Pointing, Placing, Touching : Physical Manipulation and Coordination Techniques for Interactive Meeting Spaces
Johan Mattsson · 2007
In the design and study of dedicated ubiquitous computing environments, efforts to enhance and support co-located collaborative activities and work have been a particular focus. In his vision of ubiquitous computing, Mark Weiser foresees a new era of computing, one that closes and follows on from the era of Personal Computing (Post Desktop). The vision involves simultaneous computations facilitated by a number of technical resources (services and artifacts) available in the environment. Ubiquitous Computing also draws on the perspective of embodied interaction: that our overall physical and social interaction, and the design of artifacts supporting interaction with people, places, and the environment, are two different perspectives sharing a common goal. This thesis addresses three critical aspects of interactive meeting spaces: Multi-device selection, Multi-device setup, and Multi-device direct manipulation. To do so, physical interaction techniques have been designed that make more visible the critical and central co-located manipulation and coordination actions in interactive meeting spaces. The tree designed physical interaction techniques, that have been developed and investigated are: the iwand, a pointing technique; the Magic Bowl, a placing technique; and Physical Cursors, a touching technique. In evaluation of the interaction techniques, addressed five problems that originated in observations during the development of interactive meeting spaces. How to: 1) identify and manipulate a physical object in order to select and control a particular service; 2) support the control of complementary combinations of services through physical manipulation; 3) capture, store and recall a preset group of services; 4) maintain and reuse presets, to preserve the prerequisite for a scene, under continually changing circumstances; and 5) design ways to manipulate physical widgets to enable a social protocol for coordination as an alternative to individual (invisible) manipulation? A tentative design pattern language developed, along with “sharing control”, a further developed sample of a design pattern, which applies to physical manipulations in interactive meeting spaces. Additionally, principles are described for conducting long-term studies of living-laboratory observations and for revisiting central design decisions. The principles and design patterns are drawn from designed interaction techniques and from the design and deployment of interactive meeting spaces.