Gaetan Lorho

Structured Menu Presentation Using Spatial Sound Separation

This paper describes a technique to support user interaction in a hierarchical menu, based on spatial sound separation. A complex menu structure is represented in space using a limited number of sound positions obtained by stereo panning or 3-D audio processing techniques. Spatial organisation of menu items can be designed in a logical way to provide navigation cues to the user, independent of the menu item nature. Two different strategies for menu presentation and interaction are described and compared in this paper. Finally, an application of this technique to the navigation in a large music collection is considered. This case study is an interesting example of usage situation for which eyes-free interaction would be useful, for instance on a portable audio player using headphones and a small remote control.

Enhancing end-user experience in a multi-device ecosystem

A person may use many devices capable of rendering digital content on a regular basis. For instance, the user is in front of a large TV screen, and soon he or she moves away from the TV and wants to continue the media consumption. The transfer of media content across devices needs to be handled seamlessly. In this paper, we present a phone-centric approach to improve the end-user experience in multi-device ecosystem. Together with predefined parameters, we use context information to trigger content adaptation, and generate decisions relating to the transcoding operation. We have made a preliminary UI evaluation of the system, and the system was found to be useful, although requiring fine tuning and further development.