Kristian T. Simsarian

Designing storytelling technologies to encouraging collaboration between young children

We describe the iterative design of two collaborative storytelling technologies for young children, KidPad and the Klump. We focus on the idea of designing interfaces to subtly encourage collaboration so that children are invited to discover the added benefits of working together. This idea has been motivated by our experiences of using early versions of our technologies in schools in Sweden and the UK. We compare the approach of encouraging collaboration with other approaches to synchronizing shared interfaces. We describe how we have revised the technologies to encourage collaboration and to reflect design suggestions made by the children themselves.

View-invariant regions and mobile robot self-localization

This paper addresses the problem of mobile robot self-localization given a polygonal map and a set of observed edge segments. The standard approach uses interpretation tree search with pruning heuristics to match observed edges to map edges. Our approach introduces a preprocessing step in which the map is decomposed into view-invariant regions (VIRs). The VIR decomposition captures information about map edge visibility, and can be used for a variety of robot navigation tasks.

Reality portals

Through interactive augmented virtuality we provide the ability to interactively explore a remote space inside a virtual environment. This paper presents a tool and technique that can be used to create such virtual worlds that are augmented by video textures taken of real world objects. The system constructs and updates, in near real-time, a representation of the user-defined salient and relevant features of the real world. This technique has the advantage of constructing a virtual world that contains the relevant video-data of the real world, while maintaining the flexibility of a virtual world. The virtual-real world representation is not dependent on physical location and can be manipulated in a way not subject to the temporal, spatial, and physical constraints found in the real world. Another advantage is that spatializing the video-data may afford more intuitive examination.

Achieving virtual presence with a semi-autonomous robot through a multi-reality and speech control interface

This paper describes a model for a complex human-machine system where a human operator controls a remote robot through the mediation of a distributed virtual environment with a language interface. The system combines speech controlled graphical immersive environments with the live video from a robot working in a real environment. The worlds are synchronized and updated based on operator selections, commands and robot actions. This system allows the user to have a powerful tool with a high level of abstraction to create and control autonomous robots, thus making possible the realization of single and possibly multiple real-world autonomous robot applications.

Designing interactive collaborative environments

We describe our experiences of creating and using a wide variety of techniques and applications to support collaboration in virtual environments for different activities and user groups. Our aim is to offer plentiful and rich possibilities for interaction across and between both real and virtual environments.

Multi-Modal Active Sensing for a Simple Mobile Agent

This work presents a methodology for the combination and use of many simple features of differing modalities that are extracted from the environment. There are two main ideas presented here, first that it is important to consider all modalities for extracting sensory features and second, that useful information can be extracted without resorting to computationally expensive methods. Many useful features can be extracted easily and cheaply and recognition robustness could be achieved through the combination of many such simple features. Examples of such feature parameters are based on color, texture, motion, range, sound, and magnetism. A design is given for a small, simple, and fast embodied agent employing the ideas contained herein.

The interactive collaborative environments laboratory

We overview the Interactive Collaborative Environments laboratory at the Swedish Institute of Computer Science.