Showing posts with label displays. Show all posts
Showing posts with label displays. Show all posts

Thursday, 24 November 2011

Guests in my multimodal interaction class

Today I had brought 3 more professors with me to teach the class on multimodal interaction (I learned from Hans). As we have the pd-net project meeting Nigel Davies, Marc Langheirich, and Rui Jose were in Stuttgart and ‘volunteered’ to give a talk.

Nigel talked about the work in Lancaster on the use of mobile computing technology to support sustainable travel. He explained the experiments they conducted for collecting and sharing travel related information. In the 6th Sense Transport project they look beyond looking at understanding the current context into predictions and eventually ‘time travel’ ;-)



Marc presented a one hour version of his tutorial on privacy introducing the terminology and explaining the many facets this topic has. We discussed the ‘NTHNTF’ argument (Nothing To Hide Nothing To Fear) and Marc used an example of AOLstalker.com to show the weaknesses of this argument. Marc suggested some reading if you want to dive into the topic, see [1,2,3,4].

Rui focused in his lecture on pervasive public displays. He gave an overview of typical architectures for digital signage systems and the resulting limitation. The pd-net approach aims at creating an open platform that allows many different applications and use cased. He showed once concept of using virtual pin-badges to trigger content and to express interest in a certain topic.

There is more information on the pd-net project on http://pd-net.org

[1] David Brin. The Transparent Society. Perseus Publishing, 1999.
[2] Simson Garfinkel: Database Nation – The Death of Privacy in the 21st Century. O’Reilly, 2001.
[3] Lawrence Lessig: Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace. Basic Books, 2006. http://codev2.cc/
[4] Waldo, Lin, Millett (eds.): Engaging Privacy and Information Technologygy in a Digital Age. National Academies Press, 2007.

Call for Papers: Symposium on Pervasive Display Networks

Rui José and Elaine Huang are chairing an international symposium on pervasive displays in Portugal. The conference will be held June 4-5 2012 in Porto. The submission deadline for full papers is January 16th, 2012.

With our research in the PD-net project we encounter many interesting research questions and met with many other researchers interested in the topic. It seems that the many real deployments of electronic displays is fueling ideas and makes it obvious that research is required to understand the properties of this new upcoming media. The call states: “As digital displays become pervasive, they become increasingly relevant in many areas, including advertising, art, sociology, engineering, computer science, interaction design, and entertainment.

We hope with this symposium we will bring together researchers and practitioners as well as users to share research results and generate new ideas.

Submissions that report on cutting-edge research in the broad spectrum of pervasive digital displays are invited, ranging from large interactive walls to personal projection, from tablets and mobile phone screens to 3-D displays and tabletops. Topics include:
  • Novel technologies
  • Architecture
  • Applications
  • Domains and formative studies studies
  • Evaluations and deployments
  • Interfaces and interaction techniques
  • Content design
Have a look at the webpage and the call for paper at http://pervasivedisplays.org/cfp.php

Wednesday, 9 March 2011

Visualization - Tokyo Underground Map

I spotted this visualization of an underground line in Tokyo and thought that I can use this as an interesting introductory example in information visualization. The very simple question is: what does this visualization communicate to the user? The bi-lingual labeled picture is quite rich in the way it communicates the information. Take as one example the visualization of "Where am I?" and "Where is the train going to?". This is visualized in multiple and redundant ways: (1) the station where the user is highlighted with a red background color, (2) the visualization of the underground line has a break at the current station, (3) the stations the train has already passed are lighter colored (pink) as the stations to come, and (4) there is an arrow showing the direction.

Overall I think this is a good example of how to efficiently communicate such information. But be careful if you travel … there are also much more confusing signs around here.

Friday, 21 January 2011

pdnet meeting at the University of Minho in Portugal

Over the last day we got together in Portugal to discuss the progress in the EU-FET-OPEN project pdnet. We are now 9 month into the project and it is great to see the results appearing. Stay tune for upcoming papers. Besides other research we have done interesting observational work and have gained understanding what matters for people when setting up public displays and this informs our system design.

