Activity Monitoring and Mobile Interfaces
From CS160 User Interfaces Fa06
Lecture on Nov 22, 2006
Readings
- Maps of Our Lives: Sensing People and Objects Together in the Home. Technical Report No. UCB/EECS-2005-22 2005. Aipperspach et al.
- Camera Phone Based Motion Sensing: Interaction Techniques, Applications and Performance Study. UIST 2006. Wang et al.
Bowen Li - Nov 20, 2006 10:40:31 pm
Maps of Our Lives: I think this research is very interesting. I am impressed with the fact that their findings can shape the way we think about our architecture, not just about our electronic devices. This area of interaction between home, electronics, and people has not been focused upon until recently. As most of us are living in houses that are decades old, this type of research may not immediately come to mind. The article mentions the difference between ergonomic and comfortable places. I wonder if these would be able to change if our spaces allowed them to? It's interesting that people choose to only have a few favored places, even in a large house. I suppose everyone has their favorites.
The users for this study seem to be really integrated with their technology! :carrying a laptop into your kids bedroom so you can watch them nap? Or how about at the dinner table to answer "conversational questions"? I don't know of anyone that does this.
It's interesting that they point out laptops are portable not mobile. This is definitely true when using laptops, but I tend not to think of them in this way.
TinyMotion:
I'm surprised that Professor Agrawala asked Jingtao to come in and be a guest lecture because I have been working with Jingtao on the TinyMotion project this semester. It's kind of interesting to see your work being used as material for a class that you're in. One reason that this project really drew me was it's wide application to daily life. Cell phones and camera phones are everywhere. However, no one really uses them. They're either too low resolution or there's no way to connect the phone to the computer. This project really takes the camera phone idea in a completely new direction and it requires no hardware modifications.
I think this article ties nicely into what we've already learned in the class regarding Fitts' Law.
Ramy Ghabrial - Nov 20, 2006 11:12:56 pm
Maps of our lives: It seems this would still be a pretty egregious breach of privacy to most people. I know I would certainly not be comfortable with the location of all my devices being recorded down to the centimeter. I would like to know more about the "social context of computation" and why it is so important. It seems contrary to experience that location is important at all; I use my laptop on my bed when I want to lie down and on my desk at other times. The paper does a good job of classifying these two places but I don't see how that information could be useful or worth studying and I am not convinced by their justification. Perhaps a broader sample of users might reveal much more crucial data, but I doubt it. One thing that I found interesting though was the comparison between user interactivity using paper vs animation; it seems we should have been more insistent on user participation for the hi-fi interactive prototype to make up for this.
Camera Phone Based Motion Sensing: Huh. That is pretty cool, we have a classmate working on this. It does sound very similar to optical mice, except that it doesn't emit red light to color the surface (I suppose converting the image to grayscale makes up for this?). This also does sound pretty useful for gaming applications -- the Nintendo Wii that just came out uses motion sensing to control games, and I imagine a small camera with this software would help. A few questions. Does the quality of the phone camera affect the accuracy of TinyMotion? How do you input numbers using Vision TiltText?
Maksim Lirov - Nov 21, 2006 03:38:27 am
Maps of Our Lives: My first thoughts while reading this paper is that this study seems very "big brother"-like, meaning that the investigators tracked every movement of the test subjects and their devices. I find it strange that the test subjects did not complain much about this. However, I do understand that the collection of all of this information was necessary in order to make this a viable study. I think this study posed a great question - "how can we better understand domestic space so that we can build our designs to the strengths of the domestic space?" The more we know about how our users utilize their living spaces, the better we can tailor our designs to blending into the lifestyle of the users. The laptop patterns that the subjects described were a bit striking to me at first. I can definitely see how laptops will be used more in ergonomic favored places and comfortable favored places than other places, but I think it really depends on the person. I seem to fit into this pattern, as I use my laptop mostly in my room on my desk. However, I know that there are people who cannot live without their laptop/other portable device and will take them wherever they go. Was the sample of test subjects selected big enough and diverse enough?
TinyMotion: I have actually used TinyMotion before because I was one of the participants in the TinyMotion formal study mentioned in the paper, and it was interesting to read about the findings of the study. I do feel that TinyMotion has great potential for playing some games (Tetris is a great example) on the cell phone and I actually preferred text and number entry using TinyMotion over the traditional Multitap entry convention. From experience, it felt a little weird to use TinyMotion at first but I found that I could become very competent with it after only about 10-15 minutes. One technique with TinyMotion that I was told about is that it is more effective to tilt the phone to the left/right (with respect to the vertical axis) or tilt is up/down (with respect to the horizontal axis) rather than move the phone to the left/right or up/down. In the menu selection task, I found that I could cover greater distances by tilting rather than moving the phone itself. Another point that was important to me was the use of a small vibration feedback when scrolling through a menu using TinyMotion (TinyForce). I felt that I became better at controlling fine movements in the menu when the TinyForce aspect was added.
Robert Held - Nov 21, 2006 10:46:13 am
Aipperspach et at: I enjoyed the authors' use of a thermal map to illustrate the amount of time the subjects spent in various locations throughout their homes. A bar could be used on a room-by-room basis, but the thermal map provides more specific data. Also, one can quickly glance at it and observe the movement patterns within a room. This allowed the researchers to see where each family member sat within the couches and which parts of the rooms are never visited at all.
Wang et al: I enjoyed how the authors approached the testing of their device through both repeated tasks and qualitative assessments. The simple tasks were designed to test how well the interface works as opposed to other input modalities, such as multitap. Meanwhile, the qualitative feedback provided information about how well the cell phone consumer base would react to the software. Also, one should note how impressive it is that the authors relied on only software, not hardware, for their implementation. The approach would make it much easier to disseminate the product, as consumers would not be required to purchase extra equipment for their phones.
Patti Bao - Nov 21, 2006 11:09:22 am
Maps of Our Lives: I found the data elicitation component of the triangulation method interesting - it definitely proves how recognition is easier than recall, as people were able to recollect more of their activities after seeing the sensor data. Without this component, the study would have been a lot weaker in my opinion. Although the location and usage data is fairly comprehensive, only the interviews reveal something about the behavior and motivations behind their actions, and I think it would be hard to make design recommendations without this understanding. As it is, I am not entirely sure how the design recommendations were derived from the findings - for example, how would partitions facilitate transitions between a person's favored spaces, and why is that even necessary?
Camera Phone Based Motion Sensing: I like Bowen's comment about how this research may help people utilize the camera capability of their phones more. I wasn't entirely sure how the textual input worked from what the paper said, but this video helped. I do think the concept is very innovative (I really like the scrolling!), but I don't know how this would play out in real life. Can you imagine seeing a bunch of people waving their phones around to communicate or play games? People are already so distracted when talking on mobile phones, and I think this might just add to that distraction.
Andrew Hao - Nov 21, 2006 12:16:10 pm
Maps of Our Lives: This article is fascinating in its use of quantitative data analysis via the use of RF location tracking. The creation of heat maps allows researchers to visualize locational information fairly quickly. This allows designers to better understand the use of technology in the home, and the authors of the paper propose solutions that could better complement home technology uses (e.g. the wall printer, the docking station).
