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Special Interaction Approaches and their Impact on Usability

1. 62 Figure 24 An example user and devices location within user s space and CHVITOBIDHEH Eoo tern MI M EIE EMI reer re FINE 63 Figure 25 Outlined camera VIOWL esceesseuscen ve sress e vue se suEe Ust Yu Ep iss SIN UII SEE E TUS 64 Figure 26 Horizontal coordinate system with origin in C seeseeeess 65 Figure 27 Auto calibration screen with four different colors in rectangular areas serving for detection of screen angle within camera image 70 Figure 28 Outdoor experimental interaction prototyping a user is lying under a glass pane placed on cardboard boxes aiming a laser beam to a star 42 Figure 29 Screenshot of icPoint project with main screen and left side panel which contains multimedia information about a selected sky object 74 Figure 30 Screenshot of icPoint project with the main screen displaying a part of the night sky with the selected star in the middle four large buttons placed at the bottom allow controlling icPoint by a laser pointer panel on the right side contains application settings cesses nee 76 Figure 31 Hardware usage for icPoint comfortable usage of table with transparent glass csssssssssssesessessesses sehen e he he he se estes sessi sese enn VATA Figure 32 Outdoor interaction with remote objects a user is lying under a glass table and aiming a laser beam at a star oooooooovovvovvvnonvonv
2. Figure 48 An example of the first construction rule Construction steps X Ze O 1 ci ci XZ gt cieo section line 2 1 1 AB gt e1eq B extended edge 3 e2 ea AB gt eoeq A extended edge 4 Ci C1 cine gt Cie B section point 9 Co Co cie gt Coe A section point Special Interaction Approaches and their Impact on Usability Appendix C 2 If you already found the line intersection of the section plane with one of the cube s planes and you have one point of section plane lying on the parallel cube s plane make a parallel line with this intersection line in this parallel cube s plane and find intersections of this line and the cube s edges Figure 49 An example of the second construction rule Construction steps X Zeg olx l c1 Ci XZ gt cieg section line 2 c3 ca llci ese x section line 3 C3 C3 cann DH gt Cae x A section point Alena Kovarova FIIT STU Bratislava 3 If there are no points belonging to one of the cube s planes it is necessary to construct an auxiliary plane a which is perpendicular to one of the cube s planes and two of set points belong to it e g line C4 Intersection of plane a and perpendicular cube s plane e g B is auxiliary line a which is projection of line c3 to a Finally the intersection of line c4 and a is cutting point C4 which belongs to plane a as well as to plane f Figure 50 An example of the third
3. 19 Alena Kovarova FIIT STU Bratislava 5 User supportive design training selection when appropriate manuals quick reference card aid to local experts help systems e g on line context specific help of off line hot line phone service During our development process we always focused from the start on users and their tasks We developers always fit into the target group of users and thus we have users also in our design team While prototyping we collected reservations about the functionality and its method of delivery These were included in the iterative design process Finally we created manuals 20 Special Interaction Approaches and their Impact on Usability Interaction Approaches 3 Interaction Approaches To find a better interaction approach a summary is needed of all those interaction styles types methods and devices that are already used whether commonly or rarely In the first section we started with the list of interaction styles Since the interaction itself is limited by the input and output devices IO devices that can be used in the second section we mention different types of devices with emphasis on the usual ones keyboard mouse monitor web cam microphone loudspeakers where we summarize their interaction possibilities and their intuitiveness The next section is focused on the interaction possibilities provided by software the GUIs The term intuitive or natural inter
