CHI 2010

This year’s CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems was held in Atlanta, GA, the home of Coca Cola, CNN, AT&T, and Chick-fil-A.

The conference hosted more than 2300 scientists, behavioral psychologists, designers, and performance artists – all exploring ways computers and humans interact. For many, the trip lasted much longer then expected due to travel disruptions caused by volcanic ash clouds.

As always, attending CHI was a race against time: 100+ sessions in 10 parallel tracks, with dozens of SIGs (Special Interest Groups), exhibitions, demos, showcases, and courses packed in four full days. In addition, plentiful of social events, parties, and meetings were competing for attention. Picking the right sessions and events required careful planning – and luck!

Here are some of the interesting contributions from the conference.

A.J. Brush (Microsoft Research) and Junius Gunaratne (UC Irvine) presented “Newport: Enabling Sharing During Mobile Calls” – a collaborative application for sharing context (location) and content (photos and notes) during mobile phone calls. The system supports using a computer during a call to make it easier to share content from the phone or launch screen sharing, as well as make use of the broadband connection available through the computer. Because sharing is only available during the call, Newport addresses privacy concerns when sharing sensitive information like location. Newport bridges the capabilities of a mobile phone and desktop computer by leveraging their strengths.

Jeff Quinn and Tuan Tran from Sprint Nextel presented “Attractive Phones Don’t Have To Work Better: Independent Effects of Attractiveness, Effectiveness, and Efficiency on Perceived Usability”. In a large-scale usability evaluation with 106 participants, they investigated the interplay between attractiveness, effectiveness, and efficiency to determine whether attractiveness accounts for additional variance in usability ratings beyond that, which is explained by effectiveness and efficiency. They conclude that high attractiveness can compensate for ineffective and inefficient performance, leading people to perceive a phone to be highly usable despite obvious usability problems.

Chris Harrison along with Desney Tan and Dan Morris (all Microsoft Research) presented a very interesting contribution “Skinput: Appropriating the Body as an Input Surface” for a packed audience. The technology appropriates the human body for acoustic transmission, allowing the skin to be used as an input surface. A wearable, bio-acoustic sensing array built into an armband provides an always available, naturally portable, and on-body finger input system. In an experimental evaluation with users the overall accuracy was as high as 90%. In addition, the system was enhanced with a pico-projector, allowing interactive elements to be rendered on the skin. Proof-of-concept examples included navigating hierarchical menus and dialing phone numbers using a numeric keypad on a user’s palm.

Yang Li and colleagues (University of Washington) introduced “FrameWire: A Tool for Automatically Extracting Interaction Logic from Paper Prototyping Tests”. FrameWire is a computer vision-based system that automatically extracts interaction flows from the video recording. The video recording can be an outcome of a paper prototype walkthrough or a user test with paper prototypes. The tool offers a structural view of the video recording that allows a designer or a stakeholder to easily distill and understand the design concept and user interaction behaviors. In addition, it can automatically generate an interactive HTML-based prototype that can be used for further evaluation or development.

Paul Hoover and colleagues from Microsoft presented “Augmented Reality, Surface Style” during the alt.chi session “Monsters Attack!” (alt.chi is a track for unusual, challenging, experimental, and thought-provoking work). In line with the session title, what Paul presented was – a monster. More specifically, a bent fiber optic grid enclosed in a toy monster that is used on Microsoft Surface. Because the Surface uses light for interaction, the user can interact with it through the eye of the monster represented by the fiber optic bundle.

In a related approach, Pat Baudisch and team (Hasso Plattner Institute) presented “Lumino: Tangible Blocks for Tabletop Computers Based on Glass Fiber Bundles”. Lumino is a system of building blocks that can be used to construct a three-dimensional structure on top of a diffuse illumination based tabletop computer. They present several examples, one of which is the Lumino construction kit that allows users to put together simple block constructions. The system automatically logs construction activities, checks the soundness of the hypothetical building, and informs the user about potential flaws and construction alternatives.

Florian Block and colleagues from the Lancaster University demonstrated “Touch-Display Keyboards: Transforming Keyboards into Interactive Surfaces”. The Touch-Display Keyboard (TDK) combines the physical-ergonomic qualities of the conventional keyboard with dynamic display and touch-sensing embedded in each key. The TDK effectively transforms the keyboard into an interactive surface that is seamlessly integrated with the interaction space of GUIs, extending graphical output, mouse interaction and three-state input to the keyboard.

Chris Harrison and Scott Hudson (Carnegie Mellon University) presented “Minput: Enabling Interaction on Small Mobile Devices with High-Precision, Low-Cost, Multipoint Optical Tracking”. Minput is a sensing and input method that enables intuitive and accurate interaction on very small devices – ones too small for practical touch screen use and with limited space to accommodate physical buttons. The entire device can be used as an input mechanism, instead of the screen, avoiding occlusion by fingers. The Minput prototype recognizes gestures such as flicking, twisting and motion. Example applications include hierarchical navigation interfaces (e.g. iPod-like audio player), scrolling and zooming (e.g. photo gallery or web browser), and conventional WIMP-like interfaces (e.g. mouse movements).

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