Junko Ichino

Vuzik: the effect of large gesture interaction on children's creative musical expression

Bringing the body more fully into interaction has attracted attention as research now looks to combines body, mind, cognition and emotion when people interact with a digital environment. This paper describes a user study comparing Vuzik -- an application where the user manipulates, arranges, and composes music with painting interaction akin to that used when standing at an easel, to a traditional, GUI based musical interface. Vuzik aims to promote creative musical experiences in children by allowing the childs actions and movements as he/she paints on a large display resembling a canvas using a palette and brush or finger to control musical parameters interactively. In a study conducted with fourteen elementary school children, we found that when compared to a more WIMP-based traditional tool, Vuzik promoted larger scale gestures, ease of learning, and the formation of a broader overall understanding of their musical creation.

Microscopic analysis of document handling while reading paper documents to improve digital reading device

We conducted microscopic analysis on several frequently observed types of work-related reading to find ways to support each type of reading. We obtained empirical data from video recording, concurrent verbal reporting, and retrospective reporting by 18 participants in 10 target types of reading that use paper. Using these data, first, we categorized the ways people interact with paper documents when reading in detail. We analyzed which types of behaviors were frequently observed in each type of reading based on these categories. We will discuss what kind of support is required for each type of reading by specifying what types of behaviors were frequently observed for certain types of reading.

Do tablets really support discussion?: comparison between paper, tablet, and laptop PC used as discussion tools

Touch-based tablet devices are starting to be used frequently in meetings and places of discussion. However, are tablets really ideal as discussion tools? Or do they actually obstruct communication? To answer these questions, this paper quantitatively compares discussion processes involving paper, an iPad2, and a laptop PC. We performed an experiment where 12 groups of two participants each (24 participants in total) worked collaboratively by referring to documents and using paper, an iPad2, or a laptop PC as presentation media. We observed verbal and non-verbal interaction between participants. First, we investigated the total amount of speech between two participants and found they spoke more when using paper than when using the electronic media. Next, we observed that participants used more demonstrative pronouns when using paper than when using the iPad2 but used more demonstrative pronouns when using the iPad2 than when using the laptop PC. Also, they made more eye contact when using paper than when using the other media. These results suggest that tablets may not currently be the best media to use when ideas should be actively exchanged, sensitivity is required toward other participants in the discussion, or work progress needs to be shared.

Support for seamless linkage between less-detailed and more-detailed representations for comic design

Through a study of comic design practice, we observed that comic designers created three components-character-config, plot, and storyboard-and used a trial-and-error approach with iterative progression from less detailed to more detailed representations during the early stages of design. However, existing comic design tools do not support these tasks very well. In the light of these observations, we created a system that helps comic designers in the early stages of design. Our prototype supports sketching input, allows seamless movement backward or forward among the different granularities of representations across the three components, and concurrent use of multiple related sheets. We performed an informal evaluation with one professional designer and found that she reacted positively to the concept and was interested in using such a system in her work

Truly Useful 3D Drawing System for Professional Designer by “Life-Sized and Operable” Feature and New Interaction

“Media” is an artifact that expands our creativity and intelligence. We have been studying the use of “Rich Media” to support creative and intelligent human activities. Specifically, for over ten years we have focused on the 3D space as one of “Rich Media” and developed many 3D sketch systems that support the design of 3D objects. However, their long-term evaluation has revealed that they are not used by designers in real fields. Even worse, they are treated as if they were just mere attractions in an amusement park. The fundamental problem is the lack of the indispensable function for 3D space. In this paper, we propose new design principles, “life-size and operability”, which make the 3D sketch system truly valuable for the designer. The new 3D sketch system is designed on the basis of “life-size and operability”, developed, and evaluated successfully.

