Tools for Ubiquitous HCI Eduardo Velloso

Traditional HCI

Ubicomp HCI

Embedded

Ubicomp HCI

Tangible

Ubicomp HCI

Multitouch

Ubicomp HCI

Whole body

Overview  Embedded Interaction  Tutorial 1: Digital Camera with.NET Gadgeteer  Tangible and Multitouch Interaction  Tutorial 2: Homemade Reactable  Whole-Body Interaction  Tutorial 3: Motion Capture with Kinect  Putting it all together

Embedded Interaction  “Embedded means enclosed; these chips and software are not considered computers. They are unseen parts of everyday things.”  Malcolm McCullough, Digital Ground, 2004

Components  Input  Buttons, knobs, pressure, temperature, light, accelerometers…  Output  LEDs, displays, DC motors, servos, sound, vibration…  Microcontrollers  PIC, Arduino, Gadgeteer, Phidgets…

Toolkits  Arduino (starter kit £37)  arduino.cc “Arduino is an open-source electronics prototyping platform based on flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software. It's intended for artists, designers, hobbyists, and anyone interested in creating interactive objects or environments.”

Toolkits  Lilypad (starter kit £85)  arduino.cc/en/Main/ArduinoBoardLilyPad “The LilyPad Arduino is a microcontroller board designed for wearables and e-textiles. It can be sewn to fabric and similarly mounted power supplies, sensors and actuators with conductive thread. ”

Toolkits  Phidgets (starter kit $230)  “Phidgets are a set of "plug and play" building blocks for low cost USB sensing and control from your PC.”

Toolkits .NET Gadgeteer FEZ Spider (starter kit £177)

.NET Gadgeteer  Platform conceived to make it easier to design and build custom electronic devices and systems for a range of ubiquitous and mobile computing scenarios.  Consists of 3 components:  Solder-less modular electronic hardware  Object-oriented managed software libraries  3D design and construction tools ++

Philosophy  Flexibility  Software + Hardware + Form factor  Accessibility Extensibility  Low threshold for new users  Versatility  High ceiling for advanced users  Scales up to sophisticated device and complex systems  Extensibility  Open source

Connections with sockets

Software  Designer

Software  Automatic generation of code

Programming  Object-oriented  C#  The modules are the objects!  Each modules has  Properties  Methods  Events

Arduino x Gadgeteer Arduino  Setup()  Initialisation of pins and variables  Loop()  Continuous read and write from pins Gadgeteer  Constructor  Initialise variables  Set event listeners  Listeners  Set the behaviour of the system when the event happens

Tutorial: Digital Camera

Resources  Papers  Hodges, Steve, et al. "Exploring Physical Prototyping Techniques for Functional Devices using.NET Gadgeteer." (2013).  Villar, Nicolas, et al. ". NET gadgeteer: a platform for custom devices."Pervasive Computing (2012):  Official website 

Tangible Interaction  Prioritises as principles of design:  Tangibility and materiality  Physical embodiment of data  Bodily interaction  Embeddedness in real spaces and data  Blurs the boundaries between input and output

Reactable  Tangible modular synthesizer  Controlled by manipulating tangible acrylic pucks  Multi-touch interaction  Collaborative performances

reacTIVision  Underlying sensor component for the Reactable  Open-source, cross-platform computer vision framework for the fast and robust tracking of fiducial markers attached onto physical objects, as well as multi-touch finger tracking.

reacTIVision  reacTIVision  Standalone application  Sends TUIO messages via UDP port 3333  TUIO protocol  Designed for encoding the state of tangible objects and multi-touch events  TUIO client  Your application! reacTIVision vision engine TUIO Client

Events  TUIO Objects  Represent the fiducial markers  Add, remove and update  X, Y, orientation, motion and rotation speed and acceleration  TUIO Cursors  Represent fingers  Add, remove and update  X, Y, speed and acceleration

Tutorial: Reactable  Material:  Box  Glass  Tracing paper  Webcam  Computer

Tutorial: Reactable  Download the reacTIVision server  reactivision.sourceforge.net/  Print the symbols  Build your controllers  Program your client with the functionality you want by listening to TUIO messages

Tutorial: Reactable  Example TUIO client

Whole Body Interaction  The integrated capture and processing of human signals from physical, physiological, cognitive and emotional sources to generate feedback to those sources for interaction in a digital environment.

Motion Tracking  Optical: Infrastructure-based  Inertial: Wearable

Optical IR projection Reflective markers IR cameras Triangulation

Optical  Commercial solutions:  Vicon (£70,000 - £90,000)   Optitrack (£6,500 - £20,000)   Kinect (£90 - £200) 

Inertial Accelerometer Gyroscope Magnetometer

Inertial  Commercial solutions  Xsens (£30,000-£60,000)   Animazoo (£30,000)   Wiimote (£20) 

Motion Tracking Optical  Easier setup on the user  More complex setup on the infrastructure  Not subject to magnetic interference  Cameras need a clear field of view to the markers Inertial  Harder setup on the user  Not much infrastructure needed  Subject to magnetic interference  Occlusion is not a problem

Microsoft Kinect  RGB camera  Depth camera  Microphone  Motor

Microsoft Kinect

Developing for Kinect  Kinect for Windows Runtime  Kinect for Windows SDK  Kinect for Windows Developer Toolkit

Kinect Studio  Allows you to record and playback the data from the Kinect to test applications.

Putting it all together  What if we’ve got a whole bunch of sensors and we would like to combine what they are sensing to generate more sophisticated output?

Problems  Different timestamps  Different sample rates  Modularity

Context Toolkit  “Facilitate the building of context-aware applications using the Java programming language”.  Georgia Tech  Dey, A. K., Abowd, G. D., and Salber, D A conceptual framework and a toolkit for supporting the rapid prototyping of context-aware applications. Hum.-Comput. Interact. 16, 2 (Dec. 2001),

Java Context Awareness Framework  “Java-based set of API’s for creating context-aware applications”  Aarhus University  Jakob E. Bardram. The Java Context Awareness Framework (JCAF) - A Service Infrastructure and Programming Framework for Context-Aware Applications. In Hans Gellersen, Roy Want, and Albrecht Schmidt, editors, Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Pervasive Computing (Pervasive 2005), Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Munich, Germany, May Springer Verlag.

Context Recognition Network Toolbox  “The Context Recognition Network (CRN) Toolbox allows to quickly build distributed, multi-modal context recognition systems by simply plugging together reusable, parameterizable components.”  ETH Zurich  Bannach, D., Amft, O., Lukowicz, P.: Rapid Prototyping of Activity Recognition Applications. In: IEEE Pervasive Computing. Vol 7:2, 2008, ISSN:

Cosm  “Cosm is a secure, scalable platform that connects devices and products with applications to provide real-time control and data storage”  Originally called Pachube

What’s else?  Eye interfaces  Gestural interfaces  Wearable computing  Sensory interfaces  Affective interfaces

Contact  