In summer we have the opportunity to try our system by deploying two applications in Oulu, Finland. With two applications proposals we were selected as finalist for UbiChallenge. In June we will go with our students to Oulu and implement our system and study the usage in a public deployment.

Food was amazing…

Wednesday, 22 September 2010

PD-NET web page and facebook page

For our European FET open project PD-NET we have a web page at http://pd-net.org/ online. There we describe the project and there is already the first publication (a paper we will present at ACM Multimedia 2010) listed. The page also includes a description of the project and the partners. If you work on public displays or if you are interested in this topic (e.g. as developer, service provider, device manufacturer, content designer, or user) please feel free to contact us. Perhaps there is chance for collaboration.

The project objectives are:
  • To create enabling technologies for large-scale pervasive display networks through the design, development and evaluation of a robust, scalable, distributed and open platform for interconnecting displays and their sensors.
  • To establish Europe as the international centre for work on pervasive display networks.
  • To address key scientific challenges that may inhibit the widespread adoption of pervasive display network technology: Tensions between privacy and personalization, situated displays, business and legislative requirements, User Interaction.

To share resources and ideas with a community of researchers interested in the topic we have setup a facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/pdnet. There is one album where we hope to collect a larger number of photos of public displays (traditional and digital) from around the world to document the variety of public displays and people’s interaction with them. If you have interesting photos of public displays please share them on the page. We also encourage researchers publishing in this research field to share their publications (or links to the publications) with the community (and it is obvious that everyone will cite you ;-)

Friday, 27 August 2010

Public Displays in Chengdu

This is a post to document the transition of public display systems around the work (hopefully there are more to follow). In the European pdnet project we investigate and develop a new communication medium based on public displays. The transformation that takes place in this domain is extremely quick, and hence I think it is interesting to keep some record on specific displays.I found it very interesting to see that there are many simple animations used in simple displays when they become digital. One example is the use of animation in traffic lights. There are two types of dynamic information: informative (e.g. showing the count-down to the next green light) and decorative (e.g. moving bicycle wheels as shown in the video).Currently there is a mix of traditional painted/printed displays, illuminated static displays, illuminated displays that change between discreet presentations and fully digital high resolution displays. The digital advertising displays in the inner city center of Chengdu are impressive. Looking at the photos it could be anywhere in world. It seems that public displays lose more and more their local character - very different from 20 years ago when they were still painted/printed in most places around the world.

Monday, 23 August 2010

Decorative Displays in Zürich Railway Station

In the railway station in Zürich is a display that consists of 25.000 light units (=10x50x50 - by my counting). It seems that for each unit the color can be set. As there is some space between the lights one can see the "hidden" layers which makes it a sort of 3D image. So far it seems to be used only as an artistic/decorative display - or I did not get the meaning. There is also still "conventional" art in the railway station…

I recognized an interesting effect of human behavior. I looked at the electronic display for about 2 minutes and nobody took a photo of it. When I started taking the photos there were within 30 seconds 10 other people starting to take photos ;-) Perhaps we should create an application that makes this easier - consiting of three parts: (1) if someone takes a photo the photo application broadcasts this event, (2) an application running in the back ground monitoring when others take photos and records the location and (3) a page, folder or dynamic query that shows fotos for this location (and perhaps sorted by time difference to the recording of the event).

Wednesday, 5 May 2010

pdnet kick-off in Lancaster - starting a new communication era?

We are excitet to start a new European FET Open project on pervasive display networks. With pdnet we hope to create an entirely new communication media in public spaces. At the University of Lancaster we had two intensive days to get the project started and it we developed a lot of exciting ideas!

pdnet project abstract: "The project aims to lay the scientific foundations for a new form of communications medium with the same potential impact on society as radio, television and the Internet. The goal is to explore the scientific challenges and new technologies required to enable the emergence of large scale networks of pervasive public displays and associated sensors that are open to applications and content from many sources.
In effect, the project will look to provide the foundations for work on a brand new global communications medium for information access and interaction and to ensure that Europe is in the best possible position to benefit from this new medium.
The project is highly innovative - no such pervasive display networks exist today and their emergence would represent a radical transformation in the way we think about information dissemination in public spaces; it is high risk - numerous technical and societal challenges need to be addressed before pervasive display networks are possible; and potentially high pay-off - if successful, the project will pioneer a new research area and provide the foundations for a new communications medium that offers entirely new opportunities for economic activity and a means to radically change public spaces - from today's environments in which information is pushed to passers-by in the form of adverts to spaces that can utilize public displays and ambient intelligence to reflect the hopes, aspirations and interests of its occupants using content and applications created anywhere in a global network."

