Julie Rico Williamson

Analysing Pedestrian Traffic Around Public Displays

This paper presents a powerful approach to evaluating public technologies by capturing and analysing pedestrian traffic using computer vision. This approach is highly flexible and scales better than traditional ethnographic techniques often used to evaluate technology in public spaces. This technique can be used to evaluate a wide variety of public installations and the data collected complements existing approaches. Our technique allows behavioural analysis of both interacting users and non-interacting passers-by. This gives us the tools to understand how technology changes public spaces, how passers-by approach or avoid public technologies, and how different interaction styles work in public spaces. In the paper, we apply this technique to two large public displays and a street performance. The results demonstrate how metrics such as walking speed and proximity can be used for analysis, and how this can be used to capture disruption to pedestrian traffic and passer-by approach patterns.

Understanding performative interactions in public settings

Interactive digital technologies pervade our shared spaces in personal, mobile, infrastructural and other embedded forms. These changes challenge the ways we understand and investigate the relationships between people, computing and settings. Responding to this situation—where ubiquitous computing is not only personal but also public, and where digital interactions may happen anywhere — this special issue explores how HCI research can use the strengths of an intersection of theory, practice and innovation in order to best address this conjunction of interactive technologies, public spaces and people interacting with or within both. With this shift to interaction happening in public spaces, people can no longer be seen as just ‘users’ but have to be understood as acting assemblages of bodies and technologies in the space they inhabit. This shift highlights the need to understand users in every setting—including those at desks and at work—as socially and culturally situated humans with agency. While this is not a new research development, this special issue speculates on and discusses how the shift to ‘everywhere interactions’ makes it important for research in human–computer interaction to reach beyond existing conventions. With this work comes a need to understand the interacting human as a situated body that is at any moment also a possible spectacle: as a body, a human and a user who engages with technology in response to the situation while also being a ‘performance’ for others to witness. Understanding people as actors in their context allows us to regard every user as a ‘performing body’ and a ‘performing subject’, and it enables us to analyse the performative aspects of interaction in many other situations than those where we design for actually staged performances in a defined performance space or stage. In this sense, ‘performative interaction’ is both concerned with technologies for on-stage performers using technologies as part of artistic expression, and an analytical frame for understanding every situation in which people engage with technologies (in public space). The question becomes: where and in which situations is this analytical frame relevant and useful?

GlobalFestival: evaluating real world interaction on a spherical display

Spherical displays present compelling opportunities for interaction in public spaces. However, there is little research into how touch interaction should control a spherical surface or how these displays are used in real world settings. This paper presents an in the wild deployment of an application for a spherical display called GlobalFestival that utilises two different touch interaction techniques. The first version of the application allows users to spin and tilt content on the display, while the second version only allows spinning the content. During the 4-day deployment, we collected overhead video data and on-display interaction logs. The analysis brings together quantitative and qualitative methods to understand how users approach and move around the display, how on screen interaction compares in the two versions of the application, and how the display supports social interaction given its novel form factor.

Designing performative interactions in public spaces

More and more interactive artifacts are used in public on an everyday basis, and metaphors from performance and theatre studies find their way into research on these interfaces, addressing how interaction with technology can be understood in a performative sense. Through theoretical discussions as well as practical design activities and building on the assumption that every human action in public space has a performative aspect, this workshop seeks to explore performative interaction as it occurs in real world public settings with interactive technologies. The purpose of the workshop is to make prototyping experiments that enable participants to explore select themes and questions relevant to everyday or staged performativity, e.g. the design of performative technologies, the evaluation of user experience, the importance of spectator and performer roles, and the social acceptability of performative actions in public spaces.

The lay of the land: techniques for displaying discrete and continuous content on a spherical display

Spherical displays afford social interaction, where users can crowd around the display to explore content together. Related work has explored different aspects of public display interaction, but the distribution and layout of content is often ignored by researchers and users alike. We present Venue Finder, an interactive spherical display that provided information about concert venues during a city-wide music festival. We deployed Venue Finder in a comparative evaluation using three techniques to distribute content on the spherical display; map based, linear, and distributed. We deployed the display in a concert hall for six days per condition for a total of eighteen days. The results showed that the linear condition resulting in the longest interaction times and largest proportion of touches for content viewing. Based on our results, we propose three design recommendations for content distribution on spherical displays.

Levitate: interaction with floating particle displays

This demonstration showcases the current state of the art for the levitating particle display from the Levitate Project. In this demonstration, we show a new type of display consisting of floating voxels, small levitating particles that can be positioned and moved independently in 3D space. Phased ultrasound arrays are used to acoustically levitate the particles. Users can interact directly with each particle using pointing gestures. This allows users to walk-up and interact without any user instrumentation, creating an exciting opportunity to deploy these tangible displays in public spaces in the future. This demonstration explores the design potential of floating voxels and how these may be used to create new types of user interfaces.

Designing a smartpen reminder system for older adults

Designing interactive systems for older adults often means designing with older adults from the earliest stages of development. This paper describes the co-design of a smartpen and paper calendar-based reminder system for the home. The design sessions involved older adults and used experience prototypes [1]. We completed these co-design sessions with older adults in order to explore the possibility of exploiting paper-based calendars for multimodal reminders systems using a smartpen. The initial results demonstrate successful interaction techniques that make a strong link between paper interaction and scheduling reminders, such as using smartpen annotations and using the location of written reminders within a paper diary to schedule digital reminders. The results also describe important physical aspects of paper diaries as discussed by older adults, such as daily/weekly layouts and binding.

Floating Widgets: Interaction with Acoustically-Levitated Widgets

Acoustic levitation enables new types of human-computer interface, where the content that users interact with is made up from small objects held in mid-air. We show that acoustically-levitated objects can form mid-air widgets that respond to interaction. Users can interact with them using in-air hand gestures. Sound and widget movement are used as feedback about the interaction.

Send me bubbles: multimodal performance and social acceptability

The use of performance as the focus of interaction provides the opportunity for exploratory and individual experiences but can also put users in an uncomfortable position. This paper presents an initial user study of a mobile remote awareness application in which users can control their own fish in a virtual fish tank using multimodal input from an external sensing device, where the input styles are created and performed by participants in an open ended sensing model. The study was designed in order to better understand the issues of performance when audience members are both casual passersby and familiar others watching remotely. Additionally, this study investigated the creation of performances and the effects of props when used in different social settings. The study involved pairs of participants interacting with the system in both public and private locations over repeated sessions. The results of this study show how users created and interpreted performances as well as how their consideration of passersby influenced their experiences.

Capturing Performative Actions for Interaction and Social Awareness

Capturing and making use of observable actions and behaviours presents compelling opportunities for allowing end-users to interact with such data and eachother. For example, simple visualisations based on on detected behaviour or context allow users to interpret this data based on their existing knowledge and awarness of social cues. This paper presents one such “remote awareness” application where users can interpret a visualization based on simple behaviours to gain a sense of awareness of other users’ current context or actions. Using a prop embedded with sensors, users could control the visualisation using gesture and voice-based input. The results of this work describe the kinds of performances users generated during the trial, how they imagined the actions of their fellow participants based on the visualisation, and how the props containing sensors were used to support, or in some cases hinder, successful performance and interaction.