Maribeth Gandy

The gesture pendant: a self-illuminating, wearable, infrared computer vision system for home automation control and medical monitoring

In this paper we present a wearable device for control of home automation systems via hand gestures. This solution has many advantages over traditional home automation interfaces in that it can be used by those with loss of vision, motor skills, and mobility. By combining other sources of context with the pendant we can reduce the number and complexity of gestures while maintaining functionality. As users input gestures, the system can also analyze their movements for pathological tremors. This information can then be used for medical diagnosis, therapy, and emergency services.Currently, the Gesture Pendant can recognize control gestures with an accuracy of 95% and userdefined gestures with an accuracy of 97% It can detect tremors above 2HZ within .1 Hz.

Wizard of Oz support throughout an iterative design process

The Wizard of Oz prototyping approach, widely used in human-computer interaction research, is particularly useful in exploring user interfaces for pervasive, ubiquitous, or mixed-reality systems that combine complex sensing and intelligent control logic. The vast design space for such nontraditional interfaces provides many possibilities for user interaction through one or more modalities and often requires challenging hardware and software implementations. The WOz method helps designers avoid getting locked into a particular design or working under an incorrect set of assumptions about user preferences, because it lets them explore and evaluate designs before investing the considerable development time needed to build a complete prototype.

Successful aging through digital games: Socioemotional differences between older adult gamers and Non-gamers

The purpose of this investigation was to examine differences in psychological functioning (e.g., well-being, affect, depression, and social functioning) between older adults who play digital games compared to those older adults that do not play digital games. Analysis was conducted on a sample of 140 independently living older adults with an average age of 77.47years (SD=7.31). Participants were divided into three groups (Regular, Occasional Gamers, and Non-gamers) - 60% of the sample was either a Regular or Occasional Gamer. Differences among the groups were found for well-being, negative affect, social functioning, and depression with Regular and Occasional Gamers performing better, on average, than Non-gaming older adults. Findings suggest that playing may serve as a positive activity associated with successful aging.

The Argon AR Web Browser and standards-based AR application environment

A common vision of Augmented Reality (AR) is that of a person immersed in a diverse collection of virtual information, superimposed on their view of the world around them. If such a vision is to become reality, an ecosystem for AR must be created that satisfies at least these properties: multiple sources (or channels of interactive information) must be able to be simultaneously displayed and interacted with, channels must be isolated from each other (for security and stability), channel authors must have the flexibility to design the content and interactivity of their channel, and the application must fluidly integrate with the ever-growing cloud of systems and services that define our digital lives. In this paper, we present the design and implementation of the Argon AR Web Browser and describe our vision of an AR application environment that leverages the WWW ecosystem. We also describe KARML, our extension to KML (the spatial markup language for Google Earth and Maps), that supports the functionality required for mobile AR. We combine KARML with the full range of standard web technologies to create a standards-based web browser for mobile AR. KARML lets users develop 2D and 3D content using existing web technologies and facilitates easy deployment from standard web servers. We highlight a number of projects that have used Argon and point out the ways in which our web-based architecture has made previously impractical AR concepts possible.

Putting Fun into Video Games for Older Adults

Our observations of players older than 65 suggested that they weighed costs and benefits when deciding whether or not to play video games. Current games can be higher in cost for seniors because of the perceptual and cognitive changes that tend to occur with age. When seniors choose to invest effort in overcoming those costs, it is often because they perceive a high benefit. Creating successful games for seniors will likely require designers to increase the perceived benefits of games, such as engagement, even more than lowering costs such as frustration, time, and money.

KHARMA: An open KML/HTML architecture for mobile augmented reality applications

Widespread future adoption of augmented reality technology will rely on a broadly accessible standard for authoring and distributing content with, at a minimum, the flexibility and interactivity provided by current web authoring technologies. We introduce KHARMA, an open architecture based on KML for geospatial and relative referencing combined with HTML, JavaScript and CSS technologies for content development and delivery. This architecture uses lightweight representations that decouple infrastructure and tracking sources from authoring and content delivery. Our main contribution is a re-conceptualization of KML that turns HTML content formerly confined to balloons into first-class elements in the scene. We introduce the KARML extension that gives authors increase control over the presentation of HTML content and its spatial relationship to other content.

New Media and the Permanent Crisis of Aura

Walter Benjamin is best known for his essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, (Benjamin, 1968b) in which he argues that film and other mechanical technologies are destroying the aura that had belonged to traditional art. In this article we apply Benjamin’s concept of aura to new (digital) media, and in particular to ‘mixed reality’, a group of technologies that blend computer-generated visual, aural, and textual information into the user’s physical environment. We argue that mixed reality increases the options for designer-artists and apparently allows the invocation of aura in new ways. Our culture’s pursuit of auratic experience remains problematic in mixed reality as it was for Benjamin in the case of film. New media maintain aura in a permanent state of oscillation or crisis, and this crisis is a key to understanding new media.

DART: the Designer's Augmented Reality Toolkit

This demonstration highlights the Designers Augmented Reality Toolkit (DART), a system that allows users to easily create augmented reality (AR) experiences. Over the past year our research has focused on the creation of this toolkit that can be used by technologists, designers, and students alike to rapidly prototype AR applications. Current approaches to AR development involve extensive programming and content creation as well as knowledge of technical topics involving cameras, trackers, and 3D geometry. The result is that it is very difficult even for technologists to create AR experiences. Our goal was to eliminate these obstacles that prevent such users from being able to experiment with AR. The DART system is based on the Macromedia Director multimedia-programming environment, the de facto standard for multimedia content creation. DART uses the familiar Director paradigms of a score, sprites and behaviors to allow a user to visually create complex AR applications. DART also provides low-level support for the management of trackers, sensors, and camera via a Director plug-in Xtra. This demonstration will show the wide range of AR and other types of multimedia applications that can be created with DART, and visitors will have the opportunity to use DART to create their own experiences.

Virtual transparency: Introducing parallax view into video see-through AR

In this poster, we present the idea of “virtual transparency” for video see-through AR. In fully synthetic 3D graphics, head-tracked motion parallax has been shown to be a powerful depth cue for understanding the structure of the virtual world. To leverage head-tracked motion parallax in video see-through AR, the view of the virtual and physical world must change together in response to head motion. We present a system for accomplishing this, and discuss the benefits and limitations of our approach.

BragFish: exploring physical and social interaction in co-located handheld augmented reality games

In this paper, we present our research on social interaction in co-located handheld augmented reality (AR) games. These games are characterized by shared physical spaces that promote physical awareness among players, and individual gaming devices that support both public and private information. One result of our exploration of the design and evaluation of such games is a prototype called BragFish. Through BragFish, we aim to investigate the connections between the observed game experience (focusing on social and physical interaction) and the designed affordances of our AR handheld game. Our evaluation of BragFish shows that most of our participants form strategies for social play by leveraging visual, aural and physical cues from the shared space. Moreover, we use this as an example to motivate discussions on how to improve social play experiences for co-located handheld games by designing for shared spaces.