PS: I learned about a new toy/educational kit from Ben: Lego WeDo Robotics kit connected to Scratch.

Monday, 16 November 2009

Large pixels along the underpass

In the refurbished railway station (not yet finished) there is an interesting new pixel display in one main underpass. One wall is covered with a display. It is about 10 pixel (probably about 4 meters) high and several hundred pixels long (have not counted/measured them). It changes colors and shows writing (so far not really exciting).

How cool would it be if there is a freely accessible programmable web-service to control these pixel? I would guess people could create all sorts of interesting content… Perhaps people would start to bargain to get their 5 minutes of virtual graffiti shown…

Tuesday, 8 September 2009

More surface interaction using audio: Scratch input

After my talk at the Minerva School Roy Weinberg pointed me to a paper by Chris Harrison and Scott Hudson [1] - it also uses audio for creating an interactive surface. The novelty on the technical side is limited but nevertheless the approach is interesting and appealing because of its simplicity and its potential (e.g. just think beyond a fingernail on a table to any contact movement on surfaces - pushing toy cars, walking, pushing a shopping trolley…). Perhaps having a closer look at this approach a generic location system could be created (e.g. using special shoe soles that make a certain noise).

There is a youtube movie: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2E8vsQB4pug

Besides his studies Roy develops software for the Symbian platform and he sells a set of interesting applications.

[1] Harrison, C. and Hudson, S. E. 2008. Scratch input: creating large, inexpensive, unpowered and mobile finger input surfaces. In Proceedings of the 21st Annual ACM Symposium on User interface Software and Technology (Monterey, CA, USA, October 19 - 22, 2008). UIST '08. ACM, New York, NY, 205-208. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1449715.1449747

Tuesday, 1 September 2009

Interaction technologies for display environments

I was invited to give a talk on "Embedded interaction with display environments" to discuss human computer interaction and technology issue for creating interactive display systems. The summer school has very diverse program! and I have enjoyed listening to my colleagues as much as presenting myself :-)

In the talk I have a (more or less random) selection of technologies for making display environments interactive. There are the obvious vision based approaches (see the talk for the references) but I think there are many interesting approaches that are not yet fully explored. - including spatial audio location [1], eye tracking, and physiological sensors. Sebastian Boring create a focus and context input by combing different input technologies [2] - this can be especially interesting when scaling interaction up to larger surfaces. Additionally I think looking at the floor and the ceiling is worthwhile…

Please feel free to add further technologies and approaches for creating interactive displays in the comment.

[1] James Scott, Boris Dragovic: Audio Location: Accurate Low-Cost Location Sensing. Pervasive Computing: Third International Conference, PERVASIVE 2005, Munich, Germany, May 8-13, 2005. Springer LNCS 3468/2005. pp 1-18. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/11428572_1

[2] S. Boring, O. Hilliges, A. Butz. A Wall-sized Focus plus Context Display. In Proceedings of the Fifth Annual IEEE Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications (PerCom), New York, NY, USA, Mar. 2007

Saturday, 8 August 2009

Reading material for summer school.

Tsvi Kuflik and Antonio Krüger organize from August 30th - September 3rd a German-Israeli Minerva School for Ubiquitous Display Environments: Intelligent Group Interaction, Foundations and Implementation of Pervasive Multimodal Interfaces. I will teach a session on: "Embedded interaction with display environments" and here is the list of recommended readings for the participants - if you are short on time only read the first one and glance over the other two.