TinyMotion: You know what completely fascinates me about this? It's the innovative use of existing technology to do something new, useful and cool. Augmenting the use of existing inexpensive technology to do something very useful is exactly what I love about engineering. The researchers run a useful study with student participants and conclude that the interface is largely usable (in compliance with Fitt's Law) and offers the notable advantage of using existing hardware (versus the implementation of the accelerometer into phones). This new mode of orientational input allows for freedom from the keypad limitations on existing phones (as well as boosting the cool-factor by several magnitudes).
David Hoffman - Nov 21, 2006 06:17:37 pm
Aipperspach: I thought they used some interesting technology to track people in their homes. And they also found some interesting trends such as where people use their laptop computer. In terms of human computer interaction, the paper discussed how people would take the laptop with them to comfortable areas for some applications and then go to the computer for some jobs. There most interesting idea was the wall mounted printer near the door which prints maps before people leave. This could be similar to those coupon dispensers in shoping martket isles.
Wang: This is a really creative idea for using the camera in a phone. I had always felt that the camera was a somewhat worthless feature. However, this is a good application for the technology. One thing that I'm highly skeptical of is that people will use this once the novelty is worn off. This seems like a low bandwidth data entry method. It would be much more efficient to record voice for data entry. And in terms of games, it sounds like a neat idea, but game design for cell phones seems like an unusual goal. It is impressive that they did that type of tracking and still had decent battery life.
Tony Yu Tung Lai - Nov 21, 2006 06:46:47 pm
map of our lives:
I am surprised by the result that most people actally have more than one places where they would use their laptop regularly. From my experience, my laptop is usually at one spot when I am at home. So I thought that it might just be because of the size of my apartment. But later in the paper, the authors mentioned that the size of the living has no significant effect on the number of 'usual spots' for laptops. Also, I wonder if having a desktop would effect the number of 'usual spots' for laptop usage.
tinyfinger:
Using cell phone camera as a mean to input is a really cool idea. But as mentioned in the paper, there are some limitation such as having a background with little differentiation, being in a dark room, etc. It will be interesting to see what the researchers will come up as the solution. I think using flash light that comes along with the newer camera phones might be a possible solution.
Cheng-Lun Yang - Nov 21, 2006 08:49:45 pm
Maps of our lives... The findings in the reading reflect my own behaviors at home very well. I usually stay at one comfort place for most of the day to study or surf the web with my laptop. I rarely go to another place in the house with my laptop. I also prefer a big table where I can lay my stuff around instead of piling them up at a small desk. That is the reason that I have a big desk to put my stuff on. The method of collecting data using sensors is interesting. However, I wonder how much psychological effect on the participants there is. Awareness of the sensors around the house might alter the participants normal behaviors.
Camera Phone... The TinyMotion idea sounds interesting to me. However, I am not quite sure how useful it will be just as I doubted the usefulness of camera phones when they first came out. Technology will lead humans to accept the new invention and slowly mix into everyday life. Also, the preciseness of TinyMotion is a big question mark. What if the user has the tendency to shake his hand? Would the motion detector detects the movements as intentional or accidental?
Tak Wong - Nov 21, 2006 10:20:04 pm
Maps of Our Lives: There's a lot of new concepts in this article that made it very interesting. First, the use of sensors instead of video cameras were more sucessful than I thought. I would think people will still feel a bit weird that someone is tracking them, though don't know exactly what they are doing. I guess this is what made fastrak so sucessful in getting real time traffic data. Also, the use of sensors eliminate the time it takes to retrieve data from video and saves a lot of time in analysis. It also provides a lot of evidence of where the users were actually at. It's like another level above conceptual analysis. Also, there's an important paragraph in the beginning of second column on page 8 that says users are more comfortable with paper than animation. This again shows people prefer paper based interfaces.
Camera Phone Based Motion Sensing: They have an interesting idea about moving the phone like a writing pad. What I found most suprising is the ablity to write complex characters such as Chiense with the phone. I think being able to write some foreign language characters will be very useful, but less useful with English characters. It's also interesting how they compare their input speed with fitts' law. I can totally see a similiar system in the future, but like the Anoto, we never know what would happen.
Andrew Tran - Nov 22, 2006 12:23:56 am
Maps of our lives: As i am reading this article, i am just wondering to myself what is the importance of this study. Doesn't it seem like common sense that people go day by day on a routine, and they will usually always sit and do something at the same spot everyday. I mean as this group describes their findings, such as "laptops are frequently used in comfotable favorred places in the home", or "the ergonomic place would have a desktop computer", it seems like they are just proving something we all already know. I mean i don't think a person would put a desktop at a place where he can use the recliner to work. On the other hand, i do like how this group is using their findings to think about redesigning the domestic space.
Camera Phone Based Motion Sensing: I really like this group's study because it asks the question is there an alternative method in using cell phones for games, text, etc. that would help the user more. But it is sad to say that TinyMotion did not fare as well as the original way of doing things, such as menu selection. I think the game playing task would have been better if they did indeed have a convention for the controls. But i think moving the phone to play the games such as tetris is a great idea, something like the Nintendo Wii or the Playstation 3 right now, both of these do have controllers that allows you to move the controller to move something in the game.
Yimin Yao - Nov 22, 2006 12:17:08 am
Maps of Our Lives: This is a very interesting and enjoyable reading. I am also very surprised at the fact that people dont have big privacy concerns with such sensor monitoring and would feel comfortable wearing such a badge at all times in the household. I guess the idea of not having their true images being captured on video is quite comforting. The patterns revealed by their study seem to match those of my own household, and I think it's very amazing that such monitoring methods are able to show that this indeed is a common household activity pattern. I think this will surely help household product designers (mobile or non mobile) to better understand the desires of their target users.
Camera Phone Based Motion Sensing: The TinyMotion has two very good ideas; first, using motion as a form input is an think-outside-of-box idea that lifted the restriction of keyboard input; second, it utilizes the existing resource such as camera phone to sense the motion, though i am a bit suspicious whether that's really a effecient way of doing so. The article pointed out a very valid problem with motion sensored menu selection in that it's hard to read the menu while moving the phone, perhaps a more delicate way might be sensing the motion of a finger right in front of the camera. The motion writing character recognition is also pretty cool. If I understand it correctly, u draw a stroke while you press down the key and release the key between strokes, then press a diff key when u are done with the entire character. It's very practical for english characters, however, I dont know if it's practical with chinese characters since its probably faster to enter through pinyin on the keyboard. But i definitely think such technology will be able to bring more interactive and fun games to our cell phones.
Jonathan Yen - Nov 22, 2006 12:32:40 am
Maps of Our Lives: I guess like most other people, my initial impression of this article was what the implications of this study may have on privacy issues. I think that some of the findings from this study are pretty interesting and somewhat obvious, such as the tendency for people to work in favored places in the home, and the radial plot of computer usage. I believe that there is much work that can be done based on the observations that they have made, especially since wireless devices are still on the rise. I think these observations could lead to newer and better design principles in terms of how computing should work in the home.
Camera Phone Based Motion Sensing: The idea behind this project certainly isn't very new, but I think that it could take a while for something like this to catch on, if it ever were to become popular. I think that TinyMotion could be useful, but it seems like its applications are rather limited. Honestly, using a motion based input device doesn't sound like much fun: consider those rolling ball puzzles that require you to tilt the puzzle until the ball gets to a desired location. I would imagine that the learning curve for these kinds of devices would be very steep.
