Theme Distribution

Project Leaders

Description

Current technology tends to rely on a graphical display as the primary mechanism for communicating information to the user. This can result in overwhelming the user's visual channel, and does not adequately leverage the other sensory channels that humans use to communicate in the "real world". In particular, modalities like the haptic (touch) and auditory senses, are well suited to enable humans to process background, ambient information. Sighted people use touch this way in non-digital environments: even when the information it collects is dynamic and essential to a task at hand, touch is usually a supporting player rather than the explicit focus. Similarly, much of our non-speech listening is devoted to background processing of environmental sounds, which impinge on attention as they become relevant. Today's computer enabled environments do not handle these nuanced, ambient, aspects of human communication well, if at all.

The goal of the AMBAID project is to assemble a knowledge base and develop user interface solutions for situations that could benefit from additional modalities of information display in a variety of contexts. The research will focus on four primary themes: 1) using haptics and audio to provide guidance to users in performing tasks; 2) using haptics for low-attention background information display; 3) understanding how the various modalities can contribute to displaying non-verbal social cues in the context of technology mediated human-human collaborative activities; and 4) using haptics and audio as a persuasion agent to support desired user behaviour.

In its first year, AMBAID began the process of finding specific common ground in the related research themes of its own members, while continuing those individual threads and intersecting with other projects. Examples of the use cases through which we are moving forward through design and prototyping are:

- Use of variable friction, and of passive haptic features on devices to aid in interaction

- Tactile guidance in space and time

- Mobile projectors as an intermediate between focused and ambient displays, e.g. in gaming environments

- Implicit control scenarios through physiological monitoring

- Tactile zooming display of natural images

- Anxiety reduction without concentration, through emotionally expressive haptic feedback to children

We are also studying (review and new investigation) the myriad human performance aspects of these situations. To name a few:

- Theoretical modeling of human performance when interacting with “hidden” visual spaces

- Pointing performance in the presence of variable friction and practical, unstudied effects such as distractors

- Relating measured human orienting responses to interruptive disturbances, in both calm and noisy environments

During this initial period, we have continued and deepened relations with industry partners (Immersion, Nokia; and shared with other GRAND projects, Thought Technology), with ongoing related funding and communications.

The team has produced 7 publications out of this work (including 4 full CHI papers) during this period, with several more in preparation, and will provide two Interactivity demos at CHI 2011 in Vancouver.

In its second year, AMBAID will focus on iterative prototyping and interaction design within the use cases listed above, and on collaborative and case study design and evaluation of these interaction designs. The intent of these activities is threefold: (1) to generate specific knowledge and novel instances of technology uses that leverage attention; (2) to identify and develop eventually commercializble techniques and technologies in our partners’ zone of interest, and finally (3) to expand a general understanding of human performance and constraints through which we can further push the envelope on multimodal, ambient interaction design.