4. 8 o Conclusions The aim of this thesis was to contribute to the field of Human Computer Interaction We propose three different interaction methods which creates or increases the usability Each of these methods solves a specific problem We therefore used different methods for their verification In following paragraphs are repeated our goals how we fulfilled them what are their benefits where else would the method be applicable or how it could be improved Goal 1 To propose and verify a new method of computer aided interaction with remote objects within an environment off the computer screen using common and affordable equipment including input and output devices We focused on a new and undiscovered application of human computer interaction using a laser pointer and image processing Our pilot project icPoint offers star and space object recognition using a laptop a web camera a laser pointer and a glass pane In icPoint we implemented a new method for interaction with a distant object Our acceptance test demonstrated its practical applicability This shows that the proposed method of determining the user s line of sight and subsequently the determination of the object of interest works correctly with an acceptable deviation 3 degrees Although it is complicated to set up the system once it is set it is easy to use To facilitate the control of our applications since the user is in unconventional conditions we proposed al
5. Easy to Usability eine ney Usefulness Social eae acceptabilty cepabi Few errors acceptabilty Practical n acceptability Compatibility Subjectively pleasing Reliability Etc Figure 3 A model of the attributes of system acceptability Nielsen 1993 p 25 Here the far right side of the model consists of the five factors of a good system design described on page 7 In our research we focused mainly on the usability but we also took into account the rest of the attributes of practical acceptability affordable and common equipment lower the costs and increase compatibility in our case reliability is not a present attribute An exactly specified group of users and our focus on their needs results in a high degree of utility 2 2 3 User Interface Design Since there are many different ways to provide needed functionality designers can never be sure whether they chose the right one To minimize the risk of unfulfilled users expectations there are five fundamental features of design usability Preece amp Keller 1990 p 34 1 User centered design focused from the start on the user and tasks 2 Participative design with the users as members of the design team 3 Experimental design with formal user tests of usability in pilot trials simulations and full prototype evaluations 4 Iterative design design test and measure and redesign as a regular cycle until results satisfy usability specification
6. gy and Tgc h sin p c 7 R ro Ty 7 Ire BARU E reo CRG A U Cartesian ERU ERC this is characteristics of reflection Ary ARC HT this is characteristics of reflection x Try COS Epc cos apc T Tr c COS Eg c COS Gg c d h Ty Try COSER C sin a c T 7 TR c COS Eg c S N gc dyh h rz TRU Sin Egc fgc S N eg c 0 TRU TRC h sin ERC Ty h sin Erc COSERC cosapc h sin gc cosegc COS are d h Ty h sin Epc COSERC sinagc h sin ER c COS Epc sinagc dyh 2 gt d 2 cot Erc COS Gg c and dy 2 cot Eg c sinagc 8 Substituting evaluated terms of dx dy 8 rgy and rgc 7 in expression for bx and by 6 we have cot EB U COS QB y cot EBC COS QBC 2 cot ERC COS QRC cot g y S N g y COt Eg c S N dg c Zcot Rc SINGAR C Dividing last two equations cot gy sindgy COtEpg c S N dge 2 cot Erc sin age cot EB U COS dB U cot EBC COS dB C 2 cot ERC COS ARC gt o 1 cot EBC sin Q p c 2 cot ERC sin QRC Ape y tan 9 cot EBC COS dB C 2 cot ERC COS QRC and 67 Alena Kovarova FIIT STU Bratislava END sin ag y py tan e 325710 GU EU cot EBC sin dB C 2 cot ERC Sin QRC The last step is to substitute g dg pc pc according to equations 5 which gives us the final formula for agy and egy final formulas are not stated b
7. Co discovery Learning x vv vVv 1 0 6v X VX X Performance Measurem X V v v v 1 0 6v v XX v 0 Question asking Protocol x vv vVv 1 0 4v X VIX X 4 Remote Testing ER RR A Q F Retrospective Testing x vv vVv 1 0A4 v v VIX v Shadowing Method X oy CV Cy uA A oo 4l sxx Teaching Method x vv V v 1 0 4 v X VX X Thinking aloud Protocol X V v v v 1 0 4v X 0X X Field Observation X X X vv 1 0 2 v X VX X gt Focus Groups X Xo wv dq I ce we eve oes x z Interviews x vv vVv 1 02v X vVIX X Logging Actual Use X X X vVv 1 0 6v v xv x Proactive Field Study V V X X X1 0 2X X XX X The number of test users does not need to be high Why it is so is explained in Nielsen s widely cited web article Nielsen 2000 Why you only need to test with five users He summarized the past decade s research and brought a mathematical model find more details in Appendix B section B 1 Number of Test Users Table 2 compares methods based on ten factors that distinguish different evaluation techniques and therefore help to make an appropriate choice The factors are the stage in the cycle from design to full implementation the style of evaluation laboratory as an unnatural environment with better possibilities to control an experiment or the opposite field studies the objectivity how heavily it relies on the interpretation of the evaluator the type of measures provided 14 Special Interaction Approaches and their Impact on Usability U