Kang Chen - Nov 22, 2006 12:17:58 am
Map of Our Lives The article was not only interesting in the technology and method used but also the results reported. The tracking device seemed to have provided an ample amount of data while not intruding the participants' privacy. I particularly liked the sections that talked about favored spots in the home. Perhaps the most interesting point was that the number of favored spots are not significantly affected by the area of the living space. For instance, the apt I live in in Berkeley is significantly smaller than at home but I usually just stay in 2 places: desk where my desktop and laptops are located and the bed.
Camera Phone Based Motion Sensing It sounds really neat to be able to use motion sensing as a form of input. Better yet, no additional sensors are required to make this work. I thought the Vision TiltText was pretty interesting. It also yielded surprisingly high accuracy during testing too which is always a problem with identifying physical properties with machines. The only problem I could imagine with this technique besides the gradient colored backgrounds mentioned in the article is the stress it would place on the human hand. It seems pretty exhausting to do a whole bunch of hand movements just to write a sentence... maybe it could be used as wrist training at the same time.
Aleksandr (Sasha) Ashpis - Nov 22, 2006 02:32:28 am
Maps of Our Lives It is very surprising to me that the size of the house did not really change the number of favorite places. Although I am not shocked that video cameras were perceived as more intrusive into ones privacy, it was surprising that no one in the study complained or was concerned about the monitoring with badges. It makes me think that as long as there is some ambiguity and the people monitoring don’t know what the person is doing exactly, it’s ok. The study demonstrates interesting user habits, and personally shows that the desktop has and will continue to be replaced by laptops for the average user.
Camera Phone Based Motion Sensing This is a very interesting idea, and I was skeptical at first, but then thinking of the new Wii coming out, maybe this is the next hot thing. But as I first thought of the Wii, there are some applications that this is well suited for and some applications where it would be more of a hindrance than helpful. For example, I can really see this being an improvement to multi-tap, but I don’t know about a replacement for the stylus. In regards to the stylus, I am a bit confused on how you make gaps in between strokes, especially for the Chinese or Japanese characters? How do you know how big the gap you made?
Qingyun Tang - Nov 22, 2006 02:59:44 am
Maps of Our Lives: This article mainly presents the detail of a study of people living in homes and their use of wireless laptop computers. They examined that laptops are typically used in three kinds of locations in the home: ergonomic favored places, comfortable favored places, and activity places. I am impressed by the detailed results that they found. I wouldn’t expect such results since I only leave my laptop on my desk area, which is an ergonomic favored place. It is truly amazing how these normal household activities could be divided and concluded into certain patterns.
Camera Phone Based Motion Sensing: This is another paper regarding a detailed experiment. The result tells us that having a built-in camera in cell phone can not only function as a camera, but also a motion sensor to allow cell phone to perform various different tasks. The authors of this paper made a software project called TinyMotion to research its feasibility. I find this paper particularly interesting because it focus on the technology we use everyday, and to improve that technology to serve people better.
Michael Moeng - Nov 22, 2006 03:32:29 am
Maps of our lives: I thought the "Broom" graph shown of laptop use was very interesting, and wonder whether this characteristic was shared amongst all participants. I also wish they had used it on people who use their computers more often (and often have them on all the time), and provided more data like CPU usage. Also, I wonder if people have different usage patterns for laptops and desktops while in the home, or whether they just use whichever is closer when they need something.
Tinymotion: I was most amazed by the fact that Tinymotion was able to detect changes when pointed at the blue sky. Its also odd how they managed to allow a 2-dimensional camera detect differences in 3 dimensions (if a leaf moved 3cm from one frame to the next, it would need to know how far away the leaf was to know how much the camera moved). All in all, although it was admitted that the solution was somewhat inferior to an accelerometer, it is entirely software based, allowing users interested in the technology to use it without needing changes to existing phone technology.
Simon Tan - Nov 22, 2006 04:46:50 am
Maps of Our Lives: The classification of spaces in the home as 'ergonomic favored places', 'comfortable favored places', and 'activity places' was really a fresh look at how we humans use our living spaces. Reading this immediately caused me to think about my own apartment and all the places I wandered between each day. I fit in with the results of his study, as I really only have about 2 favored places in my apartment. However, there are two only because I recently moved my desktop into the dining room area; if not for that, my ergonomic favored place, comfortable favored place, and activity place would all be the same - the seat in my room from where I have access to my desk and TV. I imagine if this study was done solely on college students, who have limited space, the number of favored places would probably average closer to one.
Camera Phone Based Motion Sensing: TinyMotion seems like another viable route for this course to take, perhaps in a different semester. Developing mobile applications with a novel human-computer interaction component sounds intriguing - and it looks like there is a lot that can be done with it from the sample applications. Things like TiltText seem like a very brave step towards a better text-input method for cell phones (as the current multi-button-tap method is clearly uninspired), but it does seem a little awkward to perform. I noted that the author of this study related it to Fitts' Law; it lent great credibility to their research.
Scott Friedheim - Nov 22, 2006 05:57:27 am
Maps of Our Lives : I must agree with a number of the comments above. Perhaps I missed something in the paper but it seems like there is not much use for this kind of study. For me the ideas trying to be expressed were pretty common sense and does not warrant a research study. Wireless laptop use and the methods and places they are used is not a very interesting topic. However, I was surprised in the amount of detail in the paper on this topic.
Camera Phone Based Motion Sensing: I really enjoyed this paper because I think using the cell phone for any kind of input is just a pain in the rear. I have never used such a system as they introduced but I would be very excited to see this become more widespread. I especially like the tilting functionality and can see that it could have great utility in the cell phone realm. Fitt's law....I know what that is!!!
Rayhan Lal - Nov 22, 2006 06:35:05 am
Maps of Our Lives: To me, the results of this article feel less important than the methods developed for tracking and visualizing computer usage. Not surprisingly, laptop usage is limited to a few favored areas of the house. An even distribution would be very difficult since people do not tend to use laptops standing up, in the middle of doorways, for example. The paper is a good example of the techniques presented in Using Vision to Think. The visualizations are both appropriate and obviously helpful to the participants. I also think the electronic foyer is a wonderful idea and very reminiscent of an embedded dock. I think the power of the paper is it allows for further analysis, with other embedded systems (it would be interesting to see what the results are for cell phones which are obviously used in a number of independent locations).
Camera Phone Based Motion Sensing: Just like the Anoto pen and optical mice, Jingtao exploits the camera already present in cell phones as a device to record relative motion. Like others I admire the novel use of existing hardware. Though the processing methods were relatively straightforward the fine-tuning probably took some time. Cell phone buttons are already too small for my liking on some phones. Just because of the size of the interface (the entire phone) the system feels more accessible. It will be interesting to see whether accelerometers become popular enough to displace the camera in this sort of input device. However, TinyMotion is useful even if these components are never integrated.
Eric Yoon - Nov 22, 2006 07:44:51 am
Maps of Our Lives. What first struck me was the technology that they used to track people's movements -- Ubisense for spatial tracking, and MS Vibelog to see what they do with the computers. It makes a ton of sense to observe people in as unobtrusive fashion as possible, and I think such "invisible" technologise advance that effort a great deal. The thermal patterns are a terrific way to display where people spend their time. I have a friend who is a tech management consultant, and it seems that they primarily use contextual inquiry. After seeing this, I feel like they should change their evaluation method to something more along these lines -- it's a terrific way to truly see how people use technology in the home, knowledge that lots of companies are interested in.