Mahato, H., Kern, D., Holleis, P., and Schmidt, A. 2008. Implicit personalization of public environments using bluetooth. In CHI '08 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Florence, Italy, April 05 - 10, 2008). CHI '08. ACM, New York, NY, 3093-3098. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1358628.1358813 (if you do not have access to ACM here is a copy on the web)

Schmidt, A.; van Laerhoven, K. 2001. How to build smart appliances? Personal Communications, IEEE. Volume 8, Issue 4, Aug 2001:66 - 71. DOI: 10.1109/98.944006. http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?arnumber=944006 (if you do not have access to IEEE here is a copy on the web)

Villar N.; Schmidt A.; Kortuem G.; Gellersen H.-W. 2003. Interacting with proactive public displays. Computers and Graphics, Elsevier. Volume 27, Number 6, December 2003 , pp. 849-857(9). Draft Version "Interacting with proactive community displays" online available.

Thursday, 23 July 2009

Visit to NEC labs in Heidelberg

In the afternoon I gave a talk at NEC labs in Heidelberg on ubiquitous display networks. Over the last year we developed and number of ideas and prototypes of interactive public display systems. We run a lab class (Fallstudien) on pervasive computing technologies and advertising together with colleagues from marketing. In another class (Projektseminar) we investigated how to facilitate interaction between interactive surfaces (e.g. multi touch table) and mobile devices. One of the prototypes will be shown as poster at mobile HCI 2009 in Bonn. In some thesis projects we introduced the notion of mobile contextual displays and their potential applications in advertising, see [1] and [2].

Seeing the work at NEC and based on the discussion I really think there is a great of potential for ubiquitous display networks - at the same time there are many challenges - including privacy that allways ensures discussion ;-) It would be great to have another bachelor or master thesis to address some of them - perhaps jointly with people from NEC. To understand the information needs in a particular display environment (at the University of Duisburg-Essen) we currently run a survey to better understand requirements. If you read German you are welcome to participate in the survey.

Predicting the future usually features in my talks - and interestingly I go a recommendation from Miquel Martin for a book that takes its own angle on that: Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely (the stack of book gets slowly to large - time for holidays).

[1] Florian Alt, Albrecht Schmidt, Christoph Evers: Mobile Contextual Displays. Pervasive Advertising Workshop @ Pervasive 2009. Nara, Japan 2009.

[2] Florian Alt, Christoph Evers, Albrecht Schmidt: Users' View on Car Advertisements. In: Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Pervasive Computing, Pervasive'09. Springer Berlin / Heidelberg Nara, Japan 2009.

Wednesday, 13 May 2009

Our Publications at Pervasive - Public Displays, Car Adverts, and Tactile Output for Navigation

Our group was involved in 3 papers that are published at Pervasive 2009 in Nara.

The first contribution is a study on public display that was presented by Jörg Müller from Münster. The paper explores display blindness that can be observed in the real world (similarly to banner blindness) and concludes that the extent to which people look at displays is very much correlated to the users expectation of the content of a display in a certain location [1].

The second short paper is a survey on car advertising and has been conducted in the context of the master thesis of Christoph Evers. The central question is about the design space of dynamic advertising on cars and how the users perceive such a technology [2].

Dagmar presented a paper on vibra-tactile output integrated in the steering wheel for navigation systems in cars. The studies explored how multi-modal presentation of information impact driving performance and what modalities are preferred by users. The general conclusion is that combining visual information with vibra-tactile output is the best option and that people prefer multi-modal output over a single modality [3].

[1] Jörg Müller, Dennis Wilmsmann, Juliane Exeler, Markus Buzeck, Albrecht Schmidt, Tim Jay, Antonio Krüger. Display Blindness: The Effect of Expectations on Attention towards Digital Signage. 7th International Conference on Pervasive Computing 2009. Nara, Japan. Springer LNCS 5538, pp 1-8.
http://www.springerlink.com/content/gk307213786207g2

[2] Florian Alt, Christoph Evers, Albrecht Schmidt. User's view on Context-Aware Car Advertisement. 7th International Conference on Pervasive Computing 2009. Nara, Japan. Springer LNCS 5538, pp 9-16.
http://www.springerlink.com/content/81q8818683315523

