Response: Equal Opportunities and Shareable Interfaces

Summary:

The purpose of the research conducted in this paper, was to examine different types of workspaces. These workspaces consisted of 3 types – a single laptop workstation, a tabletop and a mixture of tabletops and tangibles. In these workspaces, they examined a task and how they were completed in each one. The primary finding in this paper was that the mixture provided equal participation in terms of communication. The tabletop workspace had more equal participation physically and digitally. The laptop workspace, understandably, had the most communication, which was understandable given that one person was controlling the workspace and needed to communicate. Another finding from the research was that more coordinated and highly constructive collaborations occurred in the mixed workspace. In essence, its design encouraged and enforced true team collaboration. This lead the researchers to believe that configuration and entry point factors are major determinations in how effective shareable interfaces can be.

Response:

A lot of the data and findings in this paper, to me, seemed fairly obvious. If one person controls a laptop, then it makes sense that in a team, there is going to be more verbal communication than digital, especially compared to workspaces that have tabletops. The same is said vice versa. However, to me, the majority of this paper highlighted other, more interesting things. For me, the point of a multi-surface environment/system is to support highly collaborative work, and judging from the findings from the mixed workspace, this seems to be the case. With many surfaces and people in the room, you naturally have to be coordinated in tasks, and if this is coupled with appropriate tasks/software, it can be far, far more efficient than the single laptop/desktop workspace. My only critique of this paper is that the task essentially lead to this conclusion. I would have liked to see a task that would require multiple screens to be effective, for example, one with multiple maps needed for spatial analysis. Overall, I like the findings (because they support my research!)

CODE SPACE: TOUCH + AIR GESTURE HYBRID INTERACTION FOR SUPPORTING DEVELOPER MEETINGS

This paper addresses the need for information sharing between developers during important design meetings. They point that most meetings are single presenter style and developers need to share their ideas with each other. The system enables interaction with the shared display with the use of a hand or a touch phone (laptop/ touch pad). A person can point, select, and move objects on the shared display. Similarly, the system enables peer-to-peer sharing through drag and drop air gestures from one touch phone to another. The system supported the following air gestures; pointing with the finger, flat hand for selection and moving. Also temporary tracing and underlining with the use of arm + phone.

This paper highlights some of the problems associated with air gestures:

Extensive use of arm/hand waving makes it difficult to be socially acceptable.

Tactile response: Difficult to identify a gesture to trigger a distinct action. For example, In order to perform an action like, Save, you can make the pen click gesture.

Imperfect Recognition

Accidental Activation: Difficult to identify when the person is gesturing for the application or in general.

Segmentation Ambiguity: Gestures are continuous and it is difficult to distinguish the start and end of a gesture.

They overcame some of these issues with the use of gesture + touch enabled interaction in Code Space. An example of such as gesture is pointing the device at a specific object on the shared display and pressing the thumb to copy the object to the device. In contrast, they also provided the gesture only interaction for touch pad/laptop. You can point with your first hand at the object on the shared display and then with the second hand point at your device where you want the object. The order of selection determines the direction of transfer.

The researchers point the importance of knowing who is manipulating the display and whether to share the information provided by someone. Similarly, in peer-to-peer sharing pushing information is allowed, however, pulling information is not.

According to the results of the study, the developers liked the Code Space and were willing to use the provided gestures, except for pointing at another person.

Re: Visual Separation in Mobile Multi-Display Environments

Summary

This paper investigated the effects of visual separation in the context of Mobile Multi-Display Environments (MMDEs) and contrasts these with fixed MDE results, while highlighting the design factors for Mobile MDEs. The study focuses on a novel eye-tracking methodology for measuring switches in visual context between displays and identifies that MMDEs offer increased design flexibility over traditional MDEs in terms of visual separation.

Opinion

A key question in designing collaborative applications for any platform is whether to use single or multiple displays. This has become an important consideration as the emergence of projector phones – cell phones with built-in projectors – potentially enable new forms of collaboration around mobile devices. On the other hand applications of eye-tracking in the research of collaborative tasks have been minimal to date. The visual-separation system setup presented in this paper can be considered specific to the field of the collaborative programming, and could be a viable starting point for future designs. Nevertheless, I believe the main challenges of the collaborative visual attention analysis are related to inconsistencies in the data analysis.

Summary Response Week 9: Multi-Displays/Multi-Surface

CPSC 601.25 Week 9 Part 1

Paper

In this response I will discuss a paper that examines the 'visual separation' in mobile multi-surface systems and a paper which presents a set of gestures for use in traditional multi-display environments.

Towards Minority Report

In 2002 the blockbuster movie minority report appeared, among the high technology design of the film was a complete re-imagining of interaction with computers. Large semi-transparent screens, controlled at a distance, allowed digital objects like movies and picture to be dragged, flipped, expanded and moved to other devices with a flick of the wrist. This vision seems to live on with some multi-surface work as researchers try to implement a practical system that employs these interaction ideas.

