Subhashini Ganapathy

User Perception of Touch Screen Latency

The goal of this study was to determine the level at which touch screen latency becomes annoying for common tablet tasks. Two types of touch screen latency were manipulated for three applications: Web page browsing, photo viewing, and ebook reading. Initial latency conditions involved an initial delay in the screen’s visual response to touch inputs but with no delay after the beginning of a touch input. Continuous latency involved continuous delay for the duration of a touch input. Both types were tested from 80 to 780 ms. Touch inputs included resizing with multitouch input, panning, scrolling, zooming, and page turning. Results showed a statistically significant main effect for application, but differences were small. Continuous and initial latency showed little difference in ratings except with ebook reading. Trend graphs show levels of user ratings by latency duration.

Design Guidelines for Mobile Augmented Reality: User Experience

In designing for mobile augmented reality applications it is very important to understand the context in which the information has to be presented. Past research on information presentation on small form factor computing has highlighted the importance of presenting the right information in the right way to effectively engage the user. This chapter provides an overview of the design challenges in developing persuasive usage model interactions for a great user experience on mobile devices. When designing for a mobile augmented reality application it is important to understand the usage scenario, the interaction modalities and the device form factor.

MAR shopping assistant usage: Delay, error, and utility

This poster will present findings from a study of a shopping assistant prototype with simulated augmented reality information. The goal of the study was to find out the acceptable level of delay in presentation of augmented information and the acceptable rate of error of the information presented. Twelve participants interacted with a Samsung Omnia™ smartphone that presented a wine shopping scenario under several levels of delay in showing product information. Participants indicated their willingness to wait for each delay they experienced. Participants also answered a survey about which types of products they would want a shopping assistant application to assist with.

A KNOWLEDGE-BASED SYSTEM TO MODEL HUMAN SUPERVISORY CONTROL IN DYNAMIC PLANNING

With the increases in the levels of automation and computerization, supervisory control systems are becoming increasingly common in commercial and military applications. A supervisory control system consists of one or more human operators interacting with highly automated components such as those seen in satellite ground control, flexible manufacturing systems, or nuclear power plants. Humans typically perform cognitively intense tasks such as monitoring, planning, real-time control, and troubleshooting, and are ultimately responsible for the safe and efficient operation of the overall system. Although developments on supervisory control have led to useful applications in interface design and automation, there is a scarcity of research that empirically evaluates human decision making in supervisory control through emulation of task performance using knowledge-based systems. In the context of dynamic planning involving simulated search and rescue missions using ground based autonomous robots and uninhabited aerial vehicles, we developed a knowledge-based system that mimics supervisory control performance. This paper describes the application domain, the details of the simulation model, and the implementation and assessment of a knowledge-based system that mimics human supervisory control performance.

RIPPLE: Scalable medical telemetry system for supporting combat rescue

Emergency response operations would universally benefit by extending telemedicine to the most difficult and challenging environments. For example, the Air Force Pararescue Jumpers (PJ) and Combat Rescue Officers (CRO) perform rescue and life-saving measure in austere environments. Currently, Bluetooth® aided pen-and-paper systems are employed to collect and store medical data, from the time it is sensed to its dissemination. This is proving to be tedious and non-scalable, especially when the number of casualties is larger than the number of responders in a given mission. Pararescue Jumpers, Combat Rescue Officers and similar medical rescue agencies are seeking medical vital sign sensors and telemetry solutions for mass casualty responses in which a small team of medical rescuers must be able to rescue and sustain the life of multiple casualties in critical condition. Project Ripple, to be described in this paper, is meant to create a Medical Body Area Network (MBAN) of sensors to assist in triage and general physiological data collection in a disaster scenario. The system is demonstrates an improved alternative to existing Bluetooth® and pen-and-paper systems by streamlining the processes of data collection, storage, transfer, and visualization. Low-power, wireless devices that utilized open standards makeup the sensor network while custom mobile applications were used for the visualization of the sensor data. Also, flexible and generic sensor fusion architecture is being explored.

