Flows and interaction

Reading about support for mobile social interaction or social icebreakers I was inspired to this idea of a projector based system which would project information in front of you. The user would be presented with three or more possible flows or directions to moving each of which would expose different types of information to the user.   if the user followed a particular branch that Branch might then split up again into more detailed information.
The idea would be that if two users were exhibiting interest in the same kind of subject than they might be directed to collide with each other and then over the subject might discover they have some interest in common.

File this under experiments to do when I had a near infinite number of projectors on hand

Lancaster experiment

Yesterday was a good if exhausting trip to Lancaster to scan the display sites before the experiment begins in October. 

Lancaster university

Just visiting Lancaster university for a day. Definitely top of my list of universities with a good view. I am just finishing lunch of a very nice risotto ( some how Lancaster and quality risotto seem some how juxtaposed ) and freshly brewed coffee.

Just had the complete tour of all the screens which I hope to use in large scale study. I am quite excited by it all .

Pear Note for Mac - Useful Fruit Software

Pear Note for Mac - Useful Fruit Software

Looks quite nice. I like the notion of being able to index the entire audio file with text. I think I saw some nice work being done at a university on a system like this.

Good for interviewing people about products and taking notes.

Now mac or Ipad versions... hmmm

A good news day (

Well what a busy day Its 5:46 and I'm about to have my morning coffee. Gonzalo turned with with some AAC students and Ava which was very nice. So they are mostly Architects and Sculptors with a curiosity in things digital ( this was the old  UCL Virtual Environments course I set up a long time ago). They were very fun and it was nice to see some young faces for once.

Gonzalo and I had a good time running them through the final stage of the wineshop. while we did G, told me that Chirs Luebkeman ( Ducan Wilson's boss see my links ) from the mighty Ove Arups is doing a TED talk and he wants to use an image of the Wineshop as part of that talk eke!

Arups are also going to use  run the experiment in their london space for a while as well. This would be really cool Yvonne asked about being truly ecologically valid.

So a happy day. It was interesting I was talking to the students and it made me realise how busy things are and how much we have to play with. The students were quite envious of the kinds of things we have done to the building and more importantly the space we have to do thing with. Which is quite nice its was very good to be reminded of the positive sides of being here.

Today both Gonzalo and I managed to get 6 people through our experiments ( cool!) but for me the most interesting aspect was Gonzalo sat down and did a focus group about the place stats. He started to use the Microsoft desirability cards but in a group context which I thought was interesting. It makes you wonder what kind of work has been done in the context of focus groups and HCI.

While I'm on the good news front OUR HCI2011 workshop has been accepted ( the link to the call is here ) and I'm in a workshop for CHI ( so time to hurriedly sort CHI attendance out too).

Oh and I did I mention that Rose has got most of the grey balls painted and I've nearly completed the pads for Nicolas experiment?

Also a copy of Analog In, Digital Out arrived on my desk - I thought I would check out the Associates widget worked.

Finally the experiment begins!

Gonzalo's experiment has finally taken off with lots of visitors  I think he could easily get the base condition done this week. 


We also have three new visitors 

Vaiva Kalnikaite

Pablo Haya

Estefanía Martín

so things are going to be quite busy for a while! 

For the iPhone study - 12 participants!

I have a few more in the works plus at least one other left handed person.

If his/her results are like mine then I think it might be worth trying to recruit more.

You might be glad also to learn my Amazon book linkng service has stopped working ( like I made any money from it).

Cambridge Tourist multitouch table in the news

Here it is.

Cambridge tourist app in the news

The tourist information app is currently in the local news !

The day of the cloud approaches

OK on friday was a good day. New H-Bridges turned up from America and I left while the great guys from Electronics came over to replace all the h-bridges and multiplexers. Looks like they have the internal power supply working. I was talking to RIchie today and he seems confident that he has got more motors working, which is good. 

I'm pleased not because its necessary but because it might mean we can run the experiment for longer. 

Hopefully R. will concentrate on getting the experiment observed. 

Notes in the end we went for a direct mapping from absolute number to height. The taller the the more people are using it. The idear was to have something that looks like its moving all day ( you will always see a change). This way you always see the number of people in the building the eb and flow of the day. Could be good. 