Three design principles learned through developing a series of 3D sketch systems: “Memory Capacity”, “Cognitive Mode”, and “Life-size and Operability”

We have been studying the creativity-centered media to ensure that systems truly support creative and intelligent human activities. However, it has gradually become obvious that current advanced support systems have a serious drawback: instead of promoting creative work, they often discourage creativity or let us stop thinking. In this paper, we focus on the 3D sketch system that supports the design of 3D objects by drawing them in the 3D space directly, because they are not used by designers in real fields but are just treated as a mere attraction in an amusement park. We propose three design principles, “Memory Capacity”, “Cognitive Mode”, and “Life-size and Operability”, which make the 3D sketch system truly useful for the designer. They have been gradually derived in the accordance with our cognitive experiment and developing series of 3D sketch system.

Behavior extraction from tweets using character N-gram models

Human daily activities are stored in various kinds of data representations using ICT devices nowadays, named lifelogs. It is highly requested to retrieve useful information from lifelogs because these raw data are hard to handle. Extracting human activities from these logs is promising to enrich our life. Context-awareness services can be provided depending on user activities extracted from these logs. Recently, a lot of people post a message called tweet within Twitter to show what they are doing, thinking, feeling, and so on. Tweets have potential to record human activities, because many people post tweets so frequently every day. This paper focused on the tweets to retrieve human behavior from them. The length of tweets are limited within short sentence, so this causes some difficulties. The users will use domain-specific terms and will post grammatically incorrect sentences to fit with the constraints. These make us hard to analyze tweets with grammatical manner or with dictionaries. To tackle them, we are applying character n-gram tokenization and naive Bayes classifier to extract appropriate behavioral information from tweets. Using n-gram tokenizer, domain-specific words can be identified and incorrect grammar can be handled. Our approach is examined using real tweets in Japanese. The index of precision, recall and F-measure shows the promising results. Some experiments have been carried out to show the feasibility of our approach. At this point, our system applied to Japanese tweets but it is applicable to any other languages.

Simple augmented reality system for 3D ultrasonic image by see-through HMD and single camera and marker combination

Thanks to the rapid progress of ICT, significant progress has been made in both the “generation” and “display” of the advanced medical information. However, serious problems still remain in both the “generation” and “display”. Therefore, we propose a simple augmented reality system that can display an ultrasonic image of exactly the same plane in the body of the patient that a doctor is looking at. The key idea is to utilize the fact that an ultrasonic probe moves inside the doctors field of view and within the accessible range of the arm in order to simplify the augmented reality system. The prototype has been developed using only a see-through HMD and single camera and marker combination. Three simple interaction methods compensate for the limitations in 3D position sensing. We worked with a medical doctor to test the prototype system and found it to be effective.

A sketch support system based on behavior of designers

We have developed a design-support system which enhances design ideas by activating divergent thinking and convergent thinking of a designer, and offers a natural user interface that does not interrupt the thinking of a designer using the faculty of a computer. The system is composed of three user interfaces (UI)—a historical-view UI which analyzes partitions and branches of a design process automatically and displays them in the form of a tree structure, a spatial-view UI with which a designer can freely arrange past sketches in two-dimensional space, and a time-line and partial undo/redo UI which provides free undoing/redoing in units finer than a stroke—based on the results of analysis of a typical design process (i.e., designing a car), behavior analysis on several designers participating in a drawing experiment, and previous research. The effectiveness of this system was confirmed by the results of evaluation experiments with professional designers.

Effects of the Display Angle on Social Behaviors of the People around the Display: A Field Study at a Museum

In this paper, we investigate through a field study how the angles (horizontal, tilted, and vertical angles) of displays deployed in a public space (at a museum) impact the social behaviors of the people around the display. In the field study, we collected both quantitative and qualitative data of more than 700 museum visitors over a period of approximately three months. Findings of our study include the following: (1) the horizontal and vertical display angles have a higher honeypot effect, i.e., people interacting with a display attract other people, than the tilted display angle, (2) the vertical display angle, compared to the horizontal and tilted display angles, attracts several people to the display and encourages them to stay in the display space and share the space for a short period of time (88 seconds on average), and as a result, people frequently enter and leave the space with a display, and (3) display angles closer to the horizontal promotes the side-by-side arrangement, and display angles closer to the vertical promotes the L-shaped arrangement of F-formation. The findings in our study help design a public display deployed in museums and other public spaces.