Sowmya Somanath

Point it, split it, peel it, view it : techniques for interactive reservoir visualization on tabletops

Reservoir engineers rely on virtual representations of oil reservoirs to make crucial decisions relating, for example, to the modeling and prediction of fluid behavior, or to the optimal locations for drilling wells. Therefore, they are in constant pursue of better virtual representations of the reservoir models, improved user awareness of their embedded data, and more intuitive ways to explore them, all ultimately leading to more informed decision making. Tabletops have great potential in providing powerful interactive representation to reservoir engineers, as well as enhancing the flexibility, immediacy and overall capabilities of their analysis, and consequently bringing more confidence into the decision making process. In this paper, we present a collection of 3D reservoir visualization techniques on tabletop interfaces applied to the domain of reservoir engineering, and argue that these provide greater insight into reservoir models. We support our claims with findings from a qualitative user study conducted with 12 reservoir engineers, which brought us insight into our techniques, as well as a discussion on the potential of tabletop-based visualization solutions for the domain of reservoir engineering.

Communicating Awareness and Intent in Autonomous Vehicle-Pedestrian Interaction

Drivers use nonverbal cues such as vehicle speed, eye gaze, and hand gestures to communicate awareness and intent to pedestrians. Conversely, in autonomous vehicles, drivers can be distracted or absent, leaving pedestrians to infer awareness and intent from the vehicle alone. In this paper, we investigate the usefulness of interfaces (beyond vehicle movement) that explicitly communicate awareness and intent of autonomous vehicles to pedestrians, focusing on crosswalk scenarios. We conducted a preliminary study to gain insight on designing interfaces that communicate autonomous vehicle awareness and intent to pedestrians. Based on study outcomes, we developed four prototype interfaces and deployed them in studies involving a Segway and a car. We found interfaces communicating vehicle awareness and intent: (1) can help pedestrians attempting to cross; (2) are not limited to the vehicle and can exist in the environment; and (3) should use a combination of modalities such as visual, auditory, and physical.

'Maker' within Constraints: Exploratory Study of Young Learners using Arduino at a High School in India

Do-it-yourself (DIY) inspired activities have gained popularity as a means of creative expression and self-directed learning. However, DIY culture is difficult to implement in places with limited technology infrastructure and traditional learning cultures. Our goal is to understand how learners in such a setting react to DIY activities. We present observations from a physical computing workshop with 12 students (13-15 years old) conducted at a high school in India. We observed unique challenges for these students when tackling DIY activities: a high monetary and psychological cost to exploration, limited independent learning resources, difficulties with finding intellectual courage and assumed technical language proficiency. Our participants, however, overcome some of these challenges by adopting their own local strategies: resilience, nonverbal and verbal learning techniques, and creating documentation and fallback circuit versions. Based on our findings, we discuss a set of lessons learned about makerspaces in a context with socio-technical challenges.

ReservoirBench: An Interactive Educational Reservoir Engineering Workbench

ReservoirBench is an interactive workbench for educational geological science and engineering tasks. It is designed to facilitate education of novice audiences to teach them basic concepts of reservoir modeling and simulation workflow. Traditional training using lectures and software practice can lead to information overload, and retainability is questionable. As an alternative, we propose a physical workbench that is coupled with digital augmentation for the purpose of learning. We take advantage of the crucial role that spatiality and 3D representations play in petroleum reservoir modeling and allow basic domain concepts to be introduced and explored in a tangible and experiential manner. We describe the design of our prototype and reflect on the findings from our preliminary design critique.

Integrating a robot in a tabletop reservoir engineering application

We present our work-in-progress efforts of designing a simple tabletop robotic assistant that supports users as they interact with tabletop reservoir visualization application. Our prototype, Spidey, is designed to assist reservoir engineers in performing simple data exploration tasks on the interactive tabletop. We present our design as well as preliminary findings from a study of Spidey involving both interaction designers and reservoir engineers.

Fight-or-Flight: Leveraging Instinctive Human Defensive Behaviors for Safe Human-Robot Interaction

Maintaining the safety of humans is of paramount concern in the field of human-robot interaction. We employed a Research through Design (RtD) approach to explore better HRI safety mechanisms. We conducted a preliminary design study where we presented a group of designers various scenarios of different robotic platforms acting unsafely. Our findings indicate that participants mapped human responses to unsafe robotic interfaces, to natural human defensive behaviors in response to varying levels of threat stimuli. Based on preliminary findings, we suggest leveraging the instinctive human ability to react to dangerous situations as a fail-safe mechanism to the robot»s own built-in safety methods.

Can Interfaces Facilitate Communication in Autonomous Vehicle-Pedestrian Interaction?

Current vehicle-pedestrian interactions involve the vehicle communicating cues through its physical movement and through nonverbal cues from the driver. Our work studies vehicle-pedestrian interactions at a crosswalk in the presence of autonomous vehicles (without a driver) facilitated by the deployment of interfaces intended to replace missing driver cues. We created four prototype interfaces based on different modalities (such as visual, auditory, and physical) and locations (on the vehicle, on street infrastructure, on the pedestrian, or on a combination of the vehicle, street infrastructure, and the pedestrian). Our findings from two user studies indicate that interfaces which communicate awareness and intent can help pedestrians attempting to cross. We also find that interfaces are not limited to existing only on the vehicle.

Supernumerary Arms for Gestural Communication

Cyborgs are human-machine hybrids with organic and mechatronic body parts. Like humans, cyborgs may use their additional body parts for physical tasks and communication. In this study, we investigate how additional arms can be used to communicate. While using additional arms to perform physical tasks has been researched, using them to communicate is an area that is largely unexplored. Our study is divided into three stages: a pilot study, implementation, and a user study. In this paper, we discuss our efforts as related to the first two stages of our study. The pilot study was used to determine user expectations for the arms. Participants found the arms effective for describing an area from a fixed location. Users also preferred additional arms that can be controlled and are physically similar to their existing arms. Our prototype consists of a virtual mirror that augments the users body with additional arms. We discuss future directions for improving our implementation and outline a plan for the user study.

'Explorances' or why (some) physical entities help us be more creative

We believe that every physical entity has a set of attributes that defines the degree of how creatively it can be used. For example, the affordances, abstractness and modular nature of Lego™ blocks allows them to take on different forms of expression that showcases varying levels of human creativity (e.g. building alphabets, creating homes etc.). Similarly, when a DIY designer uses bottles to build houses, it projects his creative skills, but at the same time it speaks about the materiality, affordances and embodiment of the bottle which lends itself readily to creative and novel interaction design efforts. This theory, that every entity has a set of attributes that allows them to lend themselves more or less readily to creative and novel interactive design explorations is what we call explorances and is the focus of our proposed work.