Eva-Lotta Sallnäs Pysander

A Haptic Tool for Group Work on Geometrical Concepts Engaging Blind and Sighted Pupils

In the study presented here, two haptic and visual applications for learning geometrical concepts in group work in primary school have been designed and evaluated. The aim was to support collaborative learning among sighted and visually impaired pupils. The first application is a static flattened 3D environment that supports learning to distinguish between angles by means of a 3D haptic device providing touch feedback. The second application is a dynamic 3D environment that supports learning of spatial geometry. The scene is a room with a box containing geometrical objects, which pupils can pick up and move around. The applications were evaluated in four schools with groups of two sighted and one visually impaired pupil. The results showed the support for the visually impaired pupil and for the collaboration to be satisfying. A shared understanding of the workspace could be achieved, as long as the virtual environment did not contain movable objects. Verbal communication was crucial for the work process but haptic guiding to some extent substituted communication about direction. When it comes to joint action between visually impaired and sighted pupils a number of interesting problems were identified when the dynamic and static virtual environments were compared. These problems require further investigation. The study extends prior work in the areas of assistive technology and multimodal communication by evaluating functions for joint haptic manipulation in the unique setting of group work in primary school.

The Effects of Audio and Haptic Feedback on Collaborative Scanning and Placing

This paper presents a study aimed at exploring the effects of different modality combinations on collaborative task performance and employed joint task-solving strategies in a shared interface. The ...

Playing Close to Home: Interaction and Emerging Play in Outdoor Play Installations

Outdoor play is becoming an increasingly marginalised activity in the urban landscape. Even in HCI, research on interactive solutions for outdoor play has largely been limited to special areas and in particular playgrounds. But children play everywhere, and especially play close to home is central in childrens play activities. In this article we draw upon knowledge about designing for childrens play in interaction design as well as in landscape architecture, to study how interactive play installations can be integrated in outdoor environments of a residential area. We present a field study in which digitally enhanced play installations were installed, in dialogue with the landscape, in between the buildings of a residential area. We focus on how emerging play activities made use of the installations as well as of the surrounding landscape in expected as well as unexpected ways. Based on the observations, we discuss how residential play is special, and how this affects how to design for it.

Haptic feedback combined with movement sonification using a friction sound improves task performance in a virtual throwing task

In this paper we present a study on the effects of auditory- and haptic feedback in a virtual throwing task performed with a point-based haptic device. The main research objective was to investigate if and how task performance and perceived intuitiveness is affected when interactive sonification and/or haptic feedback is used to provide real-time feedback about a movement performed in a 3D virtual environment. Emphasis was put on task solving efficiency and subjective accounts of participants’ experiences of the multimodal interaction in different conditions. The experiment used a within-subjects design in which the participants solved the same task in different conditions: visual-only, visuohaptic, audiovisual and audiovisuohaptic. Two different sound models were implemented and compared. Significantly lower error rates were obtained in the audiovisuohaptic condition involving movement sonification based on a physical model of friction, compared to the visual-only condition. Moreover, a significant increase in perceived intuitiveness was observed for most conditions involving haptic and/or auditory feedback, compared to the visual-only condition. The main finding of this study is that multimodal feedback can not only improve perceived intuitiveness of an interface but that certain combinations of haptic feedback and movement sonification can also contribute with performance-enhancing properties. This highlights the importance of carefully designing feedback combinations for interactive applications.