Camera Phone Based Motion Sensing. The idea of using the built-in camera of a phone to make the phone into a motion-sensing device is innovative. The author shows how it can be used to write and even play games. Although the application is a novel use of existing hardware, it seems like it would annoying to use in real life. Cell phones have such tiny screens; to have to tilt and move that screen around while looking at the screen to see if the data was captured correctly seems sort of tiresome. It has some real promise for writing, though, as it appears from the research results that some testers could input text faster by motion than by pressing keys.
Heung Tai - Nov 22, 2006 08:24:22 am
Aipperspach et al I really like the use of location tracking instead of video taping. It gives enough data for the study while preserving the privacy of the subjects. The finding of different laptop use in home is not a surprise but I am glad to affirm that the portability of laptop make it affordable to accompany with other people while using the time to do work, e.g. baby nap monitoring. The study may go further by not allowing the subjects to use laptop and see what happen. That will be an interesting study for sure.
Wang et al TinyMotion is a very neat software. It doesn't require additional hardware support. It uses mobile phone built-in camera to capture the screen and use software to do the rest. The most valuable feature that tinyMotion provides is use of motion as input to cellphone. The keypad on cell phone is very inconvenient for most people because of the size. Using motion as input can eliminate the problem of size. However, movement can only do that much. It doesn't provide an accurate output as keypad. The requirement of the continuous use of camera is also a problem because power drain is an important issue for cell phone. Mobile phone hardware improvement would help the popularity of tinyMotion by increasing battery capacity.
David Eitan Poll - Nov 22, 2006 09:41:43 am
Maps of our Lives -- I think this article fits in very well withthe notions of Ubiquitous computing that we have been reading about in previous weeks. Things are becoming ever more integrated into our everyday lives, and this paper and project continues to make headway into that territory. By integrating technology into everyday devices, we can improve the quality of life of the average user, and they needn't even be aware of the fact that there is some computer interaction going on.
Camera Phone Based Motion Sensing -- A fascinating idea. This is actually really cool, in my opinion, because it brings the cell phone user and his device into the same world, essentially. Interactions no longer are limited to the user hitting keys on a keypad. Instead, the user can use his surroundings for input. This has ramifications for more than just games. Already, we see that GPS is being integrated into phones. Why not use this in conjunction with GPS to give a more accurate and local positioning and orientation?
Jonathan Chang - Nov 22, 2006 09:46:53 am
Activity Monitoring
This is like, a usability study taken way farther than normal. Not only do I agree with previous posts that this would be pretty uncomfortable for people, even intrusive to the point of altering their behavior and rendering the whole exercise useless, I also think that the effort involved in mounting such an observation doesn't justify the kind of data procured. While it would be interesting, it just doesn't seem worthwhile to make it part of our design process.
Mobile Interfaces
Simply awesome, I'm extremely impressed by whoever came up with this idea. I always found cameras on phones frivolous, but I wouldn't if this application had been commercially available. It's much easier for me to have my locus of attention on the entire phone, instead of trying to cram it into the tiny little screen. Bringing the interaction out to the physical world actually makes me, in my mind, feel less cramped for space. Maybe they should try marketing directly to phone manufacturers to get them to include some kind of lo-fi image device in their phones for this application (IR or something?) to cut down on memory usage.
Tabassum Khan - Nov 22, 2006 10:17:37 am
Maps of our Lives: I totally disagree with the justification that was given, in the beginning of the article, regarding the use of sensors instead of video for conducting an effective contextual inquiry. If the article considers video taping challenging because many people are reluctant to have cameras deployed throughout their home, then how is the feeling of having sensors recording their each and every move any better. However, the concept of tracking movements and analyzing the spatial relationships of people and devices is very interesting. The Thermal map shown in Figure 1 is very impressive and can very easily be generalized. I feel that some of the inferences drawn as a result of the study didnt require a huge scale of experiment such as the one described in this paper. People purchase wireless devices for the sole purpose of getting rid of the limited mobility that non-wireless devices provide. For instance, people purchase laptops so that they can use them where they cannot use their desktops i.e. at comfortable, ergonomically favorable or away-from-home places.
Tiny Motion: Fitt's Law revisited: This reading presents a very innovative and cool idea based on an existing technology but it undoubtedly comes with its limitations. It incorporates yet another functionality into existing features that cell-phones provide. However, I wonder how many of these features are used by majority of the users. Personally, I use my cell-phones mostly for talking and text-messaging and that is why I found the Vision Tilt-Text feature very impressive and attractive. I wonder how would the quality of camera phones affect the accuracy of Tiny Motion.
Alex Wallisch - Nov 21, 2006 10:57:08 pm
Map of our lives
I think that this type of tracking technology, while a bit invasive, is quite interesting and important for studying people's activity within their own home. I've noticed that I spend a lot of time dealing with inefficiencies around my house; they aren't a big deal, but repeatedly spending several seconds walking around an inconveniently placed wall or piece of built-in furniture can add up after a while. However, the only way designs are going to improve is through this type of research to determine how people use physical space inside their house.
I also think it's interesting to see how people use their laptops. This is much more of a personal interest; I own a laptop, but it is extremely heavy and typically has a number of peripherals attached to it (mouse, speakers, and often a computer lock). This means that when I am at home, it is almost always in the same place on my desk. I had thought I was rather unique in not exploiting the portability of my computer, but it appears that other people also have a tendency to use their laptop in a less-than-mobile manner.
TinyMotion
Until I reached the end of the article, my biggest concern was on the battery life of the phone. My phone's camera uses up battery life like nobody's business, so I would be hesitant to use a service like that, although the section at the end of the article regarding battery life claims that it's not a big deal. A bigger issue for me is that I tend to not use that many features of my phone - I don't play games, I don't send text messages very often, I mostly just use it for talking. Perhaps this is my subconscious reaction to the inconvenience of having to use the number pad for these activities and I really would find it more useful to use TinyMotion, but I don't find this kind of technology as interesting as the other article.
Jason Shangkuan - Nov 22, 2006 10:39:16 am
Maps Of Our Lives:
This article is interesting because this article presents issues with whether designers cross the line of improving people's lives or whether they are intruding on personal privacy and liberty. It is interesting to track people, monitor their daily activity, and also log computer activity of users. By doing this a computer system can extract behaviors and predict how users will act. This can make using systems easier because computers can adapt their interfaces or programs to what the user uses and can possibly change settings within a house depending on how often a user utilizes a space or visits it. The problem with this technology is the fact that there is no privacy or sense of ownership of personal space. Logging is particularly sensitive because anyone can find the logs or take information that is meant to be kept private. As a result, technology has to maintain the balance between being useful and non-intrusive.
Tiny Motion:
Tiny Motion is an interesting product because it is a physical approach to a user interface. It integrates existing technology to provide a solution to manipulating an interface. There are numerous applications that Tiny Motion can be applied to besides cell phones such as cameras, video, and computers. There are inherent flaws with this as mentioned such as lighting. Lighting can affect the usability of the camera. Instead, there should be something utilizing gyroscopes so that light does not become an issue. The problem is associated with the cost and integration. As a result, this technology also has to balance effectiveness and cost.
