reading summary #4

VoxBox: a Tangible Machine that Gathers Opinions from the Public at Events

Summary

VoxBox

VoxBox is a tangible system for gathering opinions on a range of topics in situ at an event through playful and engaging interaction

Aim

The aims of VoxBox is to design a more playful experience that gathers detailed feedback from the crowd at events such as festivals or fairs, by providing an engaging and playful tangible system that invites people to use it through its affordances.

Design Principles

focused on recreation events (festivals, fairs) and aimed to gather opinions on the 'feel good factor' of the events ex. Do people enjoy the event?

Encouraging Participation

For enhancing participation, the aim was to design a system that invited people to participate without focusing them or interrupting their event experience.

Also, VoxBox to be able to draw attention!

Each module - used a different input mechanism that people were familiar with such as 'sliders, buttons, knobs, and spinners'

Gathering Answers to Closed and Open Question

Problem with questions: lack of response to 'open' question. With playfulness, engagement, there is more willingness to answer the open questions.

Connecting Answers and Results

In other surveys, respondents often do not have access to the results of the surveys or are not informed. VoxBox however, made the result data visible to users in two ways. 1) on the website with the 'incentive balls' that have printed URL of the website. 2) On a set of visualization on the reverse side of the system.

Critiques

Voxbox gave me an insight to redefine the concept of 'interface'. Before reading this paper, I misunderstood 'interface' that I believed an interface is a mere way to visualize or specify one's ideas.(This is really a shame that I am in design major and have no understanding of basic concepts, though! Need studying.) Voxbox was in my opinion was great example that shows the core understanding of 'interface'. It shows that interface comes after, along with the idea of 'what people do and how people do'. The interface of Voxbox followed the path of what people do really carefully, in a super detailed way. 'It is not an easy process', I thought after following up the design process of VoxBox. Connecting to our team project, I realized that our team also need to reconsider whether there is unfamiliarity or stagnant parts of interface that people feels uncomfortable/or awkward during using our service.

reading summary #3

The Haptic Creature Project:Social Human-Robot Interaction through Affective Touch

overview of the Haptic Creature project

seek to develop a deeper understanding of affect display through touch in the context of social interaction between human and robot

introduction

-The overall goal: investigate the use of affective touch in the social interaction between human and robot.

-interested in the display, recognition, and influence of this form of touch

-the role affective touch plays in fostering companionship between human and robot.

background (related works and motivation behind the project)

Socially Interactive Robotics and Affect Display

-affectdisplay—theexternal manifestation of internal emotional state

-Thetwomoststudied modalities for affect display in humans are vision and audition.

-vision, the use of facial expressions is commonly used to convey emotion

-prosody of speech is used in affect display. Likewise, this means has also seen investigation within socially interactive robotics (e.g., [2] [18]).

Affective Touch and-the Haptic Creature be recognizable as animal-like Human-Animal Interaction

-touch: less attention than visual and audition

- it plays a major role in early development [14]. Furthermore, touch is proximal; requiring close or direct, physical contact to sense [10].

-Affective touch : touch that communicates or evokes emotion

- cause significant levels of participant discomfort

-solution:the Haptic Creature project has chosen to draw from models of interaction, not between humans, but between human and animal.

Differentiation

-the primary differentiation:strong concentration on the modality of touch for affect display.

-secondary: the level of zoomorphism-the Haptic Creature be recognizable as animal-like

more amorphous

The Haptic Creature

TheHapticCreature(Figures1&4)isaroboticdevicethatmimicsa small lap animal, such as a pet cat or do

composed of five major components: a body, two ear-like appendages, a breathing mechanism, a purring mechanism, and a warming elemen

Design Considerations

The first is that the interaction centers around the modality of touch.

. The second consideration deals with providing an organic interaction whereby the sensing and,especially,the affect display seem as acoordinate whole

Development Phases

three stages:aWizardofOzprototype,anautomatedprototype,andafinal device

Architecture

-Low level sensing

-Gesture Recognizer

-Emoter

-Physical Renderer

-Low-Level Actuation

CONCLUSION

the Haptic Creature project, whose goal is to investigate the display, recognition, and influence of affective touch in human-robot interaction.

Critiques

This was exactly my childhood dream! When I was young, my parents didn't allow me to have a dog(now having 2 dogs though!) With my brother, we imagined the puppy that is not alive, but still have those fluffy (?) body. Now I have dogs, they give me lots of happiness, with their lovely eyes, tails that are shaking with delight, and their warm, fluffy body. The interactions with my dogs come from lots of different aspects, just like Haptic-Creature in the paper. However, I thought that although it is an animal-like creature that is a lot similar to the real animals, there must be a limitation to it. Interacting with alive animal, it is more above than visions, audition, and touch. We share our heart(마음, I mean..) , caring each other (I believe , although they are unspeakable) , and it is what Haptic-Creature can never do.

“Moon Phrases”: A Social Media Faciliated Tool for Emotional Reflection and Wellness

—We propose an early prototype: a web-based tool “Moon Phrases” that leverages an individual’s social activity online for promoting emotional reflection and wellness.

introduction

-Emotional wellness

- Unhealthy mental processes are often accompanied by negative self-image; pessimism, skepticism, cynicism regarding self, others, life, and the world, sometimes leading to depression; residual anger; chronic fear/anxiety; and even emotional volatility.

- Moon Phrases mines the historical postings of a user over time on social media (Twitter in this case), to quantify his/her behavior through affective expression and language use manifested in the post

THE DESIGN PROCESS OF MOON PHRASES

A core challenge of the design process was identifying what are the best social media cues to be visualized, based on an end user’s activity that can promote emotional wellness.

