|
Microsoft Research selected 7 proposals for the
“Build, Create and Enhance: Intelligent Environments in the
Everyday” Call for Proposals.
Our goal was
to gain
insights into future applications of Intelligent Environments and
their underlying principles. In particular, we
were
looking for
innovative ideas to model and build these personal applications of the future. This includes a
better understanding of how Intelligent Environments can, and will be,
integrated into people’s daily life as well as new forms of
interaction and devices with different form factors from today’s
standard desktop PC. We were also interested in
investigating how Intelligent Environments can stimulate human
intelligence, for instance either in unleashing one’s own creative
potential and skills or through enhancing communication with emotions.
Award Recipients
Everyday Special
– “ Supporting playful experiences in everyday life
at home
Marianne Graves-Petersen, University of Aarhus, Denmark
The purpose of this project is to explore how new ways of applying
interactive technology can make everyday life at home more playful and
engaging, making everyday special.
In current research and development of interactive technology for the
home, there seems to be an implicit assumption that people wish to live
a very rational and efficient life in their homes. However, home is the
scene of a range of activities of very diverse characteristics. e.g.
having fun, laugh, hiding stuff, making love, crying, surprise, excitement,
keeping secrets, power, boredom, engagement and play. This is not to
suggest that all aspects of life need to be pervaded with interactive
technology, but as evidently technology permeates our homes and domestic
materials increasingly become digitised, we need to make sure that the
way in which these materials are handled in our homes also corresponds with
the way of living in homes in all its messy, complex and diverse forms.
The project delivers an approach to designing for playful living with
users. It produces exemplar visions in the form of a video prototype on
playful living and finally an aspect of this vision is developed in the
form of a prototype.
Sonic interventions
– Identifying requirements for ambient audio
displays in the home
David Frohlich, University of Surrey, United Kingdom
The underlying objective of this project is to examine the role and use of sound in
the home and to uncover some new uses through a series of ‘sonic
interventions’.
While families spend considerable effort decorating their homes with
visual imagery and artefacts, relatively little attention is paid to the
design of the domestic soundscape. Current audio technology such as
radio, hi fi systems, TV and games add sound to the living soundscape of
a home, but in ways which can sometimes be wearing, interruptive and
annoying. The ‘Sonic interventions’ will be content creation exercises
conducted with a small number of families to decorate and modify the
sounds in different rooms of their homes. The resulting
understandings and sonic demonstrations will then be used to identify
candidate new technologies that might be used to intelligently manage
and enhance the domestic soundscape.
The Tangible MediaTable
– Design and evaluation of a tangible music
browsing and performance platform
Sergi Jordà , Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain
The MediaTable project aims to design a tangible music browser platform, which integrates into the everyday environment the
handling of a digital music collection and its real-time musical
manipulation.
Using the reacTable framework the musical practices
of the last decade will be translated into the tangible domain: Design,
implementation and evaluation of a new “Digital Media Centre” inspired from the DJ
paradigm, which will allow the browsing, presentation and real-time
musical manipulation of a personal musical collection on a table-top
interactive display.
In the background of this project lays the idea that the very special, precise and demanding
needs of real-time computer music control and interaction, have much to
bring to more general areas of Human Computer Interaction, and that the learning resulting from
that research will spread beyond its original musical domain. A tangible
user interface will allow us, in turn, to reinterpret successful
musical models in a context as free as possible of traditional burden,
eliminating the ubiquitous dedicated pointing devices, sliders and
menus, without mimicking analogue turntables either.
Alice in Wonderland (ALICE) – Cultural computing as an interactive
experience
Matthias Rauterberg,
Technische Universiteit Eindhoven 2, Netherlands
The project ALICE is about cultural computing as an
interactive, entertaining experience inspired by Alice in Wonderland.
In the scope of this project interactive adventures are experiences
provided by an Augmented Reality (AR) environment based on selected
parts from Lewis Carroll’s book “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland”. The
user assumes the role of Alice and explores an interactive narrative.