Ming Huang - Nov 22, 2006 11:16:23 am
The paper on “Maps of Our Lives” represents vital research that will one day reshape our daily activities, thanks to the valuable data to collects. As we know, technologies are invents in the hope that they will make our lives easier. Small, mobile, and high-performance devices that are starting to emerge into popularity are crucial in forming new interaction patterns in the future. In a recent talk I heard, research has shown that during a person’s lifetime he leaves on average 2 gigabytes of data behind, be it video recordings of his actions on a store, transportation tickets he purchase, search query history, digital photos, bank accounts, cell phone call logs, etc. It is very beneficial that we can analyze this data and tailor goods and services to the patterns present in the user and thus make his daily routines more convenient and efficient. This does bring about concerns with privacy and anonymity, but in my opinion the trend is inevitable. There has never been perfect security because in order to live our lives today we have to interact with many external agencies that collect information from us. Therefore we should put them to good use.
The paper on “Cell Phone Based Motion Sensing” is yet another approach to data gathering that seems more omnipresent than the study with wireless laptops in the home. Cell phones nowadays are cheap, very mobile, and are very pervasive in people’s everyday lives. New technologies enable the cell phone to be both a communication medium and a miniature but rich multimedia and information hub. Leveraging its ability to follow the user and its myriad of existing external sensors is a very effective way to collect activity data of its user. As usual, the paper shows that the development of the TinyMotion application has undergone the same design, test, evaluate cycle that most interaction design projects go through to ensure validity and usability. Unlike the graphical location maps shown in the result of the last report, this paper uses the “traditional” statistical analysis on user data. Although it looses some intuitiveness in conveying the meaning of the measurements, ample explanations of the data and charts help me understand the finding better. I was also surprised at the processing abilities of today’s cell phone, which is enough to do handwriting recognition on the fly without external assistance from more powerful machines. I can foresee the day where all one needs for all his mobile computing needs to be in a single device, the cell phone.
Roland Carlos - Nov 22, 2006 10:22:15 am
Maps of Our Lives: Sensing People and Objects Together in the Home: While some people have decried the privacy issues of the tracking method, I think the benefits here outweigh the negatives. I can see the results from case studies being used to help architects design the next generation of houses, houses that are built with tech intergration. But past that, it's an interesting little glimpse into human psychology, which places do we tend to and why. As the importance of technology increases, I can (sadly) see our lives revolving more and more around laptops, so its a reasonable place to start this project around. Who knew (or even thought) about dividing up the house into "ergonomic favored places", "comfortable favored places", and "activity places"? Sadly, as it has been said, the places of college students aren't the ideal locations for this study, as we probably combine all the different types of places in one small little room.
Camera Phone Based Motion Sensing: Interaction Techniques, Applications and Performance Study: Definitely an interesting project they have proposed here. I'm more impressed in the fact that this project is strictly software, which means they're supplementing existing hardware in a rather ingenious way. This is definitely a strong sign of creativity, using something already existing for something brand new. They also definitely made sure to test all the possible variables for testing, showing the project has been well thought out. They tested the camera's functionality is a variety of settings, indoors/outdoors, low/high light, etc. They even included some testing of non-English characters and a brief discussion about battery life, things that could have easily been forgotten in the hype of the project.
I worry a little bit about the motion sensitivity readings...I know when I'm playing a game that requires a joystick rather than a direction pad, I get a little more frustrated at the fact that the using the joystick is not more of a start/end operation. For example, one press on a direction pad is pretty well defined, but moving the joystick is a much more precise operation if you want your character to go in a certain direction.
Julius Cheng - Nov 22, 2006 11:11:53 am
Maps of our Lives - This reading is like a meta-study of UI interaction. Whereas previously we analyzed the details of how users interact with a single UI, this study tracks how humans move between different UIs throughout their daily lives. I was pretty amused that there was a thermal map, because it seemed like an enormous invasion of privacy, until I realized that it was only generated by the sensor data, but more relevant to the topic at hand, I found the movement map of Margaret and Jack to be very cool. Computer use is relegated to a few key places, and I imagine that corporations can make such studies about their workplaces and study their movement habits to make them more efficient by analyzing where people go, when, and why.
TinyMotion - Motion detection as an input is very cool, but what is even more impressive to me is that this program requires no additional hardware. After reading this I imagined using existing inputs to create new emergent forms of input, like using mouse gestures as a kind of input. My laptop has a touchpad; it would be possible for me to draw some symbol with my finger and have it do something. I don't imagine TinyMotion to be terribly useful for practical applications, like typing English, though it might help in writing Chinese. For all of the existing functions of cell phones, like organizing contacts and writing notes and text messages, there's not really anything that buttons can't already do better. The only thing I can imagine that would be really cool is for games. Motion detection would be very advanced for a game from a first-person perspective, or perhaps to scroll across some very large map just by moving the phone in a certain direction.
Michael Mai - Nov 22, 2006 02:50:13 am
Map of our Lives:
Although some people are uncomfortable with being constantly tracked, this research reveals a lot of data about the use of space in the home environment. Using sensors instead of cameras allows the subjects to feel less uncomfortable because the sensors only detect where you are, and not what you are doing. Although knowing that they are being tracked, subjects may refrain from engaging in certain activities while doing other activities more knowing that the results will be processed. Using the data gathered for each room, a person may be able to rearrange the room to be optimal for use. Also, some people think of this as invading privacy, but it can be turned around and the sensors can be used in conjunction with a security system to ensure safety in the home if there is someone doing unusual activity within the home.
Camera Phone Based Motion Sensing:
Camera phone software may be the next step in instant consumer use/feedback. Although the concept sounds interesting, I think the Vision TiltText will have problems avoiding unwanted attention. Text messages are a way for users to send messages quickly and quietly without distraction, with the vision TiltText, you may be sacrificing noise/notice for speed. Another thing to think about is how these motion detectors will function when the phone is in a pocket/purse/car where there is a lot of motion. Will the TinyMotion still continue to work through the wear and tear of cell phone use?
Johnathan Hawley - Nov 22, 2006 12:12:59 pm
Maps of Our Lives - It appears that people like using wireless technology in places they are most comfortable. I admit, I mostly use my laptop while laying on the couch or in bed. I've heard a lot of complaints from people who would rather work at home than in an office. Wireless technology opens the door for more possibilities like this. It just shows that people like to be as comfortable as possible. I suppose that this little fact could be capitalized on if implemented correctly. The Anoto pen has wireless usage similar to the laptop discussed in the article. Its property of being able to be used in comfortable places should be thoughtfully considered when refining our application designs.
Camera Phone Based Motion Sensing - This seems like an interesting software project. Everything seems to be going into cell phones. Just yesterday a guy in my E190 class gave a presentation on cell phones and pretty much concluded that cell phones will be the way we do everything in the future: TV, internet,... The TinyMotion project seems to believe so also otherwise they wouldn't have put so much effort into this project. I like what they are accomplishing with Vision TiltText. Entering text messages is a real pain, especially when you want to enter the same letter twice in a row and have to wait. I can see Vision TiltText to be pretty effective. However, it might be a little annoying having to always have a strong light on in the room if you want to send a message.
