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Email: Homepage: http://wwwhome.ewi.utwente.nl/~jansenmmh
Onderzoeksonderwerpen: Multimodal Interactions
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Titel: | Improving the Inattentional Opersion of Touch screen Interfaces |
| Instituut: |
Siemens Corporate Research | | Plaats: | Princeton, NJ 08540-6632 |
| Land: | Verenigde Staten |
| Begindatum: | 01-04-2011 |
| Voltooid: |
Nee |
| Begeleider: | Dirk Heylen |
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Onderwerpen: | Human factors |
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| Beschrijving: |
Touch screens have long been used for numerous applications. The technology can already be produced cheaply enough that it is found even in budget consumer devices like car navigation systems, handheld gaming consoles and digital photo frames. A recent trend in smart phones and tablet computers is to completely abolish physical buttons in favor of more touch screen real estate. Touch screens, in particular those supporting multi-touch, have a number of unique advantages over physical buttons. In some contexts, they have been shown to allow users to work twice as fast as with mouse input. Additionally, the layout of the whole screen - and thus the whole control surface - can be changed dynamically. This means the same space can theoretically be reused for different purposes in different contexts. For example, in one mode the screen might be filled with buttons whereas in a next mode, the system uses drag-and-drop style interaction. As always, this flexibility comes with a price. Whereas physical buttons, dials and other controls have a distinct tangible identity, a touch screen is generally a uniform sheet of glass or plastic; making
it hard to identify individual controls that are on the screen. If a touch screen is used as a drop-in replacement for physical controls, it will thus likely be more difficult to use without looking at the screen. These issues limit the applicability of touch screens in all contexts where the user's attention is required elsewhere. Examples include invehicle information systems (IVIS), universal remote controls, portable music players, game consoles but also medical instruments, industrial machines and other control interfaces. A better understanding of the limitations of touch screen controls that cause them to demand so much visual attention to operate is needed. This in turn, would allow us to find solutions that make touch screens easier to use for these purposes and as a consequence, increase the accessibility and applicability of touch screens. This leads to the following research question: “How can in attentional operation of peripheral touch screen interfaces be improved”. To find answers to this question, the following subquestions should be considered: 1) How do touch screen controls compare to alternative input methods in terms of performance and attention demands and other usability factors; 2) What properties of touch screen controls cause problems and at what points in the interaction do these occur and 3) What are potential solutions to these problems and what are their effects on performance and attention demands and other usability factors.
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| Beschrijving: |
(joint Capita Selecta with Richard Loos)
There are several problems in the code base and architecture of ParleVision, the Computer Vision framework of HMI. We propose a redesign of the ParleVision pipeline model, which will be implemented from the ground up. The proposed research will start with a short analysis of ParleVision's strong and weak points, including its UI. Additionally, other computer vision pipeline frameworks and related user interfaces will be examined for design lessons and inspiration. Next, both the system's graphical user interface and the framework itself will be designed and implemented in parallel. The goal in this phase is to build a working first iteration of the system, that can demonstrate the merit of an architecture based on the design goals mentioned earlier. The implementation of a full set of processors as well as other features that might be present in the current version of ParleVision, which are not needed to provide a proof of concept implementation, will be left for future work. A clear specification of the Application Programming Interface (API) and other documentation needed to use and extend the system will be given instead.
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| Beschrijving: |
As devices become smaller and more ubiquitous, they place an ever higher demand on our attention and our mental resources. The increasing number of systems fighting over our attention causes a strain on human cognition which is known as information overload or data overload. The problem of flooding a user with available data is especially important in ambient interfaces that are secondary to a user who is already occupied. When the user's primary task is critical, like driving a car or performing surgery, an interface should not interrupt or disturb at all. We call such interfaces unobtrusive interfaces, which we define as interfaces that operate outside our primary focus, on the periphery of our attention. This research focuses on these unobtrusive interfaces and attempts to answer the following research question:
What approaches and techniques exist for preventing information overload in ambient interfaces?
For these approaches and techniques, a number of additional questions will also be asked:
- What are the main advantages and disadvantages of the different kinds of techniques and approaches?
- For what applications are the different kinds of techniques and approaches suitable? |
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