ALICE is an exploration of interactive story-telling in AR. By
exploiting the unique characteristics of AR compared to established
media such as film and interactive media, the project uses AR as a new
medium for edutainment and entertainment. Innovations include the
refashioning of conventions used in film and interactive tools for the
development of an AR narrative, and the use of simple artificial virtual
and real characters (avatar and robot respectively) to create an
immersive interactive experience. ALICE would also be the first
prototype that demonstrates the feasibility of advanced robot technology
for entertainment in a complex narrative.
Questions, not answers – Re-envisioning mobile search
Matt Jones, University of Wales Swansea, United Kingdom
The aim of this project is to completely re-envision mobile search.
Instead of investigating the most efficient and effective ways of
providing search results, the answers that is, the
value of giving access to previous queries, the questions relating to a
user’s location will be considered. The hypothesis is that by exposing what other people
have searched for, users will gain rich insights into a location’s
character. Furthermore, the approach may promote a style of interaction
with this intelligence in the environment that is playful, intrigue-led
and serendipitous. The project will see three probes deployed into the
environment to help us validate the hypothesis as well as providing
working technology proofs-of-concept.
Roombots – Modular robotics for adaptive and self-organising furniture
Auke
Ijspeert, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
(EPFL), Switzerland
The objective of this project is to merge technologies from information
technology, roomware, and robotics such as to design adaptive and
intelligent furniture.
The project intends to design and control modular robots, called
Roombots, to be used as building blocks for furniture that moves,
self-assembles, self-reconfigures and self-repairs. Modular robots are
robots made of multiple simple robotic modules that can attach and
detach. Connectors between units allow the creation of arbitrary and
changing structures depending on the task to be solved. Therefore
offering versatility and robustness against failure, as well as the
possibility of self-reconfiguration. The scenario envisioned is a group of Roombots that autonomously connect to each other
to form different types of furniture, e.g. stools, chairs, sofas and
tables, depending on user requirements. This furniture will change shape
over time (e.g., a stool becoming a chair, a set of chairs becoming a
sofa) as well as move using actuated joints to different locations (with
or without a person sitting on it) depending on the users needs.
Additionally the Roombots will be capable of memorising user preferences
in terms of structures and places in order to facilitate repetitive use
of the adaptive furniture.
Using analyses of human-animal social interactions to inform human
interactions with ambient technologies
Shaun Lawson, University of Lincoln, United Kingdom
The objective of this work is to deploy an innovative inter-disciplinary
approach to the development of empathetic human-computer interfaces that
are informed by analyses of social human-dog interactions.
The dog Canis familiaris was the first species to be domesticated and
has evolved particular sensitivity and empathy to human behaviour. The
importance of human-animal interactions has been occasionally recognised
by designers of largely entertainment-based computer systems. To date this has been very limitedly informed by scientific study of the
qualitative nature of real human-animal interactions. We view such
fundamental work as a first step in developing solid and novel building
blocks for constructing interfaces to future ambient and pervasive
technologies which are naturalistic, unobtrusive and implicit.
Many researchers in the human-computer interaction community are
addressing the when of “computers interrupting people” –
the aim here
is to address the how, in aiming to determine the skills, behaviours and
affordances which dogs utilise and exhibit when they are engaged in (a)
interrupting people, (b) persuading non-compliant people to engage with
them, whilst all the time remaining an endearing, integral, though often
unremarkable presence in their owners’ lives. The project will also
contribute to the unsolved issue of embodiment in socially-aware
interfaces. Ethnographic methods will be used to determine modes and
sequences of interactions between a test set of dogs and their owners
and will use the outcome of this study to construct interfaces which
feature differing degrees of genuine dog-human social interaction
behaviours and also differing degrees of embodiment. A set of
experimental trials will then be performed to determine user performance and preferences
when using the varying interfaces, with the aim of identifying emerging
issues, themes and models supported by the project results.
|