Jason Lee - Nov 22, 2006 12:10:18 pm
Maps of Our Lives: This was a very interesting article to me, as I am the only one in an apartment of 3 without a laptop and while reading this article, I saw many parallels between the data found in the article and the behavioral patterns of my roommates while using their laptops. Upon reading the definitions of ergonomical favored and comfortable favored places, I immediately thought to the areas in which my roommates often use their laptops. One favors either his own desk or the kitchen table as a place to work, while the other actually either prefers the kitchen table or my own desk, as he feels that his own desk is too small to get work with his laptop done. Both roommates prefer the couch when using their laptops for entertainment purposes. It is also interesting to think about how these findings might affect future design decisions of technology and domestic spaces. It surely will not affect our own project in any significant way, but I'm sure that market and data analysts will probably be able to get all kinds of information from this article.
Camera Phone Based Motion Sensing: I feel bad for saying this because we have a classmate who is working on this project, but I personally cannot see this taking off at all, except perhaps as a gimmick for playing games, much like the Nintendo Wii, and to a lesser extent, the PlayStation 3. The handwriting tool also seems like it might be a good application, but I can't imagine a scenario when handwritten text would be preffered over a text message, unless you are writing in a character-based language, such as the Chinese characters that were displayed. While the technology behind it is quite fascinating, there are probably better uses and applications for it then navigating your cell phone menus with it. I simply can't imagine people preferring to wave their arms about than click a few buttons to reach a person on their namelist. However, the research behind the project is commendable.
Bryce Lee - Nov 22, 2006 12:32:11 pm
Aipperspach
I found the premise of this study to be very relevant to the new direction of digital electronics. The key change is that devices are not only getting more mobile, but they're becoming more grounded in our everyday lives. Design of homes these days must factor in technlogy, something that has started to show up with preinstalled home networks, but hasn't fully materialized beyond that. It would have been interesting if the study had gone further to include other digital devices such as mp3 players and cell phones, which I believe have more bearing on an entire family. Also, it would have been interesting to look at other sort of electronic interaction. For example, the location of a computer one is trying to access over a home network.
Wang
The concept of TinyMotion is a very interesting adaptation of existing technology to bring new functionality. However, it seems more like a substitute until the proper functionality is in place to meet such goals. It seems that motion detection would be a helper for input rather than the primary input method. For example, it would be interesting in the future for a phone to understand a tilt to move the keypad mapping left or right, allowing you to have a full effective keyboard on a standard numberpad.
Sung Yi - Nov 22, 2006 12:12:22 pm
Maps of Our Lives: At first I wondered how the study would carry itself out due to concern with privacy issues of using camera to track down the people's behaviors. Using a sensor relieved the worries, and it seems more effective than using camera in terms of time and money. However, I am not sure what this study is carried out for; I find it very obvious that people would follow similar pattern of behaviors everyday. Also, the participants' awareness of the presence of the sensors might result in different behaviors than usual.
Camera Phone Based Motion Sensing:
Wow. This article was very interesting and I believe it will emerge as one other
innovative technology. Using a motion sensor to input to the system is a great idea.
For example, when entering text messages into the cell phone using this device will
shorten the time and enhance comfortability for the users. However, inputting such
complex characters like Chinese seems pretty inefficient with this device. Even
English alphabets will require for the user to simplify in writing characters: to
write the alphabets with one stroke only -- such letters as "f" or "k" or "p"
requires two or more strokes. In order to make the inputting system most efficient,
it should be done in one stroke.
Utsav Shah - Nov 22, 2006 12:46:55 pm
Maps of our lives:
Throughout the paper I was looking for that one section which would interest me but it didn’t happen. I knew it was going to be long reading for me after reading the introductory paragraphs. No doubt the authors provided some great examples to support their study but as someone mentioned above, I personally don’t see a point researching this topic. I must say using sensor technology to track people rather than video is definitely something cool, but then again there is always privacy issues associated with it. Perhaps in the lecture they’ll shed some light on the research and I’ll get better understanding of it.
TinyMotion:
This was an interesting paper as it touches on something new and meaningful research. It’s very innovative thinking to use built-in camera as an input device into mobile phones. The article itself mentions some of the limitations with TinyMotion, but I think it has lots of potential if used properly. I personally use my cell phone mostly for talking and sometimes for alarm purposes. But I’m usually surrounded by people who use their cell phones for gaming, text messaging and many more activities. I’m sure TinyMotion can be in great use for people who enjoy playing with their cell phones
Tom McClure - Nov 22, 2006 12:42:37 pm
activity monitoring As devices that we wish to focus-test get smaller and smaller, this method of data capture seems like it will become more and more useful, especially since it provides more accurate data with much less invasiveness than the video camera. The pilot test with laptops did not seem to reveal anything shocking or unexpected but as our devices become more mobile I'm sure this will show more interesting patterns that can influence design.
tinymotion While it was impressive that they were able to attain such high accuracy of motion capture with the camera analysis technique, given the cheap availability of accelerometers with much better accuracy and resolution, and the relative high battery expense of keeping the camera on, this doesn't seem like a good reliable long term solution to, well, anything. But kudos, maybe this tech will be used in remote controls one day.
Dexter Lau - Nov 22, 2006 12:23:06 pm
Maps of our lives Privacy is definitely a major concern. I had a project on a similar topic and got feedback from a lot of people saying it was too "creepy" to be tracked all the time. On the flip side, they might think that now but realize it's not as bit a deal as they think it is. For instance, I don't hear many people complaining about the Daily Feed of themselves on Facebook. Yes, there are nice improvements on privacy, but you can do a similar thing with mapping your lives as well.
Camera phone based on motion sensing
I am frankly surprised that something like this hasn't been brought up sooner. I suppose the proliferation of the camera phone had to occur first. At any rate, using it as an input to do a variety of things that can include a mouse, security system, and/or other input devices seems like just unlocking all of the camera phone's true abilities, merging it into one nice and tidy package.
Siu Pang Chu - Nov 22, 2006 12:31:35 pm
Maps of Our Lives: This is a paper that discuss the interactions between household and their computers. I like the way the research collect the data. They track the location and computer devices and a log a when and where the devices were being used. And they plot the data in a Thermal map that show the data clear that most of the time computer is used in bedroom. Also, I am very agree the idea that " wireless laptops are portable , not mobile". There is also a limitation for laptop , a suitable place to put the laptop and close enough electric outlet.
Camera Phone Based Motion Sensing: In this paper, they describe a mobile phone technologies that can detect the user's hand movement in real time thought the image that capture from the camera, called TinyMotion. The data in table 1 seems so unbelievable for me, the application was able to detect the action approaching 100% under all situation. I also want to know that if this application works under dark environment. I am worry about the power consumption of the application. In order for this application to work, the camera have to be on and keep shooting picture. I just wondering how long can it runs? I won't want this application if it shorten my time to talk a lot.
Siyan Wang - Nov 22, 2006 12:52:24 pm
Maps of Our Lives: This experiment seemed to be more of a psychology or behavioral study rather than an HCI study. Although they did measure use of electronic devices, this study seemed to be more adept at capturing certain behavioral trends, such as the people's preferred areas and the portability of laptops. However, with HCI as such a diverse and interdisciplinary field, I suppose this kind of research makes sense in the context of designing interfaces that would best suit the user, based on their preferences, which can only be determined from behavioral studies. One thing I found kind of amusing was that they didn't use cameras since people might be uncomfortable with them, but these people did not object to a massive grind of sensors that could record their every movements.
