Vincent P. Buil

Headphones with touch control

The Touch Headphones are meant for portable music players and aim to present an improvement to the conventional remote control in the headphone wire, and a solution for controls on wireless in-ear type headphones. Two capacitive touch sensors per earpiece sense when earpieces are being tapped on, and being put in or out.

Design and evaluation of online multimedia maintenance manuals

Maintenance in production environments is becoming increasingly complex as machines become more technologically advanced and need less maintenance. As a result, maintenance personnel face more difficult tasks. At the same time the maintenance engineers obtain less experience with the tasks. In this context, online multimedia manuals are thought to give better support for searching information and expressing complex interactions with physical objects than paper manuals. Three prototypes were designed and formative evaluated in an industrial environment. The evaluation of the first prototype showed that maintenance engineers encountered serious problems with the online multimedia manual, as they omitted crucial steps in the task. The second prototype addressed this problem. The third prototype addressed a problem observed in the second prototype when subjects switched between the online manual and the machine controls.

Acceptable operating force for buttons on in-ear type headphones

The touch headphones are a solution for providing playback and volume controls on in-ear type headphones. One of the issues with placing controls on earpieces is that applied pressure is transferred to the inner ear, which potentially creates discomfort. The experiment described in this short paper shows that conventional button switches are not well accepted. Users preferred to operate a button on an earpiece with a force of around 85 grams.