[3] Dagmar Kern, Paul Marshall, Eva Hornecker, Yvonne Rogers, Albrecht Schmidt. Enhancing Navigation Information with tactile Output Embedded into the Steering Wheel. 7th International Conference on Pervasive Computing 2009. Nara, Japan. Springer LNCS 5538, pp 42-58.
http://www.springerlink.com/content/x13j7547p8303113

Tuesday, 28 April 2009

Meeting on public display networks

Sunday night I travelled to Lugano for a meeting public display networks. I figured out that going there by night train is the best option - leaving midnight in Karlsruhe and arriving at 6am there. As I planned to sleep all the time my assumption was that the felt travel time would be zero. Made my plan without the rail company… the train was 2 hours late and I walked up and down for 2 hours in Karlsruhe at the track - and interestingly the problem would have been less annoying if public displays would provide the relevant information … The most annoying thing was passengers had no information if or when the train will come and no one could tell (neither was anyone at the station nor was anyone taking calls at the hotline).
The public display - really nice state of the art hardware - showed for 1 hour nothing and that it showed that the train is one hour late (was already more than 1 hour after the scheduled time) and finally the train arrived 2 hours late (the display still showing 1 hour delay). How hard can it be to provide this information? It seems with current approaches it is too hard…

On my way back I could observe a further example of short comings with content on public display. In the bus office they had a really nice 40-50 inch screen showing teletext of the departure. The problem was it was the teletext for the evening as the staff has to manually switch the pages. Here too it is very clear the information is available but current delivery systems are not well integrated.

In summary it is really a pity how poorly the public display infrastructures are used. It seems there are a lot of advances in the hardware but little on the content delivery, software and system side.

Wednesday, 15 October 2008

Trip to Dublin, Aaron's Display Project

Visiting Dublin is always a pleasure - even if the weather is rainy. Most of the day I was at Trinity College reading master theses (which is the second best part of being external examiner, best part is to have lunch at the 1592 ;-)

In the evening I met with Aaron Quigley and we talked about some ongoing display and advertsing projects in our groups. He told me about one of their recent workshop papers [1] on public displays where they investigated what people take in and what people remember of the content on displays in an academic environment. It is online available in the workshop proceedings of AIS08 [2]. I found it worthwhile to browse the whole workshop proceedings.

[1] Rashid U. and Quigley A., "Ambient Displays in Academic Settings: Avoiding their Underutilization", Ambient Information Systems Workshop at UbiComp 2008, September 21, Seoul, South Korea (download [2], see page 26 ff)


Thursday, 7 August 2008

Christian Kray visits our Lab

Christian Kray and I were colleagues in Lancaster for a very short time – he just joined the university when I left for Munich. After his post-doc in Lancaster he moved to a position in Newcastle.

His work at the cross roads of mobile interaction and public displays is very exciting. In particular he investigates interesting concepts related to visual codes – some aspects to these ideas are discussed in “Swiss Army Knife meets Camera Phone” [1]. His new prototypes are really cool and I look forward to see/read more about them.

We realized that there are many areas where we have common interests. Perhaps there is a chance in the future to work together on some of the ideas discussed!

[1] Swiss Army Knife meets Camera Phone: Tool Selection and Interaction using Visual Markers. C. Kray and M. Rohs. (2007) In "Workshop on Mobile Interaction with the Real World at Mobile HCI 2007". Singapore, September 9, 2007.

Thursday, 10 July 2008

Embedded Information - Airport Seoul

When I arrived in Seoul at the airport I saw an interesting instance of embedded information. In Munich we wrote a workshop paper [1] about the concept of embedded information and the key criteria are:
  • Embedding information where and when it is useful
  • Embedding information in a most unobtrusive way
  • Providing information in a way that there is no interaction required

Looking at an active computer display (OK it was broken) that circled the luggage belt (it is designed to list the names of people who should contact the information desk) and a fixed display on a suitcase I was reminded of this paper. With this set-up people become aware of the information – without really making an effort. With active displays becoming more ubiquitous I expect more innovation in this domain. We currently work on some ideas related to situated and embedded displays for advertising – if we find funding we push further… the ideas are there.

