Tanja Döring

A design space for ephemeral user interfaces

In this paper, we present the novel concept of ephemeral user interfaces. Ephemeral user interfaces contain at least one user interface (UI) element that is intentionally created to last for a limited time only and typically incorporate materials that evoke a rich and multisensory perception, such as water, fire, soap bubbles or plants. We characterize the term ephemeral user interface and, based on a review of existing user interfaces that fall into this research area but have not been discussed under one common term before, we present a design space for ephemeral user interfaces providing a terminology for (a) materials for ephemeral UI elements, (b) interaction and (c) aspects of ephemerality. This paper contributes to the ongoing research on materiality of user interfaces as well as on conceptualizing visionary interaction styles with novel materials.

Exploring material-centered design concepts for tangible interaction

In this paper we present two concepts for material-centered design of tangible interaction: (1) material-based interaction constraints and (2) material-driven user engagement. This approach applies material iconography as underlying theory, a method from art history that focuses on the characteristics and meanings of materials. Our reflections are based on experiences with an interactive installation we have built: the soap bubble user interface, a tangible user interface that has been presented and used in six public and semi-public settings. This work contributes to the emerging field of research on materiality of tangible user interfaces.

Ephemeral user interfaces: valuing the aesthetics of interface components that do not last

problem of cognitive overload due to the huge amount of data that gets represented in ubiquitous computing systems nowadays. This also leads to the question of how ephemerality can be designed into the digital. Thus, it is timely to systematically explore the design space for user interfaces that focus on ephemerality as a design concept—we call them ephemeral user interfaces. By taking a material perspective, we also address questions around the role of materiality in HCI, a current research topic in interaction design [3].

NatCut: an interactive tangible editor for physical object fabrication

While physical prototyping and personal fabrication is currently getting increasingly popular, many of the tools used to design 3D objects are still complex and cumbersome to use. In this paper, we address this issue and present a novel tabletop-based tangible editor, called NatCut, that allows the quick and easy design of physical enclosures for interactive prototypes. To generate an enclosure with NatCut, the user first chooses a basic geometric shape for it on the tabletop surface. By simply placing electronic components on the displayed 2D layout for the enclosure, respective cut-outs and holes are generated. Further, a number of user interactions on the tabletop screen are supported to modify, personalize, and enrich the casing. The resulting 2D layout contains all joints needed to assemble the parts after laser cutting. We discuss the results of a user study in which we tested the approach.

What People Really Remember: Understanding Cognitive Effects When Interacting with Large Displays

This paper investigates how common interaction techniques for large displays impact on recall in learning tasks. Our work is motivated by results of prior research in different areas that attribute a positive effect of interactivity to cognition. We present findings from a controlled lab experiment with 32 participants comparing mobile phone-based interaction, touch interaction and full-body interaction to a non-interactive baseline. In contrast to prior findings, our results reveal that more movement can negatively influence recall. In particular we show that designers are facing an immanent trade-off between designing engaging interaction through extensive movement and creating memorable content.

The Interaction Material Profile: Understanding and Inspiring How Physical Materials Shape Interaction

This paper presents the interaction material profile, a novel structural approach that supports a material-centered analysis of how physical materials affect human-computer interaction from different perspectives and on different levels. Inspired by material dimensions as discussed in product design and in a material-iconographic approach to understand how materials create meanings in artworks, this profile defines a micro and a macro perspective on interaction materials and includes general as well as application-specific material aspects. It builds a model to compare and discuss the role of physical materials in existing user interfaces and serves as a structure to build a catalogue of selected interaction materials.

Insert Needle Here! A Custom Display for Optimized Biopsy Needle Placement

Needle-guiding templates are used for a variety of minimally invasive medical interventions. While physically supporting needle placement with a grid of holes, they lack integrated information where needles need to be inserted. Physicians must manually determine the correct holes based on the output of planning software - a workflow that is error-prone and lengthy. We address these issues by embedding a display into the template using electroluminescence (EL) screen printing. The EL display is connected to planning software and illuminates the correct hole. In an empirical evaluation with physicians and researchers from the medical domain, we compare the illuminated against the conventional template as used in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) guided prostate biopsies. Our results show that the EL display significantly improves task completion time by 51%, task load by 47% and usability by 30%.

Vibro-Band: Supporting Needle Placement for Physicians with Vibrations

Medical images and navigation systems support physicians during needle-based interventions. As the information is primarily displayed on monitors, the physicians attention is drawn away from the patients body. To address this issue, we explore the additional use of a vibration wristband that directs the movements for needle-based operations via different vibration patterns on the operators arm. We conducted a first user study comparing the combination of tactile and visual guidance versus visual-only feedback with 12 participants to investigate the general feasibility. Our results show that task times, usability scores, cognitive load, and accuracy are comparable for both conditions suggesting that vibration feedback is generally suitable for medical navigation tasks and warranting further iteration and research in this direction.

An Interactive-Shoe For Surgeons: Hand-Free Interaction With Medical 2D Data

During interventions, surgeons often need to review medical imaging data, e.g., CT scans. Usually, surgeons need to rely on an assistant to browse the images because of sterility requirements. Communication with a substitute operator is tedious and error-prone if the operator does not have an equal level of professional experience and might interrupt the workflow. We present a sensor-integrated shoe allowing surgeons to browse and manipulate 2D medical image data by foot movement. It is portable and wearable. The shoe uses an optical sensor taken from an off-the-shelf computer mouse for tracking the foot movements and an additional micro-switch to turn it on or off. We evaluated the performance of the shoe interface against a control condition with assistant together with ten surgeons in an empirical user study. Our results provide first indications for the effectiveness of a shoe interface in this application area.

VRBox: A Virtual Reality Augmented Sandbox for Immersive Playfulness, Creativity and Exploration

Augmented sandboxes have been used as playful and educative tools to create, explore and understand complex models. However, current solutions lack interactive capabilities, missing more immersive experiences such as exploring the sand landscape from a first person perspective. We extend the interaction space of augmented sandboxes into virtual reality (VR) to offer a VR-environment that contains a landscape, which the user designs via interacting with real sand while wearing a virtual reality head-mounted display (HMD). In this paper, we present our current VR-sandbox system consisting of a box with sand, triple Kinect depth sensing, a virtual reality HMD, and hand tracking, as well as an interactive world simulation use case for exploration and evaluation. Our work explores the important and timely topics how to integrate rich haptic interaction with natural materials into VR and how to track and present real physical materials in VR. In a qualitative evaluation with nine experts from computer graphics, game design, and didactics we identified potentials, limitations as well as future application scenarios.