Maribeth Back

Designing audio aura

In this paper. we describe the process behind the design of Audio Aura. The goal of Audio Aura is to provide serendipitous information, via background auditory cues, that is tied to people’s physical actions in the workplace. We used scenarios to explore issues in serendipitous information such as privacy and work practice. Our sound design was guided by a number of strategies for creating peripheral sounds grouped in cohesive ecologies. Faced with an physical and software infrastructure under development in a laboratory distant f?om our sound studio. we prototyped different sonic landscapes in VRML worlds. In our infrastructure design, we made a number of trade-offs in our use of legacy systems and our client-server design.

Algorithmic mediation for collaborative exploratory search

We describe a new approach to information retrieval: algorithmic mediation for intentional, synchronous collaborative exploratory search. Using our system, two or more users with a common information need search together, simultaneously. The collaborative system provides tools, user interfaces and, most importantly, algorithmically-mediated retrieval to focus, enhance and augment the teams search and communication activities. Collaborative search outperformed post hoc merging of similarly instrumented single user runs. Algorithmic mediation improved both collaborative search (allowing a team of searchers to find relevant information more efficiently and effectively), and exploratory search (allowing the searchers to find relevant information that cannot be found while working individually).

Listen reader: an electronically augmented paper-based book

While predictions abound that electronic books will supplant traditional paper-based books, many people bemoan the coming loss of the book as cultural artifact. In this project we deliberately keep the affordances of paper books while adding electronic augmentation. The Listen Reader combines the look and feel of a real book - a beautiful binding, paper pages and printed images and text - with the rich, evocative quality of a movie soundtrack. The books multi-layered interactive soundtrack consists of music and sound effects. Electric field sensors located in the book binding sense the proximity of the readers hands and control audio parameters, while RFID tags embedded in each page allow fast, robust page identification. Three different Listen Readers were built as part of a six-month museum exhibit, with more than 350,000 visitors. This paper discusses design, implementation, and lessons learned through the iterative design process, observation, and visitor interviews.

Audio aura: light-weight audio augmented reality

/ The physical world can be augmented with auditory cues allowing passive interaction by the user. By combining active badges, distributed systems, and wireless headphones, the movements of users through their workplace can trigger the transmission of auditory cues. These cues can summarize information about the activity of colleagues, notify the status of email or the start of a meeting, and remind of tasks such as retrieving a book at opportune times. We are currently experimenting with a prototype audio augmented reality system, Audio Aura, at Xerox PARC. The goal of this work is to create an aura of auditory information that mimics existing background, auditory awareness cues. We are prototyping sound designs for Audio Aurain VRML --ln L.“.

Boosting system performance with optimistic distributed protocols

Rather than eliminating reading as many fear, digital technology actually facilitates a wide array of exciting and unusual reading experiences. A research team at Xerox PARC has created a museum exhibition called XFR that provides a glimpse into the future of reading forms and how we will interact with them. The exhibit stimulates an awareness of the ubiquity of reading and its continued importance in the digital age. It also explores the range of exciting reading experiences made possible by new technology, from interactive readers to large-scale reading walls to dynamic narratives that change in response to reader input. Because the XFR show took place within the context of a modern technology museum, most of the exhibits are interactive and hands-on.

Page detection using embedded tags

We describe a robust working prototype of a system for accurate page-ID detection from bound paper books. Our method uses a new RFID technology to recognize book page location. A thin flexible transponder tag with a unique ID is embedded in the paper of each page, and a tag reader is affixed to the binding of the back of the book. As the pages turn, the tag reader notices which tags are within its read range and which have moved out of its range (which is about four inches). The human interacts with the book naturally, and is not required to perform any actions for page detection that are not usual in book interaction. The page-detection data can be used to enhance the experience of the book, or to enable the book as a controller for another system. One such system, an interactive museum exhibit, is briefly described.

It's Just a Method!: a pedagogical experiment in interdisciplinary design

What does a student need to know to be a designer? Beyond a list of separate skills, what mindset does a student need to develop for designerly action now and into the future? In the excitement of the cognitive revolution, Simon proposed a way of thinking about design that promised to make it more manageable and cognitive: to think of design as a planning problem [11, 29]. Yet, as Suchman argued long ago [32], planning accounts may be applied to problems that are not at base accomplished by planning, to the detriment of design vision. This paper reports on a pedagogy that takes Suchmans criticism to heart and avoids dressing up design methods as more systematic and predictive than they in fact are. The idea is to teach design through exposure to not just one, but rather, many methods---that is, sets of rules or behaviors that produce artifacts for further reflection and development. By introducing a large number of design methods, decoupled from theories, models or frameworks, we teach (a) important cross-methodological regularities in competence as a designer, (b) that the practice of design can itself be designed and (c) that method choice affects design outcomes. This provides a rich and productive notion of design particularly necessary for the world of pervasive and ubiquitous computing.

The SIT book: audio as affective imagery for interactive storybooks

We describe a working prototype built as part of our continuing research focus on new document genres and the crossmodal affordances of interactive audio. Our experimental SIT (Sound-Image-Text) Book is a personal interactive reading experience that combines the look and feel of a real book -- a beautiful cover, paper pages and printed images and text -- with the rich, evocative quality of a movie soundtrack. The soundtrack is multi-track and includes music and sound effects. The SIT Book uses electric field sensors located in the book binding to sense the readers casual book handling and fingering of the page; these sensors control the ambient audio. The particular point of the SIT Book is to explore the use of background sound to provide a sense of place, and to add affectto the experience of reading a book without interrupting the flow of the story.

Speeder Reader: An experiment in the future of reading

Abstract Speeder Reader is an interactive reading station built around two primary ideas: dynamic text (especially RSVP, that is, rapid serial visual presentation), and the interface metaphor of driving. As words flash one at a time on a screen in front of the reader, he or she controls the rate of speed of the words with a gas pedal (up to 1850 words per minute in the current instance). Text stream selection is performed with a steering wheel. Thus, one can “drive through a book”. We leverage peoples knowledge of the familiar activity of driving an automobile (or, in the case of children, operating a speed-racing video game) to allow comfortable and intuitive access to a possibly less familiar world of interactive text. We emphasize the power and ease of the familiar driving metaphor as a navigation device. Speeder Reader was first installed at the Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose, CA, as part of a larger exhibit on the impact of digital technologies on reading.

Sound design for Brain Opera's Mind Forest: audio for a complex interactive system

Sound design for large interactive systems poses unique challenges, many of which are illustrated in the complex set of instmments and games that were built for the interactive installation/perfortnance Brain Opera. Three design and differentiation processes for these interactive artifacts sre deseribed: conceptual design system design, and acoustic implementation.