TM13
May
CHI2007 Highlights
Ideal Mechanism was at the ACM Computer/Human Interaction 2007 conference in San Jose, California, to hear how some of the best minds in academia and industry are innovating our interactions with smart machines. In the proceedings, there are a wealth of useful research papers; here are some highlights from the demo room after the break.
Soap, developed by Patrick Baudisch and his colleagues at Microsoft, is a variation on the mouse which can be operated with one hand independent of a desk surface. The prototype is constructed using an off the shelf compact wireless mouse, which is extracted from its housing and placed in a smooth transparent container. This container is then sewed into a closed fabric sack, and the whole device is manipulated similar to how one might flip around a slippery bar of soap in one’s hand. Applications are foreseen in control of mobile devices and gaming.
Rexplorer, developed by a large team from RWTH Aachen University and ETH Zurich is a device which encourages tourism in the German city of Regensburg with a geotagged game. At the heart of this game is a handheld device similar in form factor to a remote control, which features GPS, a camera, audio, and an LCD. Explorers are led through the city in search of “paranormal activity”, which they find with the aid of the Rexplorer device. At these locations, they cast “spells” by making special gestures which are cleverly identified with signal processing of the built in camera. Real history is mixed with the fictional back story, and the explorers are encouraged to take pictures along the way, which are geotagged and recorded in a custom souvenir blog for each user.
Building Upon Everyday Play is a mashup of Control Freaks, originally developed by Haiyan Zhang at the Interaction Design Institute IVREA, and Exemplar from Bjorn Hartman of the Stanford HCI group. Control Freaks are devices containing inertial sensors which attach to everyday objects in order to turn them into playful controls. Exemplar provides these devices with a rapid tool to implement applications around them. Together, these ideas allow for pervasive game play for fun and work.