Code Space

The authors of this papers have taken the multi-surface system concept the farthest in the literature we've reviewed. Their target problem is developer meetings, where several developers meet to discuss programming tasks or difficulties. They use the Kinect to track 'physical gestures' such as waving your arms or moving your hands - in conjunction with a mobile phone or laptop - allowing for what they call cross-device gestures. These gestures are all very application domain specific, designed to enable the interactions that the authors claim are useful for developer meetings. So much of the interaction is merely 'aided' by the device, and the primary gestural interaction is done by pointing or selecting objects. One weakness is that the evaluation for the paper is very weak, most people evaluating the system outside of an actual meeting are likely to be overly positive. It would also be interesting to see what kind of 'cross-device' gestures would be possible for a different task.

Pico Idea

The authors of the second paper seem to have taken a different approach to the problem. Previous research into multi-display environments had uncovered that 'visual separation' is an important factor, which is consistent with common sense. If a screen is placed in a way that is difficult to consult, is too far away or placed in awkward way it will be difficult to work with. These micro-context switches will probably delay work and eliminate the benefits provided by the displays. But the authors here are interested specifically in devices which will contain 'pico-projectors'. Phones outfitted with a projector - that will allow users to project a screen out against a wall or floor. In all probability - and despite "estimates" that 20 million phones will have pico-projectors in 3 years - these phones will probably not take off. The authors do an experiment with a fixed and free cell phone which they've outfitted with a projector and determine some information about eye tracking. They find some design principles but it's not clear that these are useful for systems which do not rely on projectors and which interact with traditional multi-surface systems. This is because the device is free to move but the screens are not.

RE: Sleep as a victim of the “time crunch” – A multinational analysis

Summary

A major aim of this research was to present analyses of reports of decreased sleep, which were based on estimate data, and were not supported by findings of flat or increased sleep time in time diaries. The analyses suggest that there is no credible evidence of any decline in sleep in most of the countries surveyed. According to the authors, the reports of this research is consistent with earlier studies showing no long-term decrease in free time or effects of a 24/7 economy as a reflection of a societal time crunch from work, family or other pressures on personal time.

Opinion

Many would agree that the growing trend for late nights and early mornings is actually a ticking time bomb for the modern society. There appears to be an expectation in today’s society to fit more into an individual’s daily life. The whole work-life balance struggle seems to be causing too many people to trade in their sleeping time to ensure they complete all the tasks before them.

Nonetheless, the hypothetical question that comes to mind is: What if lack of sleep is the reason why people try to fill up more of their daily time with work? Perhaps a case could be made for the likelihood of causality to flow in both directions. I believe that a prospective randomization survey of the inherent and variant factors that precipitate reduced sleep hours – on one hand, and the increased tendency to spend more hours at work – on the other hand, might establish a bi-directional causal link between the two issues.

Sleep As Victim Of The Time Crunch

This articles addresses the issue of sleep depreviation as it is extensively discussed on the Media. Therefore, the article looks at sleep times recorded in the Time Diary surveys conducted in US, Canada, and other 21 countries that conduct such surveys. According to the time diary surveys in Canada and America there is an increase in sleep since 2000 i.e 59hrs/week of sleep (8.2 hours on weekdays, 8.9 hours on Saturdays and 9.5 hours on Sundays). Moreover, the survey results show that Women sleep 1-2 hrs more than Men in Us and Canada, as well a few other 21 countries. The reason is predicted to be more education and working hours of men than women. However, according to a few international countries like Japan they found that men sleep more than women. They do conclude that the time diaries may not be accurate because Americans tend to show themselves as more productive. However, according to a survey on students sleep time was marked as the most enjoyable time. The researchers end the article by saying that the hype of sleep deprivation in the media might be due to ineffective sleep, i.e insomnia, stress, etc.

Comments: I feel that people are not getting the time to relax and release household/work pressures and stress, that is leading to ineffective sleep. People don't need sleep they need more relaxed happy time or stressless work and household environment.

Sleep as a Victim of Time Crunch

I actually found a slight disconnect between the title and the content of the paper. The main reason is that they are talking about sleep being a victim of time crunch, yet such term is never defined. They speak of the external pressure of people affecting sleep, yet they don't draw correlations as to what effects the "time-crunch" had on sleep. If I were to keep a diary of my sleeping hours, chances are that my school days average 4-5 hours a day, weekends average 12 hours a day, and if you gave me a whole week off, I'd probably average more than 12 hours a day. Being under "time-crunch" to me would mean that I have assignments, etc. and chances are that I average less hours of sleep.

Another aspect that struck me a bit is that I felt a bit uninformed in terms of data collection. A major cultural factor that could potentially affect the results is the concept of napping, as some cultures value napping as a necessary thing in our every day life. This means 1-2 more hours of sleep per day, and also means that there will be less hours of sleep per night. To my perspective, this would change the number of hours in Brazil and Spain, for example.

Despite how I wanted to see a more correlational study as to what affects sleep, I still found this paper to be quite interesting as to how they put together a lot of data and compare it across gender and nations. I also found it interesting how sleep has gained so much value in terms of how it is regarded as such an important activity. I also do wonder to what extent a healthy sleep pattern would improve people's working hours, again going back to this unexplained concept of time crunch.