Sensor net back on line

All the arduinos are now talking to the server!

Pressure pad on unit 2 (central stairs ) might have worn down. We need re-calibration.

the white table gets musical application

Image of the big table in use by some of the Music students doing collaborative music application on the table I designed and built. I wish I had time do work on 8 things at once. Back to writing grant application.

Existental insideness

thounght for two experiments.
1.investigating by interview peoples desktops. Both phisical and virtual
when users have been using software for long periods they don't think consusly but use there body to remember.
2. Displays using expressions faces to visualize data like energy consumption up or down ( so a more emotional engagement). Also I suspect that text, images, signs and people are different categories when it comes to how people read signs. 

3. Why not put the attrium study up as an MSC project to gain more data. We have the write up why not get more data. 

Goal

Well I spoke to Yvonne and said I could have functioned with 15 and prefered 20. Paul said he would like 30 so I put up 4 posters and sent out another begging email.

As of this afternoon we have 31 responses (yes!).
I'll keep posters up and process all the data for Monday next week.

ON the bad news front the floor pads have not been delivered and I need to reorder them ( DHL failed to deliver they had the wrong number ).

New idea of the day

On train to meeting had an itreasing thought about how to compute more about position of amibent displays.

Then had good idea about using the big screen. Basically put something up on the big screen and project something on the floor and measure how often people 'see' it. Do floor and wall displays work equally attractive. Big advantage of this kind of experiment is don't have to get the motion detection stuff working to make it an experiment.

The other idea is to run the does an ambient display make a difference by visualising the cookies which are used by people to track you. See if visualising this changes peoples security behaviours. Might be another persuasive type paper. Must do it quick before big display gets used.

Experiment from hell well..

This morning the expierment ended and I sent out the questionnaire. Paul made some last minuet adjustments which took me an hour to produce. Sent out the invite email and then got on the train to have a meeting at the DANA centre.

Talking with Y said I would be OK with min 15 responses and could write a paper with 20. In fact I had 15 partial with 19 full responses. I'm quite impressed people remembered words from a month ago to! Inital reponses look to be the reverse of what I was expecting but I have to chase up people in computer science to take part.

This experiment is officially cursed!

I was setting up the projectors for the second run-through and ping one of the projector bulbs goes!

NO! 

cursed research continues

Paul thought he had found a flaw in the experiment which I think does not exist. The big problem has been the weather. Snow has stopped people coming in the building again. We are going to re-run the experiment or just continue it for the next few days and end it next Wednesday. 

Today I'm at home but having a conversation with R.

Cursed and not so cursed research.

Had a skype meeting with Yvonne and Richie yesterday. Richie is in the US and is going to come over and prototype a physical visualisation of the movement experiment.  We are going to come up with ways to visualise the data. 

Richie is on for repeating the experiment in the US.

The cursed experiment is on hold for two days due to the snow. This won't effect the validity of the final experiment. 

I've been reading up about FLEX sounds intreasting I'm going to get it running on my mac. Perhaps I can do the zoomable interface idea again but this time in real time on mac and PC with minimal load time. I've been trying an other touchSimulator - not wildly impressed but I like the transparency stuff. 

More evil ideas

Puma

Origin: COCONUT 
Physical meaning: inverse kinematics of a 3R robot 
8 equations with 8 unknowns

  x1^2 + x2^2 - 1 =0 x3^2 + x4^2 - 1 =0 x5^2 + x6^2 - 1 =0 x7^2 + x8^2 - 1 =0 0.004731*x1*x3 - 0.3578*x2*x3 - 0.1238*x1 - 0.001637*x2 - 0.9338*x4 + x7=0 1 =0 0.2238*x1*x3 + 0.7623*x2*x3 + 0.2638*x1 - 0.07745*x2 -0.6734*x4 -0.6022 =0 x6*x8 + 0.3578*x1 + 0.004731*x2 =0 -0.7623*x1 + 0.2238*x2 + 0.3461 =0 

Ranges: [-1,1] for all unknowns 
Solving method: GradientSolve+HullConsistencyStrong+ +3B 
Solutions:: 16 (exact) 

Computation time (May 2004):

So output the sum of all the outputs ( how far from zero they are).