Camera Phone Based Motion Sensing: I found this article to be pretty interesting in that this application is really innovative. With the drive to make cell phones smaller and smaller, the keypad has to become smaller as well. With this technique, a user may eventually not even have to use the keypad, simply through motion sensing their commands can be captured, which would make for some interesting phone designs, especially since they found their method to work faster than the normal method of inputting text into the phone. Although battery life seems to be a big concern, I hope they are able to bring this technology to market.
Patrick Rodriguez - Nov 22, 2006 01:01:48 pm
Maps of Our Lives: Very interesting article. I think I would be interested in recording data on how I utilize my space. I know that it would confirm my suspicions that I only work in a few spaces throughout my living area, but it would be interesting to get a more detailed breakdown. I wouldn't approve any non-consentual research, but wouldn't it be valuable if we could know the usage patterns of students on campus? Where they congregate and use their technology?
Camera Phone Based Motion Sensing: I agree with most that this is a really cool idea. I don't really have a use for the camera that is on my cell phone, so maybe this would open up more possibilities for that feature. Most phones these days have a built in camera, so it would be nice to see it utilized in other ways. It's amazing that the researchers are able to harness already existing technology in new and innovative ways.
Robert Taylor - Nov 22, 2006 01:34:58 pm
Maps of our Lives: While of course when one devotes so much time and effort to research on this topic you can only assume it must be very important, but I just don't see it. Perhaps as a laptop user myself, along with all of my roommates, it didn't really seem all that groundbreaking. I guess, though, when looking into what kind of portable, next generation device to develop, this kind of research could be very important. I think the research with heatmaps (also covered in lecture) could have been more useful if one could distinguish which user used what, and develop different "profiles".
TinyMotion: I really like this idea. It's an example of innovation using what we already have, and perhaps Jingtao used Ryan's research when developing this. It's interesting how much is moving towards using motion sensing technology these days and the implications it can have for almost any form of technology as we have seen.
It was also fun to follow the testing of TinyMotion and see how Jingtao used testing principles we've already learned. Additionally features incorporated into the idea, such as the vibration feedback, also resonate with what we've practices and ideas we've already learned.
Chen Chang - Nov 23, 2006 03:20:18 am
Maps of Our Lives: Sensing People and Objects Together in the Home - DOUBLE COMMENT - Like most others, I felt that this user study may have gone slightly overboard in terms of invasion of privacy of the lives of these users, the intense data study certainly poses the question of what is the borderline between whats acceptable and whats too much. With the legal comment aside, I feel that some interesting points were brought up through conducting this study of tracking peoples' usage of laptops at home. In particular, I felt the thermal map to be really useful in terms of memory jogging even the smallest things in life, for instance as mentioned in the article it could give "Joe" proof to "Mary" that he did wash the dishes and take out the trash on that given day. This reading mentions the differences between an ergonomic versus a comfortable location in the house and then takes notes of the various places that user's spend most of their times on their laptops. In my case, I simply leave my laptop on a small extension table aside from my larger main table which houses my desktop computer for the simple reason that I prefer using a more powerful desktop with a bigger and better display when I have the resources. The reading mentioned "portable but not mobile" and I think thats true as the former is a lesser magnitude than the latter; the word "mobile" made me think of Intel's Centrino mobile technology as a wireless fidelity standard and by marketing reasons the word "mobile" essentially means be connected to online wherever and whenever. Lastly, maybe I could relate to this article more so if my wireless connection could maintain better connectivity at home but for now I always have concerns in the back of my mind regarding the stability of wireless networks (my Netgear router dies about once every 24 hours and needs to be power cycled in order for DSL to work again).
Camera Phone Based Motion Sensing: Interaction Techniques, Applications, and Performance Study - DOUBLE COMMENT - This was a fascinating read and in my opinion a very interesting research project, I feel that TinyMotion has found a very creative use for a camera phone as I currently don't use the 1.3mp camera integrated in my cell because its worthless in resolution and quality compared to the digicams we have these days. First off I like the idea of using the camera as a motion sensor because it presents many new possibilities just like the nintendo wii gaming system that just came out, I think these devices will represent a good chunk of the market in the future and at the very least can grab the attention of many people. Judging by the screenshots, I would like to have a go at Tinymotion tetris as its certainly different than playing tetris on a shrunken size number pad. The idea of vision TiltText being an input method faster than Multitap is promising as it also lends the ability to perform large vocabulary multilingual real time handwriting recognition. TinyMotion detects the movements of a cell phone in real time by analyzing image sequences captured by its built-in camera and typical movements that TinyMotion detects include horizontal and vertical movements, rotational movements and tilt movements. Given the complexity of these motion sensing features, the computations behind the scene can definitely be complex and rigorous. The analysis presented detailed motion sensing mathematical algorithms as well as an excellent application of Fitt's law introduced in this course.
Kimberly Lau - Nov 27, 2006 12:37:07 am
- Map of Our Lives
Wireless technology has fully immersed itself in today's society. Just four years ago, I remember when the first test Airbears ports were being installed in select, coveted areas across campus. Today, Airbears is installed practically all over campus, and in some spots beyond the campus border. Additionally, cafes are offering their own wireless Internet services to customers. And even San Francisco contemplated a partnership with Google to bring free wireless Internet to the city (and are perhaps still negotiating?) As portable computing devices become more prevalent and wireless technology becomes more immersed in society, I definitely understand the market for wireless communication and interaction between electronic devices within a home. However, I must admit that I myself rarely move my own laptop around the house except for special occasions, ie group meetings, faulty Internet connection in my room, etc.
I found the method used in this experiment for monitoring a person's location extremely interesting. I agree that contextual inquiry can be somewhat difficult. Even when performing the contextual inquiries myself, it was sometimes awkward to insist that the experimentees talk through every little step they performed. And although the process they were following was new, people rarely vocalize every choice they make when they use any program.
In any case, this location measurement process reminded me of mote sensing. This mote technology is an intelligent wireless system that can be programmed to capture any data, including applications such as how many times a door opens. This can be then applied to rooms all over a house to monitor when an individual enters or leaves any room around his home, thus gathering his overall location data.
- Camera Phone Based Motion
The first thing that came to mind as I began reading this article was the new Nintendo Wii system. The main selling point, and definitely something I find extremely cool about this new system, is the wireless controller that detects the motion of the user in three dimensions. As such, I find it somewhat amusing and very understandable that this TinyMotion technology is immediately accepted in the cell phone gaming industry. The funnest part to me is that users can play Tetris or Snake by orienting or jerking the phone in the necessary directions.
However, the more amazing part to me is that this TinyMotion technology can be used for rapid typing or as a handwriting capture device. The TinyMotion technology also reminds me of the Anoto pen, mainly because it detects movements by analyzing image sequences recorded by an embedded camera. As such, the success of this technology is also based on the continued success of the camera phone, but consideration of the current statistics seem to indicate that camera phones are around to stay. The advancement of the current camera phones seem to be enough as well, as the results of the tests show nearly 100% accuracy in four convergent lighting environments. This is great, because one shortcoming of the tablet PC for me has always been that under certain lighting, I cannot read or see anything on the screen.
Overall, this seems to be a great project on a technology that will eventually be widely accepted.