8. The application allows the user to translate rotate and zoom the scene so he she can look at it from all angles As with the constructing method the application offers 1 Definition of a new point on an intersection for teachers there is the possibility to add points anywhere on the cube on its vertex edge or face as the first three points for the task 2 Insertion of a new segment defined either by two points or as a parallel line with some other segment passing through an existing point 3 Extension of an existing segment in one of its two directions 4 Coloring of a plane either one plane of the cube an auxiliary plane or the section plane Additional features are e The system activates snapping object after clicking the mouse to preserve the educational character of application and not before as it is usual e The system gives a feedback on the correctness of the solution e The system does not allow the students to edit the scene at the same level as teachers can User description According the curriculum for eight year grammar schools Slovak Ministry of Education 1997 secondary vocational school Reiterova amp Grmanov 2005 and for four year specialized secondary schools Cernek 2005 approved by the Slovak Ministry of Education the mathematics is a compulsory course and the solid geometry which contains also the cross section of a cube is taught in the penultimate year of the study This establ
9. They built a prototype see Figure 5 of the system that helps remote users draw directly onto remote objects In the prototype users see remote objects through cameras and draw on the objects simply by positioning the pointer on the images from the cameras This property helps remote users get involved in remote environments We describe the design of the prototype and also show an 30 Special Interaction Approaches and their Impact on Usability Current Interaction Approaches example of the prototype in use The remote pen enables remote users to draw directly onto a remote desk or note Figure 5 The setup of the prototype for Remote pen left Student s camera view where is shown how he draws a diagram representing the direction of the outer product and the magnitude right IShihara amp Ishihara 2006 The prototype of a remote direct pointing system using graycode includes a projector two CCD cameras and four computers two of them perform two Cam views one performs Camera switch and the other performs Gray code manager Gray code generator and Application All pieces of equipment are networked by 100Mbps Ethernet The Remote pen enables remote users to draw directly onto a remote desk or note 4 1 2 Indoor Interaction within Table Distances With magnification of touch displays often tabletop displays as working areas the user cannot reach the far side of a display by a direct input device such as a stylus The di
10. This can either refresh the displayed data to a different one or it can run or turn off automatically the application The last question was How to solve an incorrect adaptation If there are no data stored e g the first touch of the user or if the choice estimation was wrong the system provides the choices for manual selection the same one as the choices of any other system providing departures In the case of the existing subset data for the current location the lines belonging to this location subset with corresponding stop and direction are offered first e g on the top of the drop down menu or in a quick access bar 87 Alena Kovarova FIIT STU Bratislava Cold start problem The above mentioned method has the cold start problem there is nothing to display when the user model is empty There are several ways to eliminate it The two most often ways are 1 To use a history of other application e g cookies 2 Tolet the user set the initial values The second one requires manual setting up but it rapidly increases system effectiveness 6 3 Evaluation Our second goal was to propose and verify a method of interaction supported by the user model when the user is retrieving web information requiring selection s To verify this we set a hypothesis The system adaptation using our user model reduces the demands on the user s interaction and thus accelerates information access and users find this way of information r
11. Thompson D Kreylos O Hamann B amp Staadt O G 2005 A practical system for laser pointer interaction on large displays Proceedings of the ACM symposium on Virtual reality software and technology VRST 05 pp 106 109 New York NY USA ACM AID CREEM 2009 Geoplan Geospace Retrieved 2011 from http www aid creem org geoplace html Ajzen I 1985 From intentions to actions A theory of planned behavior In J Kuhl amp J Beckmann Action control From cognition to behavior pp 11 39 Berlin Springer Verlag Ajzen I amp Fishbein M 1980 Understanding Attitudes and Predicting Social Behavior Prentice Hall Edglewood Cliffs NJ Pearson Apple 2011 Dashboard Widgets Retrieved 2011 from http www apple com downloads dashboard Autodesk Inc 2010 Autodesk Maya 2011 Getting Started Retrieved from http images autodesk com adsk files 3ds max 2011 tutorials pdf Autodesk Inc 2010 Autodesk 3ds Max 2011 Retrieved from http images autodesk com adsk files 3ds max 2011 tutorials pdf Bezerianos A amp Balakrishnan R 2005 The vacuum facilitating the manipulation of distant objects Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems pp 361 370 New York NY USA ACM Bostr m F Nurmi P Flor en P Liu T Oikarinen T K Vetek A et al 2008 Capricorn an intelligent user interface for mobile widgets Proceedings of the 10th interna