[1] Albrecht Schmidt, Matthias Kranz, Paul Holleis. Embedded Information. UbiComp 2004, Workshop 'Ubiquitous Display Environments', September 2004

Wednesday, 11 June 2008

Talk by Florian Michahelles, RFID showcase at Kaufhof Essen

Florian Michahelles, associate director of the AutoID-Labs in Zürich visited our group and gave a presentation in my course on Pervaisve Computing. He introduced the vision of using RFID in businesses, gave a brief technology overview and discussed the potential impact - in a very interactive session.

Florian and I worked together in the Smart-its project and during his PhD studies he and Stavros were well know as the experts on Ikea PAX [1], [2]. In 2006 and 2007 we ran workshops on RFID technologies and published the results and a discussion on emerging trends in RFID together [3], [4].

At Kaufhof in Essen you can see a showcase of using RFID tags in garment retail. The installation includes augmented shelves, an augmented mirror, and contextual information displays in the changing rooms. The showcase is related to the European Bridge project. ...was fun playing with the system - seems to be well engineered for a prototype.

PS: Florian told me that Vlad Coroama finished his PhD. In a different context we talked earlier about his paper discussing the use of sensors to access cost for insurance [5] - he did it with cars but there are other domain where this makes sense, too.

[1] S. Antifakos, F. Michahelles, and B. Schiele. Proactive Instructions for Furniture Assembly. In UbiComp, Gothenburg, Sweden, 2002.
http://www.viktoria.se/fal/exhibitions/smart-its-s2003/furniture.pdf

[2] Florian Michahelles, Stavors Antifakos, Jani Boutellier, Albrecht Schmidt, and Bernt Schiele. Instructions immersed into the real world How your Furniture can teach you. Poster at the Fifth International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing, Seattle, USA, October 2003. http://www.mis.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de/Publications/ubipost03.pdf

[3]Florian Michahelles, Frédéric Thiesse, Albrecht Schmidt, John R. Williams: Pervasive RFID and Near Field Communication Technology. IEEE Pervasive Computing 6(3): 94-96 (2007) http://www.alexandria.unisg.ch/EXPORT/PDF/publication/38445.pdf

[4] Schmidt, A., Spiekermann, S., Gershman, A., and Michahelles, F. 2006. Real-World Challenges of Pervasive Computing. IEEE Pervasive Computing 5, 3 (Jul. 2006), 91-93 http://www.hcilab.org/events/pta2006/IEEE-PvM-b3091.pdf

[5] Vlad Coroama: The Smart Tachograph - Individual Accounting of Traffic Costs and Its Implications. Pervasive 2006: 135-152. http://www.vs.inf.ethz.ch/res/papers/coroama_pervasive2006.pdf

Saturday, 7 June 2008

Visit at Microsoft in Redmond

AJ Brush and John Krumm organize for the people who are in Redmond for the Ubicomp PC meeting a visit to Microsoft. In the morning we got a tour at the home lab – Microsoft’s vision of future home environments – was quite interesting, but had to sign an NDA.
After lunch we went over to Microsoft Research (which is in a new building). We got to see some cool demos. Andy Wilson showed us some new stuff moving the SURFACE forward (physics rocks!). I learned more about depth sensing cameras and Andy showed a fun application [1] – there is video about it, too. Patrick Baudisch talked us through the ideas of LucidTouch [2] and more general about future interaction with small mobile devices. The idea of using the finger behind the screen and the means to increase the precision has many interesting aspects. I found the set of people that work at MSR as impressive as the demos – it seems to be a really exciting work environment.

The atrium of the new building is amazing for playing Frisbee and shoot rubber band missiles. And waiting for the pizza with those toys around proved yet again that researchers are often like kids ;-)

[1] Wilson, A. Depth-Sensing Video Cameras for 3D Tangible Tabletop Interaction. Tabletop 2007: The 2nd IEEE International Workshop on Horizontal Interactive Human-Computer Systems, 2007.

[2] Wigdor, D., Forlines, C., Baudisch, P., Barnwell, J., Shen, C. LucidTouch: A See-Through Mobile Device. In Proceedings of UIST 2007, Newport, Rhode Island, October 7-10, 2007, pp. 269–278 http://www.patrickbaudisch.com/projects/lucidtouch/