Ethnography Idea

The blog post on our ethnography idea can be found here:

http://christalks436.blogspot.com/2010/01/ethnography-humans-and-doors.html

Collabio: A Game for Annotating People within Social Networks

Summary:

Collabio is a game that this group developed for Facebook - a social network. The point of the game is to have the highest score, so it is basically a fight to the leader board. To get points, a user must enter tags for their friends and try to guess the tags that have been applied to them. There is also a 'friends who know me best' section, which can be seen in the screen shot below.

The group conducted a user survey to test tag accuracy. They found that the majority of tags were affiliations, while less tags conveyed interests, expertise, and hobbies. They concluded that most of the tags were accurate descriptors of the people in the social network.

Comments:

I find it difficult to find the merit in this research. I know that tags contain useful, easy to use information about (in this case) people, but why aren't the existing games good enough? I am not sure how much incentive the user has to spend time tagging and guessing tags either. The main question I find myself asking after this paper - why?

Augmenting Interactive Tables with Mice & Keyboards

Summary:

The research presented in this paper is very interesting. It brings forth an idea that I have not seen seen associated with touchscreen technology. The idea is to combine physical input devices with an interactive tabletop. They hypothesize that this will "provide spatial sensing, augment devices with co-located visual content, and support connections among a plurality of devices."


The group implemented several different ways to interact with the tabletop via mice and keyboards:

• Drag a document to your keyboard to dock
• Place your keyboard on a document to dock
• Type commands through your keyboard
• Place devices close to each other to link them
• Link mouse and keyboard by clicking on the keyboard
  
• Remote 'touch' via mouse
• "Leader Line" which locates the mouse pointer

The group suggested a scenario in which their research would be valuable: three college students are working on a class presentation. The students can independently collect research by conducting search queries through the tabletop - these queries can be applied to the web or personal documents. At this point, each student can create new documents to record their research findings. As the students finish their independent research, they can begin to collaborate together to combine their findings by linking their devices.

Comments:

I thought that the idea presented was extremely innovative. They mentioned that some previous work had been done in the area, but that their research would look farther into the topic. Since touchscreen technology has become a front runner as of late, this research could definitely come in handy. I think it is great that they are adding accuracy to the input methods of tabletop. Because tabletops are starting to mature application-wise, this research is very relevant.

A Practical Pressure Sensitive Computer Keyboard

Summary:

This paper starts by mentioning that it is "sobering" that the keyboard has changed little with the advances in computer-human interaction. The main idea here is to make a change to the keyboard for the better. They realize that the only successful altered keyboards are ones that make very little change to the preexisting model. Something that the pressure sensitive keyboard has going for it is that it looks and feels exactly like a standard keyboard - the only difference being that it can report the pressure at which the keys are pressed.

Most of the modern keyboards use a flexible membrane to register when a key is clicked. This model uses a pressure sensitive membrane. They have created a membrane where "contact ... decreases in resistance as force is increased," this is the opposite of normal behavior.

The paper goes on to discuss "practical" applications of a pressure sensitive keyboards. One example given is in gaming - if you want to move faster than simply press the key harder. Another example given is during instant messaging to convey emotion. Press keys harder to convey more emotion - this saves time because the user does not have to scale the font to their liking.


Comments:

I think that the subject matter is somewhat interesting and relevant. However, I think that there is a problem with the fact that they are trying to change the keyboard. It is very difficult for me to see any practical applications in everyday desktop use with this pressure sensitive keyboard. After all, would you press keys harder to convey emotion or would you use a smiley?

Mouse 2.0: Multi-touch Meets the Mouse

Summary:

Touchscreen technology has been advancing rapidly as of late. However, it seems as though this technological advancement is only being taken advantage of in mobile and tabletop devices. Because a desktop environment is still preferred for most computing tasks, there needs to be some way to incorporate multi-touch and the desktop. Naturally, the mouse was chosen - enter the multi-touch (MT) mouse. This research covers five different prototypes of MT mice, each of which "presents a different implementation and sensing strategy that leads to varying device affordances and form-factors, and hence very unique interaction experiences":


Each mouse has a very intricate design. Some of them use a system of cameras and infrared illumination, while others use optical sensing grids. Though many attempts have been made to append to the standard mouse, the only successful idea thus far has been the scroll wheel. Since the use of a standard mouse is embedded in most users, the idea for MT mice is to "support multi-touch gestures alongside regular mousing operations." To do this, they conjured the multi-touch cloud. In the picture below, the cloud is shown on the computer screen and the user can click on any portion of the cloud. This is an example of seamlessly integrating multi-touch into standard mouse use.

The group conducting this research did a user study in which six different users were asked to perform Rotate-Scale-Translate (RST) actions with all five MT mice. Of the five, users preferred Arty mouse the most (pictured third above). The only problem with Arty mouse is that it has two points of touch - compared to the Orb mouse (pictured fourth above) which has five potential points of touch. The Orb mouse was also a hit amongst the users, but the feedback suggested that Arty was more natural.

The research concluded that their contribution was a technical one, opening the door to integrating multi-touch into the desktop. They plan to continue work in the area by making better prototypes of their models and testing them again. They will also study the interaction techniques of these new devices.


Comments:

I think that it goes without saying that this is very significant work. It is interesting too! I believe that the technology for multi-touch environments is going to make huge strides in this decade, and this research is pointing us in the right direction. If we can get users more accustomed to integrating multi-touch into everyday computing than we are essentially making the UI layer transparent. After all, we use our fingers and thumbs in an intricate way in everyday activities - why not take advantage of our hand mastery?

I thought that the design of each MT mouse was interesting, but I was more interested in the observations of the user study - I wanted to see how the users interacted with the mice. The paper seemed to be lacking here because it focused more on the concepts and design of each mouse than it did on the observations and results.

It is obvious that there is plenty of room to improve for desktop MT mice. However, I think that an even more interesting area to do continuing work is trying to make multi-touch the norm. How long is it going to take until users are generally able to perform MT tasks with ease? How long is it going to take for widely used applications to incorporate MT interfaces?

Introduction

Hi! My name is Brett Hlavinka, and my email is brhlavinka@yahoo.com. I am a 3rd year senior CPSC major at Texas A&M. I enjoy working on projects that are human centered so computer human interaction was a natural choice for me. In ten years, I expect to have a job that I enjoy and a family to share that with. I hope that the user interface layer will become completely transparent soon, and I believe that touchscreen technology will be a large part of that advancement. Outside of computer science, I enjoy hanging out with friends and playing sports and video games.