abstract

Continuous developments in the field of Human Computer Interaction (HCI) are resulting in an omnipresence of digital technologies in our everyday lives, which is also visible in the presence of supportive technologies in education. These technologies, e.g. tablets and computers, usually require focused attention to be operated, which hinders teachers from appropriating them while teaching. Peripheral interactive systems, which do not require focused attention, could play a role in relieving teachers’ cognitive load, such that mental resources are freed to focus on other teaching tasks. This paper presents an exploratory study on enabling such cognitive offloading through peripheral interaction in the classroom. We present the design and a seven-week field deployment of FireFlies2 interactive tangible pixels which are distributed over the classroom. Our findings show that FireFlies2 supported cognitive processes of teachers and pupils in a number of scenarios.

MeetAlive combines multiple depth cameras and projectors to create a room-scale omni-directional display surface designed to support collaborative face-to-face group meetings. With MeetAlive, all participants may simultaneously display and share content from their personal laptop wirelessly anywhere in the room. MeetAlive gives each participant complete control over displayed content in the room. This is achieved by a perspective corrected mouse cursor that transcends the boundary of the laptop screen to position, resize, and edit their own and others’ shared content. MeetAlive includes features to replicate content views to ensure that all participants may see the actions of other participants even as they are seated around a conference table. We report on observing six groups of three participants who worked on a collaborative task with minimal assistance. Participants’ feedback highlighted the value of MeetAlive features for multi-user engagement in meetings involving brainstorming and content creation.

We present two realizations of TastyFloats, a novel system that uses acoustic levitation to deliver food morsels to the users’ tongue. To explore TastyFloats’ associated design framework, we first address the technical challenges to successfully levitate and deliver different types of foods on the tongue. We then conduct a user study, assessing the effect of acoustic levitation on users’ taste perception, comparing three basic taste stimuli (i.e., sweet, bitter and umami) and three volume sizes of droplets (5µL, 10µL and 20µL). Our results show that users perceive sweet and umami easily, even in minimal quantities, whereas bitter is the least detectable taste, despite its typical association with an unpleasant taste experience. Our results are a first step towards the creation of new culinary experiences and innovative gustatory interfaces.

In this paper, we demonstrate IllumiPaper: a system that provides new forms of paper-integrated visual feedback and enables multiple input channels to enhance digital paper applications. We aim to take advantage of traditional form sheets, including their haptic qualities, simplicity, and archivability, and simultaneously integrate rich digital functionalities such as dynamic status queries, real-time notifications, and visual feedback for widget controls. Our approach builds on emerging, novel paper-based technologies. We describe a fabrication process that allow us to directly integrate segment-based displays, touch and flex sensors, as well as digital pen input on the paper itself. With our fully functional research platform we demonstrate an interactive prototype for an industrial form-filling maintenance application to service computer networks that covers a wide range of typical paper-related tasks.