Hiroki Terashima - Nov 29, 2006 09:25:02 am
Map of Our Lives
- While I do agree that ubiquitous computing is becoming more common in our lives, I also have strong feelings against it. The study finds that "laptops are frequently used in comfortable favored places in the home" such as a couch and a bed. This makes me wonder why people have taken up computing so much- why it is so important to so many people. Why do they use the computer now in the same place where they used to just rest and relax? With added ubiquity, I think we are losing our time to relax and enjoy other things in life. Sure, it allows people to "look up recipes", but whatever happened to "grandma's recipe book?" Isn't that where the traditional, family-oriented flavor comes from? It seems like a lot of people feel like they need a computer and allow their lives to be controlled by it, but in reality, it's just a tool.
- Bowen wonders "if [ergonomic and comfortable places] would be able to change if our spaces allowed them to?". I think yes, they will change. Things change over time to fit the current trend, and I'd be surprised if it didn't change for this case. Tony wonders “if having a desktop would effect the number of 'usual spots' for laptop usage.”. I think yes; you'll be more choosy of your laptop usage because you now have more options available for computing purposes. Kang notes that “The tracking device seemed to have provided an ample amount of data while not intruding the participants' privacy.” And yes, I too was amazed by the amount and diversity of data that they were able to record.
Camera Phone Based Motion Sensing
- I have a friend who told me about this research, and I thought this was neat. I too was reminded of Nintendo Wii (which I plan to buy when I get my paycheck!). It's like another toy! It add so much more possibilities to things, and we get more sense of involvement with the device. The quality of the motion sensing (eg Chinese characters without any smoothing) and the idea of “camera movement navigation” were amazing. The paper mentioned battery life as a possible problem, but I think this will be solved with an advent of newer, better batteries.
- Yimin suggests that “perhaps a more delicate way [for menu navigation] might be sensing the motion of a finger right in front of the camera.” That's a nice alternative; it's kind of like the hand-based computer that was in the movie Minority Report. I think there is already something like this. David suggests “Why not use this in conjunction with GPS to give a more accurate and local positioning and orientation?” Adding this feature sounds nice too. I think it's important to consider more usages and improvements, because this is a really nice tool.
Randy Hilarbo - Nov 29, 2006 10:07:35 am
Map of our Lives
- I thought that the study that they did is very unique. I find the results very interesting and agreeable: I, myself, do not use all parts of my apartment. I find the method of using sensors to study movement patterns very effective. But it does not seem to provide as much data as using video to perform the same function.
- The design ideas that they outlined resulting from their study are very interesting. I personally find that installing printer near the door would be very useful; this need could only have been realized after the results of the study. A design idea that I thought of while thinking of the results of their study is designing a house so that the activity places and favored places either belongs in one area of the house or are located near each other so that users will not have to move a lot.
Camera Phone Based Motion Sensing
- I think that TinyMotion is a really interesting innovation. What is interesting about their design is how it provides feedback to its users. The phone would vibrate to indicate success but this could become annoying. I thought that this will make playing cellphone games more fun. But this may have usability problems when using this in menu selection and writing text message. Unlike the current method of doing these tasks, I also don't think the process of using TinyMotion can become automatic.
- For some reason, I thought that seeing people shake their phones on the streets would be really funny. Though very promising, I'm not sure how adaptable this technology is. It seems that using this phone requires the user's locus of attention. If they want to send a text message, for example, while driving, doing so may require their attention; therefore, it may even conflict with their driving.
Jae Chang - Nov 29, 2006 12:19:01 pm
Maps of Our Lives
Comment 1: This article basically talks about daily user behavior with the use of sensor. I find this could lead to inaccurate data for statistics -- the fact that the user knows that the sensor (though not even camera) is present, it will at least implicitly alter their normal everyday behavior, like avoiding to be present at where the sensors are present and etc. If we do not inform the users about the presence of the sensors, it will turn out to be a privary issue. Also, to get the exactly location where the users are, we will probably need much more sensors than we think.
Comment 2: It was interesting article. The idea that mapping of people’s lives use of wireless laptop computers was very attractive. Also, I was impressed by the author’s approaches to the experiments. At the same time, the idea itself was a bit scary because the equipments used in the experiments are very common devices for home computing, so people’s privacies can be harmed.
Camera Phone Based Motion Sensing
Comment 1: The TinyMotion technology enabled the motion sensor to detect the user's hand movement via camera. This will be especially useful when text-messaging using the cell phone. Instead of inputting letter by pressing buttons, using handwriting motion to do so is much more efficient in terms of time and effort. Some problems I find with this are how effectively will it recognize motion in darkness, and how long battery will last with frequent use of such function.
Comment 2: The article was very interesting. I thought about how to write text messages in the cellular phone, and I believe that this can be the solution for the problem. For old people, writing text message by tapping the keypads on the cell phone can be the very difficult task since it may hard to learn or hard to see the fonts. The camera phone based motion sensing can be used by those people because all they need to is write text message by moving the cell phone as they write letters with pen. Also, I believe that the fact that the author convinces readers by using the Fitt’s law increased a lot of creditability of the research. I thin that there are many things to expand features: support more foreign language characters, grammar checking, and etc. Even if so, I think this solution is very good because this application does not need extra equipments or devices.
CharlesLeung - Nov 29, 2006 11:48:05 am
Maps of our Lives
I think that the part about how users using their laptops in action activities reveals a lot about user surverys. Even though the participants did not actually spend that much time using their laptops for action activities, they spent a lot of time talking about that because it was unique and interesting to talk about. The lesson to take from this is that surveys give information on what the participants think are interesting, not necessarily on what the do the most often.
I thought that it was also interesting about what the survey learned about people's routines with their laptops. For example, I think that it was really interesting that people had a departure routine for their laptops in which they had to prepare the laptops for departure or hide it away for the day. I also thought that the arrival habits of the users were interesting in that one participant in particular had to unwind before unpacking their laptop and begin using it.
Camera Phone Based Motion Sensing
Like a few other readers, I read this article and starting thinking about the Ninento Wii gaming system. I think that this technology is very intersting because it uses the camera to apparently fairly accurely sense motion. It seems like this technology could be very useful because it makes use of what's already in most cell phones and uses it to give a cell phone more functionality.
At the end of the article, they say that accelerometers are very inexpensive, so I would be very curious to see if that would be more easily deployed because it does not depend on other factors like lighting, etc. Although the TinyMotion technology employs what's already in the cell phone, it seems like the negative factors like having to use up computing power could be a problem because if this hampered the primary funciton of my phone, then I would be wary of having this on my phone. I'm sure in time that compting power won't be a very big deal though.
Robin Franco - Dec 15, 2006 07:49:50 pm
Maps of Our Lives: I can understand how one would have privacy concerns for being tracked around their own home. If I were the experimenter, I would be more worried about whether this lack of privacy would alter the behavior of the subjects, and therefore alter the results. If guy in one of the studies is secretly sneaking out at night, one would be safe to assume that he would hide those actions during the course of the study.
Camera Phone Based Motion Sensing: The use of the of a phone's camera as a motion-sensing input device is something that was very interesting because it made me think of my phone in ways I never have before. At first I thought that this would potentially have many uses. But upon further readings, most of the uses are more "neat" than important. I think that it would probably require a near perfect environment (lighting/contrast) in order to be reliable and accurate enough to be used in various applications.
