Apple recently unveiled one of its newest creations: a mouse that responds to gestures and finger movements instead of the usual clicks and scroll wheel that come standard on a regular mouse. Dubbed “Magic Mouse“, this mouse uses a special optical laser that can read movement on any surface. This means the user does not have to have a mouse pad; the Magic Mouse can be used on just about any surface. One of the best features of this mouse is that it allows the user to have many different mouse configurations in one. For example, a left handed person can configure the mouse so that right click will be on the left side of the mouse, which fits a left handed person better. The mouse allows its user to click and double click anywhere on the touch surface, as well as utilize a scroll function that is harnessed by dragging a finger along the surface of the mouse. Another great feature of this mouse is that it allows a user to hold down the control key on the keyboard and drag a finger along the touchpad to zoom in. The Magic Mouse also offers a “momentum scrolling” option, where the user can increase the scrolling speed of the mouse by dragging their finger faster or slower along the touchpad.

 Devin Mullen

Matthew Lape, a recently graduated Project54 student, passed along this interesting video (shown below) regarding a device being developed at MIT called SixthSense. This wearable gesture-driven device consists of a pocket projector, a camera, and a mirror. These components are driven by the user’s smartphone and allow the user to make various gestures on different surfaces to not only obtain information (such as detecting what items the user picks up at the grocery store) but to also display information pertinent to the user (is the item a good buy for the user?). It’s certainly interesting to see the importance of not only selecting pertinent information to show the user, but the methods on how to display them is equally important as well. Here at Project54, Michael, Ankit, and Oszkar provide an example on the importance of displaying information with work on the multi-touch table.

Mark Taipan

As my colleagues Zeljko and Mike have already blogged about, we attended the 2009 Ubiquitous Computing Conference in Orlando, Florida. It was a very interesting gathering with some vanguard research topics. For me, the one-minute madness was a new and exciting experience. Poster authors have to present their research in a single minute. At prior conferences I observed two distinct classes of one-minute presentations: serious ones and funny ones. The purpose of the first class is obvious, while the second type tries to convince people to visit the poster stand by using some witty slides and usually an open question that would be answered at the time of visit. For this conference I decided to try my luck with the funny presentation. Here are my slides, so you can judge for yourself:

The following text accompanies the slides:

Slide2: Everyone likes to take fun vacation pictures.
Slide3: But an hour long slide show of these pictures might not be as much fun for your friends as it is for you.
Slide4: So how can you stop your friends from falling asleep? We propose a new storytelling environment which integrates 3 new technologies: GPS enabled smart phones, virtual globe applications and multitouch interaction.
Slide5: This environment could create a much more enjoyable user experience for your friends compared to a slide show. It might even be the killer app for multitouch!
Slide6: If you would like to know more about our research please come by to see our poster and hear about some much more serious applications.

Acknowledements to Hyomin Kim and Alex Vapirev for their great acting skills shown in the slides.

Here you can also see the layout of our poster. If you click on it, a larger view will appear.

Let me know if you have any comments on the presentation and poster. Thanks!

Oszkar

Last week my colleague Zeljko Medenica and I visited AgeLab of the Massachussetts Institute of Technology. The visit was organized by the New England Chapter of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society (NEC-HFES). This laboratory is investigating the role of technology in the human aging process. One of the big issues that older people face is driving safety. Bryan Reimer gave a very interesting lecture on driving research done at the lab.

He emphasized that in order to know more about people’s driving behavior, it is very important to know their workload. The workload measures they use are very similar to the ones we collect in our experiments: driving performance, physiological measures and subjective ratings.
After the lecture, we had a hands-on experience with the MIT AgeLab test vehicle and driving simulator, thanks to Bryan, Jarrod Orszulak and Bruce Mehler. The proprietary Volvo test car allows them to collect naturalistic driving data using many kinds of sensors. The driving simulator is based on an STI simulation engine. The car cab is a fixed-base VW Beetle placed in front of a projection screen.

In one of the studies done at AgeLab, researchers compared results from the driving simulator with naturalistic data and found that physiological measures correlate very well over the different platforms. It was very interesting to hear the experience of fellow workload estimation researchers and compare methodologies and measures used. Thanks Brian, Jarrod and Bruce for hosting us.

Oszkar Palinko

Given that the fall has already started, is there a better place for a conference than Florida? Just a couple of days ago professor Kun, Mike, Oskar and I came back from UbiComp2009, which was held in Orlando, FL. The conference was very interesting with lots of participants from all over the world.

One new thing that I haven’t had a chance to experience myself at a conference before is the “one minute madness” session. The purpose of this session is to make it possible for all poster presenters to introduce their work in a relatively short period of time. This way, all participants get an overall impression about the available topics and can decide in advance which poster presentations they would like to attend later.

This time I presented a poster about a pilot study where we explored in-car augmented reality navigation aids (see picture below). Just briefly, in this experiment we compared a standard navigation aid with a head-up display (HUD) augmented reality (AR) navigation aid regarding driving performance and visual attention. The purpose of the HUD AR navigation aid is to project the navigation route directly on the windshield, so that no distraction caused by looking at the in-car display would take place. Our preliminary results show that there is no difference in driving performance, but there is a significant difference regarding visual attention in favor of HUD AR. We are currently working on extending this study further and exploring other possibilities (such as head-down display AR aid), so more posts about this topic will follow soon. And hopefully more conferences too…

This summer, Oskar, Ankit, Professor Kun, and I had a poster submission accepted at the Ubicomp 2009 conference. Unfortunately Ankit could not make it, since he was back in India for school. The rest of us and Zeljko attended the conference. During the conference, there was a 2 hour period where Posters, Videos, and Demos were displayed. During this time, Oskar and I, stood by the poster and presented our project to any interested attendees, and there were plenty. Zeljko stood nearby at his own poster. It was a great learning experience, to interact with the other researchers and present our work to them. The other attendees also had some good advice on other areas our project could be applied, or projects with similar goals that might be helpful. Oskar and I also took turns ‘manning the post(er)’ so that we could each see the other projects on display. Below is a picture of an interested researcher at our poster.

Overall, the conference was really awesome, and it was great to experience both the research presentations and community.

Mike Litchfield