Daniel Boland

Transient and transitional states: pressure as an auxiliary input modality for bimanual interaction

A novel investigation of pressure input is presented where it is characterised as a transient modality, one that has a natural inverse, bounce-back and a state that only persists during interaction. Three empirical studies are described that evaluate pressure for use as a non-dominant hand input modality, where the ability to target and maintain pressure while simultaneously performing a dominant-hand targeting task is investigated. Pressure accuracy was high (93%) and the impact on dominant-hand targeting was low. Mean pressure accuracy when selecting targets by releasing pressure was also high (89%) as was selecting targets by applying pressure from a non-zero starting point (94.4%). The ability to accurately maintain pressure over time was better with larger target pressures. Example applications and design guidelines are presented that enable designers to exploit the transient properties of pressure input in interaction design.

Finding my beat: personalised rhythmic filtering for mobile music interaction

A novel interaction style is presented, allowing in-pocket music selection by tapping a songs rhythm on a devices touchscreen or body. We introduce the use of rhythmic queries for music retrieval, employing a trained generative model to improve query recognition. We identify rhythm as a fundamental feature of music which can be reproduced easily by listeners, making it an effective and simple interaction technique for retrieving music. We observe that users vary in which instruments they entrain with and our work is the first to model such variability. An experiment was performed, showing that after training the generative model, retrieval performance improved two-fold. All rhythmic queries returned a highly ranked result with the trained generative model, compared with 47% using existing methods. We conclude that generative models of subjective user queries can yield significant performance gains for music retrieval and enable novel interaction techniques such as rhythmic filtering.

Lost in the rift: engaging with mixed reality

Virtual reality users are torn between the real and virtual worlds. Determining how, and when, to show elements of reality in a virtual view is key to providing usable VR experiences.