We also found evidence in conversations with our set of participants that, linguistic usage of various words was useful as psychological markers, since it conveys information about individuals’ social surroundings, contexts and crises they are in.

Finally, our participants indicated the utility of being able to reflect on their emotional states via their postings on social media.

INTERFACE AND INTERACTION DESIGN

The central idea of Moon Phrases was to show daily trends of positive affect (PA) and negative affect (NA) as manifested in the Twitter postings of a particular user who is provided a mechanism to “log in” into the web tool

TECHNICAL FEATURE DEVELOPMENT

-using machine learning models trained on Twitter collections to detect affect

-we first run the classifier on each Twitter post of a user

- we also compute a variety of linguistic styles in the Twitter postings of a user. Given all posts of the user, we follow a regular expression matching technique to determine the total number of words of a certain style occurring in them.

IMPLICATIONS AND OPPORTUNITIES

Moon Phrases presents an early prototype in the design and deployment of effective and smart health intervention systems, derived from people’s naturalistic social activity online, for emotional wellness

-limitation: automated assessment > unusal behavioral change?

The strength of the tool lies in revealing longitudinal trends of affect and behavior, for instance identifying time periods of low positivity or high negativity

- Moon Phrases may also be adapted to log trends and serve as a diary-style data source

CRITIQUES

The most surprising of Moonphrase, for me personally, was the using of metaphor 'moon'. It gives a full concept of 'a day' and just arranging them tells me the concept of 'the changes of something according to days' . Just looking at the image on the paper, I could easily grasp the idea of the moonphrase without explaining. However, as mentioned in the paper, There were some unsolved problems such as "Are each person's psychology exactly shown in the text?" As linguistics contain twist, exaggerate or even there could be jokes. Although there are some unclearness to Moonphrase, but one thing is clear that it is an brilliant idea of making archieve of people's mood through the day, approaching from relationship between linguistics and psychology.

reading summary #2

The Reactable: Tangible and Tabletop Music Performance

About music performance and interaction designs

Dedicated interfaces for digital music performance or music controllers, as they are commonly called, have existed for years.

Tangible Music Interfaces and Musical Tabletops

Tabletops interfaces, as surfaces in which objects can be alternatively grabbed or left, do certainly excel at the former feature.

Tangible User Interfaces (TUIs) combine control and representation within a physical artifact

The visual feedback brought by these interfaces, can partially solve another relevant problem of laptop music performance, such as the perception difficulties and the lack of understanding these type of concerts provoke in the audience, which could be synthesized as ‘how could we readily distinguish an artist performing with powerful generative software tools, from someone checking their e-mail whilst DJ-ing with iTunes?’

The Reactable

The Reactable is built upon a tabletop interface, which is controlled by manipulating tangible acrylic pucks on its surface.

The Reactable’s Hardware and Software

The Reactable was conceived and developed since 2003 by a research team at the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona.

The Reactable hardware consists of a round interactive surface with a diameter of 90cm and a height of also 90cm.

Critique

This paper covered 'tangible' music interfaces such as the Reactable. However, as a normal person who is not related to the music field, I barely have opportunities to use tangible music interfaces. Instead, these days I use 'intangible' music interfaces such as 'GarageBand' on MacBook. I was surprised using it how it mixes the metaphor of physical products-such as synthesizer- (into graphics) and digital mode, together in an easy way even normal people can make music. However at first using this program, I found the difficulties finding functions because it is organized like a 'cockpit' interface, all functions are arranged on the screen. The example of Reactable reduced this problem using round-shape table and pucks that are tangible. I realized that there is pros and cons of both tangible and intangible interface, and they can be used for total different purposes.

Presence and Discernability in Conventional and Non-Photorealistic Immersive Augmented Reality

In this paper we investigate the use of NPR in an immersive, stereoscopic, wide field-of-view head-mounted video see-through AR display.

Introduction

The three modes

The conventional mode does not post-process the image, showing unaltered video feeds and uses standard real-time graphics algorithms.

The stylized mode applies an edge-detection fil- ter to silhouette edges of objects within the full image frame, which includes both video and graphics.

The virtualized mode presents an extreme stylization by both silhouetting edges and removing color information

Presence as Non-mediation in Immersive AR Presence

Presence : central to the study of immersive display technology. It can be defined as a user’s psychological response to patterns of sensory stimuli, resulting in the psychological sensation of “being there” in the computer-generated space

two classes of factors can influence this sense of non- mediation

1) consistency of the content

2) technical factors

presence should be assessed through measurement of both quantitative data, for instance tracked body movement or physiological response, and qualitative insights from questionnaires and interviews.

participants behave towards the virtual pit as if it could be real.

Non-Photorealistic Rendering

NPR applies transformation filters to modify the appearance of an image.

Result of the test

Results from the discernability task demonstrate the effectiveness of the two non-photorealistic rendering modes to visually merge virtual objects within a real environment.

Judgment accuracy in the stylized mode suggests that NPR can be effective in unifying the appearance of an environment in immersive AR despite the range of perceptual sensorimotor cues afforded by the system.

the virtualized mode reducing the effectiveness of cues otherwise used successfully in the conventional mode. The stylized mode achieves a balance in forming a unified scene despite the availability of these perceptual cues.

Critique

As our team is going to work with AR or Vr according to the discussion so far, this paper was so helpful to me to get the ideas of 'how to design AR' with the example of AR-Rift. I thought what our team has to deal are concept of AR, researches, and creating scenarios etc. as other normal courses of design. However, while reading this paper, I found out that quantitative and qualitative researches of user-behavior is one of the most important things to explore. I think it will be a fun time, measuring people's actions and applies it into our service.