Transitioning from Implicit to Explicit, Public to Personal, Interaction with Multiple Users

Daniel Vogel, Ravin Balakrishnan Department of Computer Science

University of Toronto

Interactive Public Ambient Displays:

Why do we need a interactive public display?

• Information exchanging

• A dream of ubiquitous computing– A gateway to access our personal information

How? Challenges

• Public: attention– Not overloading users’ senses – Minimally intrusive

• Personal: privacy

• Sharing interaction

Bringing people from public to personal

Streitz, et al., 2003

Vogel, et al., 2004

Design Principles and Interaction Framework

• Goal: seamlessly, fluidly• implicit explicit• Public personal • Solve the dilemma of dual role• Solution: user’s attention (location and

orientation) to the display and relationship between available information type and user’s phase

Hardware and layout

From top to bottom: weather, office activity, calendar, and messaging

50” plasma screen with toch-sensitive overlay

Vicon for tracking

Ambient Display Phase

• able to get a sense of the overall information space with a quick glance

• Calm aesthetics, shared use, comprehension and Immediate Usability

• Tech: text labels

Implicit Interaction Phase

• Calm aesthetics and notification• Tech: vertical bar– :appearance (location)– width (body orientation)– opacity (head orientation)

Notification Flag

Subtle Interaction Phase I(Overview)

• Distance < 40”• Why• Shared use and Immediate Usability

Subtle Interaction Phase II(Select)

Personal Interaction Phase

Transition

Informal User Study• four participants• work in an office environment, and were fluent with various

computational media• Our evaluation had two parts. • First

– Method: talk-aloud– how they explore their movements influenced the display and their

interpretation– glove with markers for hand tracking was not used in the first part of

the evaluation• Second

– the gestures performance, gesture hint icons effectiveness, timeline navigation, and the phase of touch-screen initiation

– did not implement help sequences

Summary• Fluid movement between phases• Techniques for multiple users• Subtle notification• Privacy controls• Self-revealing help• Implicit interaction was enabled by sensing

contextual cues such as body orientation and position, and user proximity to the display.

• Hand gestures and touch screen input support explicit interaction.

Conclusion• a new style of interactive public ambient display combining

peripheral notification with implicit and explicit interaction for accessing both public and personal information

• Initial user feedback indicates that our techniques are quickly discoverable and appear to be usable.

• A set of design principles and an interaction framework that fluidly moves from implicit interaction with a public ambient peripheral display to explicit interaction

• Taking us a step closer to realizing more sophisticated and useful sharable, interactive, public ambient displays.