Technology-Enhanced Learning Analytics System Design for Engineering Education

The field of technologically enhanced learning (TEL) allows for the visualization of different patterns of user behaviors. These trends represent the usages of the technology based educational content. The visualization of this information leads to the formation of a comprehensive analytics system to process the metadata. The efforts to the formation of this learning analytics system were initiated with a comprehensive ethnographic research conducted over the engineering students of Wright State University to understand the pain points in studying engineering subjects. The focus of this research is primarily over the development, testing and evaluation of the educational content over small form factors devices in order to provide an interactive form of learning support to the engineering students. The usage data will be collected from the students with the help of the questionnaire designed to understand the affinity towards the technology. The data will be collected to understand the user attitude, ease of use, behavioral and social effects on the user as well as the user affinity towards the technology. The metadata presentation forms the learning analytics system, which will serve as the performance benchmark for the educators, technology developers, education administrators and stakeholders.

Ethnography, Ethnography or Ethnography? What Happens When the Same Word Means Different Things to Different People?

This paper discusses how the notion and practice of ethnography differs for practitioners with different disciplinary backgrounds, especially in a context where ethnography exits academia to enter industry contexts. The paper is divided into four sections. The first provides background to specific experiences and briefly over-views existing literature. In the second part we compare our experiences through an industry case study. The third section proposes a taxonomy, suggesting a number of implications, and providing recommendations on how to integrate cross-disciplinary approaches to expand the scope of conducting user research. The final section wraps up our propositions and provides a number of recommendations.

Emerging Artificial Intelligence Application: Transforming Television into Smart Television

The science of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been applied in different fields such as financial systems, health-care systems, transport systems, and military systems. However, there has been very little research and application of AI solutions in the field of consumer electronics (CE) especially as related to TV and TV related products even with the arrival of Smart TV and Smart TV products in the marketplace. This paper examines the user research on TV practices, discusses the experiences consumers’ desire and want, and the AI tools necessary for the development efforts of true Smart TV and Smart TV products.

Empirical evaluation of augmented information presentation on small form factors - navigation assistant scenario

Mobile Augmented Reality (MAR) enabled devices will have the capability to present a large amount of information in real time, based on sensors that determine proximity, visual reference, maps, and detailed information on the environment. This poses a challenge of presenting the information such that there is no cognitive overload for the user and the augmented information that is presented is useful and meaningful to the user. This study examined the user tolerance and identified acceptable values for the performance characteristics of the augmented information presented on - density of information, accuracy of information, delay in information presentation, and error rate. Results indicate that the amount of information presented depends on the type of activity that the user is interested in. For example, in the case of density of information - participants were interested in seeing about 7 items identified at a time. With 11 items, most were overwhelmed, but 4 items were not enough. However, desired information density depends on the information shown, and the participants wanted to control the type of information shown. The findings of the study can be used as design guidelines for MAR information overlay on small screens.

Interactive Model-Based Decision Making for Time-Critical Vehicle Routing

Advances in technology, software algorithms, and operations research methods provide the opportunity for effectively coupling the human decision maker with optimization modelling algorithms in large-scale systems operating in dynamic and uncertain environments. In military applications, such as search and rescue/destroy missions or real-time route planning or re-planning provide time windows within which critical decisions need to be made. Using a specially constructed human-computer integrated routing application, an evaluation was conducted to compare the effects of interactive model-based solutions with respect to automated solutions generated by mathematical modelling algorithms in the context of unmanned aerial vehicle route planning. Results indicate that significantly more high priority targets were covered in the human integrated approach compared to the automated solution without any significant degradation with respect to all the other dependent measures including percentage of total targets covered, low priority targets covered, total targets covered in threat zone, high priority targets covered in threat zone, and low priority targets covered in threat zone.