports a more natural and immediate interaction. It manages also the presence of different simultaneous users, allowing for the creation of local multimedia contents, the connection to social networks, providing a suitable working environment for cooperative and collaborative tasks in a multi-touch setup, such as touch-tables, interactive walls or multimedia boards.
Authors: S. A. Iacolina, M. Corrias, O. Pontis, A. Soro, F. Sorrentino, R. Scateni.
A Multitouch Notice Board Fostering Social Interaction.
ACM SIGCHI Italian Chapter (CHItaly 2013), 13:1–13:4.
Trento, Italia, Settembre 2013.
Abstract: The wide availability of low-cost sensing devices is opening the possibility to easily create different interaction settings, which exploit various techniques for a more natural interaction, especially in public and shared settings. In this paper, we compared two different solutions for enhancing the interaction experience of a planetarium application, both replicable at a reasonable cost. The first version is based on a simple multitouch paradigm, while the second one exploits a full-body interaction together with a projection on geodetic sphere. We detail the technical implementation of both versions and, in addition, we discuss the results of user-study that compared the two modalities, which highlights a tradeoff between the control and the users’ involvement in the virtual environment.
Abstract: Natural User Interfaces are often described as familiar, evocative and intuitive, predictable, based on common skills. Though unquestionable in principle, such definitions don’t provide the designer with effective means to design a natural interface or evaluate a design choice vs another. Two main issues in particular are open: (i) how do we evaluate a natural interface, is there a way to measure ‘naturalness’; (ii) do natural user interfaces provide a concrete advantage in terms of efficiency, with respect to more traditional interface paradigms? In this paper we discuss and compare observations of user behavior in the task of pair programming, performed at a traditional desktop versus a multi-touch table. We show how the adoption of a multi-touch user interface fosters a significant, observable and measurable, increase of nonverbal communication in general and of gestures in particular, that in turn appears related to the overall performance of the users in the task of algorithm understanding and debugging.
Abstract: Gestures and gesticulation play an important role in communication, particularly in public speech. We describe here the design, development and initial evaluation of MORAVIA (MOtion Recognition And VIdeo Annotation): a collaborative web application for (semi)automatic gesture annotation. MORAVIA was conceived as a support for the automatic evaluation of a speech based on non-verbal components, that is, as much as possible independent from the verbal content. We adopt an evaluation model, based on quality metrics related to gestures and provided by experts in the education and psychology domain. The final goal is to design and implement a system able to detect the gestures using a video camera and a depth camera, such as the Microsoft Kinect, to detect the position and the movements of the speaker. Then, the web application for video-annotation allows collaborative review and analysis of the different video sequences. This is useful both to domain experts, as a research tool, and to end users, for self-evaluation.
Abstract: We report on two interactive systems for natural exploration of 3D models. Manipulation and navigation of 3D virtual objects can be a difficult task for a novel user, specially with a common 2D display. With traditional input devices such as 3D mice, trackballs, etc. the interaction doesn’t insist directly on the models, but is mediated and not intuitive. Our user interface allows casual users to inspect 3D objects at various scales, panning, rotating, and zooming, all through hand manipulations analogous to the way people interact with the real world. We show the design and compare the tests on two alternative natural interfaces: multitouch and free-hand gestures. Both provide a natural dual-handed interaction and at the same time free the user from the need of adopting a separate device.