12. cross section as a hint turn on off projection use left mouse button press anaglyph button in menu toolbar or context menu Figure 44 select an object and translate the scene right mouse button rotating the scene drag and drop autorotation of a scene when unsuccessfully adding a new point use drag and drop to delete an object left mouse button press button select an object drag an object rotate the scene extend a line Figure 45 right mouse button default system function 104 Special Interaction Approaches and their Impact on Usability Interaction Using Visual Help in Simple 3D Editors tB Stereo3D 05 xml Vyzna ili ste rez spr vne gratulujem Figure 42 Screenshot of our pilot application Stereo3D Figure 43 Screenshot of our pilot application InteractiveCube 105 Alena Kovarova FIIT STU Bratislava a A s x X Figure 44 Context menu for a line on Stereo3D u Temporary preview Figure 45 Preview of segment extension in InteractiveCube 7 2 2 Experiments Our development included incremental prototyping we pre tested each part of Stereo3D interaction design to users from the secondary target group We also consulted it with expert in didactics of mathematics Mgr Iveta Kohanov PhD who is Head of the Section of Didactics Mathematics at the Department of Algebra Geometry and Didactics Mathematics Faculty of Mathematics Physics
13. object aligned according to axes Alt A click on a point invokes settings menu for aligning select the mode on a toolbar or press w e Ctrl e and then LMB MM Delete key click type of object from toolbar on mouse click position oriented toward actual view size respective to MM select the mode on a toolbar or press w e r and then LMB MM Delete key Go SketchUp SketchUp no object insertion only extrusion of an existing 2D object triangle rectangular circle by MM select the mode on a toolbar or press m q s and then LMB MM Delete key ogle ZBRUSH no object insertion only import and surface modeling select the mode on a toolbar or press w e r and then LMB MM delete button in list of subtools Alena Kovarova FIIT STU Bratislava Figure 16 Illustration of different editing modes in 3ds Max editor dragging a rotating b and scaling c 4 3 3 Educational 3D Editors There are different educational pieces of software working with 2D or 3D covering various mathematical areas Math Forum Drexel 1994 2011 Our interest is in editors that simulate task for 3D geometry drawing resembling drawing on a paper with a ruler and a pencil The following list of applications only partially fulfilled our task e Geometria Dumitrascu 2000 2011 the user is drawing by setting input from keyboard and not by mouse but it supports
14. object behavior which allows the user to interact with it easier it means user performance is quicker and learnability of the system remains acceptable In our case the most intuitive screen would be a touch screen but that is not common for PCs To resemble the real world the first step is to use perspective imaging for our 3D scene The second step is to offer the user such a view that would remove the deficiencies of a 2D screen What these deficiencies are and how to remove them is my main area of research so a detailed description follows in later sections and chapters Web cam Microphone and Loudspeakers Besides the keyboard the mouse and the monitor there are other standard IO devices such as a web cam a microphone and loudspeakers Since there is no guarantee that the user has them the majority of applications do not count on them because to keep high usability effectiveness they should work properly for any type of user also the one without these devices An example of interaction via a camera connected to a standard PC is a user tracked by a camera and according to his her head or eye movements an object is moved on a screen or a scene itself Other example of interaction is an audio signal spoken word captured by a microphone recognized by a speech recognition algorithm and the pronounced command performed Loudspeakers can via speech synthesis announce whatever is necessary Omitting the fact that not ever
