Steven Houben

WatchConnect: A Toolkit for Prototyping Smartwatch-Centric Cross-Device Applications

People increasingly use smartwatches in tandem with other devices such as smartphones, laptops or tablets. This allows for novel cross-device applications that use the watch as both input device and output display. However, despite the increasing availability of smartwatches, prototyping cross-device watch-centric applications remains a challenging task. Developers are limited in the applications they can explore as available toolkits provide only limited access to different types of input sensors for cross-device interactions. To address this problem, we introduce WatchConnect, a toolkit for rapidly prototyping cross-device applications and interaction techniques with smartwatches. The toolkit provides developers with (i) an extendable hardware platform that emulates a smartwatch, (ii) a UI framework that integrates with an existing UI builder, and (iii) a rich set of input and output events using a range of built-in sensor mappings. We demonstrate the versatility and design space of the toolkit with five interaction techniques and applications.

Overcoming interaction blindness through curiosity objects

In recent years there has been a widespread installation of large interactive public displays. Longitudinal studies however show that these interactive displays suffer from interaction blindness - the inability of the public to recognize the interactive capabilities of those surfaces. In this paper, we explore the use of curiosity-provoking artifacts, (curiosity objects) to overcome interaction blindness. Our study confirmed the interaction blindness problem and shows that introducing a curiosity object results in a significant increase in interactivity with the display as well as changes in movement in the spaces surrounding the interactive display.

ActivitySpace: Managing Device Ecologies in an Activity-Centric Configuration Space

Mobile devices have become an intrinsic part of peoples everyday life. They are multifunctional devices providing ubiquitous access to many different sources of information. Together with traditional personal computers, these devices form a device ecology that provides access to an overlapping information space. Previous studies have shown that users encounter a number of fundamental problems when interacting with these device ecologies, such as lack of transparency, control, intelligibility and context. To mitigate these problems, we introduce ActivitySpace: an activity-centric configuration space that enables the user to integrate and work across several devices by utilizing the space between the devices. This paper presents the conceptual background and design of ActivitySpace and reports on a study with nine participants. Our study shows that ActivitySpace helps users to easily manage devices and their allocated resources while also exposing a number of usage patterns. \

Activity-centric support for ad hoc knowledge work: a case study of co-activity manager

Modern knowledge work consists of both individual and highly collaborative activities that are typically composed of a number of configuration, coordination and articulation processes. The desktop interface today, however, provides very little support for these processes and rather forces knowledge workers to adapt to the technology. We introduce co-Activity Manager, an activity-centric desktop system that (i) provides tools for ad hoc dynamic configuration of a desktop working context, (ii) supports both explicit and implicit articulation of ongoing work through a built-in collaboration manager and (iii) provides the means to coordinate and share working context with other users and devices. In this paper, we discuss the activity theory informed design of co-Activity Manager and report on a 14 day field deployment in a multi-disciplinary software development team. The study showed that the activity-centric workspace supports different individual and collaborative work configuration practices and that activity-centric collaboration is a two-phase process consisting of an activity sharing and per-activity coordination phase.

NooSphere: an activity-centric infrastructure for distributed interaction

Distributed interaction is a computing paradigm in which the interaction with a computer system is distributed over multiple devices, users and locations. Designing and developing distributed interaction systems is intrinsically difficult as it requires the engineering of a stable infrastructure to support the actual system and user interface. As an approach to this re-engineering problem, we introduce NooSphere, an activity-centric infrastructure and programming framework that provides a set of fundamental distributed services that enables quick development and deployment of distributed interactive systems. In this paper, we describe the requirements, design and implementation of NooSphere and validate the infrastructure by implementing three canonical real deployable applications constructed on top of the NooSphere infrastructure.

Co-activity manager: integrating activity-based collaboration into the desktop interface

Activity-Based Computing (ABC) has been proposed as an organisational structure for local desktop management and knowledge work. Knowledge work, however, typically occurs in partially overlapping subgroups and involves the use of multiple devices. We introduce co-Activity Manager, an ABC approach that (i) supports activity sharing for multiple collaborative contexts, (ii) includes collaborative tools into the activity abstraction and (iii) supports multiple devices by seamlessly integrated cloud support for documents and activity storage. Our 14 day field deployment in a multidisciplinary software development team showed that activity sharing is used as a starting point for long-term collaboration while integrated communication tools and cloud support are used extensively during the collaborative activities. The study also showed that activities are used in different ways ranging from project descriptions to to-do lists, thereby confirming that a document-driven activity roaming model seems to be a good match for collaborative knowledge work

CurationSpace: Cross-Device Content Curation Using Instrumental Interaction

For digital content curation of historical artefacts, curators collaboratively collect, analyze and edit documents, images, and other digital resources in order to display and share new representations of that information to an audience. Despite their increasing reliance on digital documents and tools, current technologies provide little support for these specific collaborative content curation activities. We introduce CurationSpace -- a novel cross-device system to provide more expressive tools for curating and composing digital historical artefacts. Based on the concept of Instrumental Interaction, CurationSpace allows users to interact with digital curation artefacts on shared interactive surfaces using personal smartwatches as selectors for instruments or modifiers (applied to either the whole curation space, individual documents, or fragments). We introduce a range of novel interaction techniques that allow individuals or groups of curators to more easily create, navigate and share resources during content curation. We report insights from our user study about peoples use of instruments and modifiers for curation activities.

Cross-Surface: Workshop on Interacting with Multi-Device Ecologies in the Wild

In this workshop, we will review and discuss opportunities, technical challenges and problems with cross-device interactions in interactive multi-surface and multi-device ecologies. We aim to bring together researchers and practitioners currently working on novel techniques for cross-surface interactions, focusing both on technical as well as interaction challenges for introducing these technologies into the wild, and highlighting opportunities for further research. The workshop will help to facilitate knowledge exchange on the inherent challenges of building robust and intuitive cross-surface interactions, identify application domains and enabling technologies for cross-surface interactions in the wild, and establish a research community to develop effective strategies for successful design of cross-device interactions.

EagleSense: Tracking People and Devices in Interactive Spaces using Real-Time Top-View Depth-Sensing

Real-time tracking of peoples location, orientation and activities is increasingly important for designing novel ubiquitous computing applications. Top-view camera-based tracking avoids occlusion when tracking people while collaborating, but often requires complex tracking systems and advanced computer vision algorithms. To facilitate the prototyping of ubiquitous computing applications for interactive spaces, we developed EagleSense, a real-time human posture and activity recognition system with a single top-view depth-sensing camera. We contribute our novel algorithm and processing pipeline, including details for calculating silhouette-extremities features and applying gradient tree boosting classifiers for activity recognition optimized for top-view depth sensing. EagleSense provides easy access to the real-time tracking data and includes tools for facilitating the integration into custom applications. We report the results of a technical evaluation with 12 participants and demonstrate the capabilities of EagleSense with application case studies.

HCITools: Strategies and Best Practices for Designing, Evaluating and Sharing Technical HCI Toolkits

Over the years, toolkits have been designed to facilitate the rapid prototyping of novel designs for graphical user interfaces, physical computing, fabrication, tangible interfaces and ubiquitous computing. However, although evaluation methods for HCI are widely available, particular techniques and approaches to evaluate technical toolkit research are less well developed. Moreover, it is unclear what kind of contribution and impact technical toolkits can bring to the larger HCI community. In this workshop we aim to bring together leading researchers in the field to discuss challenges and opportunities to develop new methods and approaches to design, evaluate, disseminate and share toolkits. Furthermore, we will discuss the technical, methodological and enabling role of toolkits for HCI research.