Felipe Breyer

Increasing kinect application development productivity by an enhanced hardware abstraction

Designing and implementing the interaction behavior for body tracking capable systems requires complex modeling of actions and extensive calibration. Being the most recent and successful device for robust interactive body tracking, Microsofts Kinect has enabled natural interaction by the use of consumer hardware, providing detailed and powerful information to designers and developers, but little tooling. To fulfill this lack of adequate tools for helping developers in the prototyping and implementation of such interfaces, we present Kina, a toolkit that makes the development not fully conditional to the existence of a sensor. By providing playback capabilities together with an online movement database, it reduces the physical effort found while performing testing activities.

Scissors A Precise Pointing Widget for Touch Screen Devices

A common complaint of touch interaction concerns the lack of precision and false negatives, especially in applications inherited from the PC and mouse context. This work introduces Scissors, a virtual widget for tasks that require precision while interacting with touch screens. It also prevents occlusion of targets, is effective for screen edges and is compatible with current interaction techniques. We developed two prototypes for testing: the first introduced a basic learning scenario and the second presented two sequences of targets with different sizes and locations. The system recorded, for each target, the time spent and number of attempts to select it. We performed tests with thirty-one users and evaluated their data according to statistical test, in this case, t-test for difference of means. The results showed that the Scissors widget was very effective in the scenarios that motivated its conception attaining an equivalent or up to 11.5 times higher success rate, thus achieving its main purpose.

A Relational Model for Playful and Smart Game Design

In recent years, a range of industry sectors including digital games and toys has incorporated smart tangible things into their design. This paper seeks to investigate how to integrate these physical objects associated with connectivity technologies into digital games, and how they affect the game design decisions. Therefore, the research flow consists in, systematically reviewing the literature, and then, analyzing existing market scenarios. Hence, the results of data extraction allowed to structuring a relational model of the entities that comprise different scenarios of smart play.

Luz, Câmera, libras!: how a mobile game can improve the learning of sign languages

There is a natural communication barrier between hearing and non-hearing people, and one of the reasons is the lack of knowledge about sign languages. This paper presents a study about a mobile application for learning and practicing the Brazilian sign language (Libras). The application consists of a guessing game in which two players must guess each others signs. For two months, the data collected from the game server and from the user gaming experience was analyzed with regard to the user interaction, engagement, fun and learning. The obtained results indicate that due to the mobile nature of the application, the drop rate was higher than expected. However, the user information demonstrated that learning tools can benefit from the mobile and ubiquitous nature of such devices. Despite the many drawbacks found, users confirmed the game was fun and effective for learning a sign language.

My Best Shirt with the Right Pants: Improving the Outfits of Visually Impaired People with QR Codes and NFC Tags

In our daily lives, some situations demand a dress code. Those circumstances may cause issues to the visually impaired people (VIP), mainly when they need to select a specific outfit. This study considers the importance of visual references on fashion and presents a solution to help VIP during the process of picking the proper clothing with awareness of their look. We explored technologies from the Internet of Things (IoT), such as Near Field Communication (NFC) combined with Quick Response (QR) Codes, in an assistive context. The project goal is to develop a cloth matching and an audio description system. This way, VIP may recognize the parts of an outfit and also combine such pieces. To give information about the apparel’s data, we attached an NFC tag and a QR code on the clothing tag. Our set up uses an Android application, to scan the QR Codes with the garment data. We also used a prototyping board to read the NFC tags, providing feedback about the clothing combinations. To measure the effectiveness of our solution, we conducted a pilot test with a group of visually impaired users (VIU). The procedure consisted of asking them to pick clothing from a garment rack, with a specific purpose in mind, and then check if they fit the requested dress code. The volunteers were positive about the audio description and the clothing matching system feedback. The participants suggested a few adjustments to the system, and they would recommend our solutions for other VIU.

Modelling Playful User Interfaces for Hybrid Games

Both toy and games industries are investing in hybrid play products. In these scenarios user access the system using toys as input/output, thus, they consist of playful user interfaces. Such systems are complex artifacts since they use real and virtual information. Therefore, they present new challenges to both designers and developers. We supposed both industries could benefit from hybrid design approaches since product concepts. Hence, we applied the model of hybrid gameplay as a practical tool for designing such systems. To achieve it, we included the model in a 16-week class to design hybrid games. In this paper, we detailed model usage in course schedule, and discussed how students experienced it. Besides, we presented student’s six working prototypes, including design cycles, and playtesting sessions. After class, we conducted semi-structured interviews with student’s representatives. Results revealed model usefulness to describe the system setup and interface elements. Furthermore, according to students, the model vocabulary facilitated communication among team members. Finally, we proposed improvements in model nomenclature based on student’s feedback. In addition, we recommend a few topics for a methodological approach to design hybrid games.

A Natural Interaction VR Environment for Surgical Instrumentation Training

This paper details the process of prototyping a Surgical Instrumentation Simulator using Virtual Reality and a gesture-based natural interaction. Our prototype used a cost-efficient mobile headset along with a telephone screen for a stereoscopic display, thus creating a low-cost. We applied an iterative approach to our prototyping process, and user testing included both students and professionals from the Health field. Results showed proposed interactions techniques as satisfactory according to users. In addition, the low-cost hardware choice proved sufficient in quality to support an immersive experience.

Remote HRI and Mixed Reality, an Ontology

This work builds a panorama of resources in Remote HRI identified in a systematic literature review with focus on Mixed reality solutions. This study builds a panorama of HRI with mixed reality through the definition of the terms presented in this ontology which serves as a reference to facilitate to create new robotic solutions relying on this resource.

Design Methodology for Body Tracking Based Applications - A Kinect Case Study

Along with the popularization of new body tracking technologies such as Microsoft Kinect, and the increasing individual initiatives in order to design solutions for such platforms, it is necessary to improve and to adapt all the framework of methods and processes for developing new applications for this context. Just like that, this paper proposes a direction towards the formalization of an agile methodology for developing new applications on the background of body interaction, suitable for modest innovation projects with short schedules and small teams. To achieve that, we executed an experiment during a graduate course in Informatics, due to its similarities to the start-up context. The participating students followed a four-step methodology comprehending the stages of requirements identification, ideas generation, prototyping, and evaluation. The experiment outcomes are described in a way to enlighten the methodology techniques. As a conclusion, the students provided an extremely positive feedback regarding the adoption of the proposed methodology during the development of body interaction applications.