15. transportation departures Since a lot of people often use the same bus lines this domain has a simple pattern of the user s behavior The 83 Alena Kovarova FIIT STU Bratislava most often context is traveling to work school and back home This type of user s behavior can be even very regular User description Our target group is people who use public transportation They know these three facts e which line number they need e what the name of the closest bus stop is e in what direction their route is and they need to know e the closest line departures since they do not remember them and they do not need to know e when the line will arrive to their destination e if line changes are necessary e which route is the shortest e which route is the quickest e which route is the cheapest The user uses a computer like device e g smartphone frequently or with immediate access Environment description It can be any type of environment We assumed users working with computers at work or using them at home It can be only one computer a notebook Instead of a computer it can be any type of smartphone At the start of using our system the Internet connection is required to download departures Later no connection is needed since data is stored in the database The user requirements The user wants to know several of the closest departure times of a certain line from a certain stop in a certain direc
16. 0 12 Adding a parallel line was without problems 1 2 3 4 5 problematic 2 0 2 2 13 Did you shift the scene during your work with the application Yes no 1 4 1 1 14 Did you find the scene shifting natural 44 n this column is given a weighted average of responses or their ratio Special Interaction Approaches and their Impact on Usability Appendix C natural 1 2 3 4 bunnatural 15 Did vou find moving the scene with the left mouse button comfortable Yes no 16 Did vou rotate the scene during vour work with the application ves no 17 Did vou find out the scene rotation natural natural 1 2 3 4 bunnatural 18 Did vou find rotating the scene with the right mouse button comfortable Yes no 19 Did vou have a feeling that vou cant do what vou want because vou didn t know how to perform it within the application Yes no 20 Would vou like to change something If ves please specify Status bar 21 Did vou notice the status bar during vour work ves no 22 Did it distract vou Yes was distracted 1 2 3 4 5 No it didn t distract me at all 22 Did the information from the bar help you during your work with the application Yes it was very helpful 1 2 3 4 5 No it didn t help me at all 23 Would you like to change something If yes please specify 13 1 4 1 0 1 5 1 0 3 8 1 8 1 6 3 4 13 1 3 13 1 2 13 2 7 2 5 1 4 2 5 Al
17. 16 12 2008 IEEE Computer Society 2008 ISBN 978 0 7695 3444 2 p 40 44 Publications with national recognition C Kov rov Alena Michal Sokolsk Using Virtual Reality for Teaching Solid Geometry A Case Study for a Cube Section Accepted as oral presentation for International Conference on Interactive Collaborative Learning 2011 PieStany Slovakia Kovarova Alena Polak Marek Virtual Reality Interaction via Mouse Gestures In Spring Conference on Computer Graphics SCCG 2011 in cooperation with ACM and Eurographics Galbov Mlyn Vini n April 28 30 2011 Conference Materials and Posters Bratislava Comenius University 2011 ISSN 1335 5694 p 43 46 Kovarova Alena M szaros Viktor Zelman Andrej Laser Pointer Map Interaction In Virtual University 2008 9th International Conference Bratislava Slovak Republic 11 12 12 2008 STU v Bratislave 2008 ISBN 978 80 893 16 10 6 Kovarova Alena Czanner Silvester Interactive simulations of Elementary Physical Experiments In Proceedings First Central European International Multimedia and Virtual Reality Conference Veszpr m Hungary 6 8 5 2004 Veszpr m University Press 2004 ISBN 963 9495 46 8 p 109 116 Alena Kovarova FIIT STU Bratislava Kovarova Alena Gregor Jan Stereometria a virtualna realita In SCO 2009 sborn k 6 ro n ku konference o elektronick podpore v uky Brno Czech Republic 2009 Masarykova univerzita 2009 ISBN 978 80
18. LL WE S Arson attack on French synagogue 55 57 57 60 61 59 Hemingway archive opens in Cuba A pink iguana missed by Darvin pron gt b c d e Figure 15 Examples of desktop widgets screenshots taken from web Windows Gadgets a Google Desktop Gadgets b Opera Widgets c Yahoo Widgets 9 d and Dashboard e There are some differences between desktop widgets and gadgets made in different engines From the user perspective some are represented by views or icons which are located in a standard sidebar of the desktop and they become active only after click initiation where the icon spreads itself to the desktop After this the widget can be relocated as wished sometimes the relocation is limited within the sidebar Some have almost double sized sidebar wideness and provide the service during the whole time they are active When they are clicked they spread themselves and increase the service quality or quantity From the implementation point of view there are three possibilities how a user can get his her own personal widgets The user needs first to decide which API he she wants to use according to his her operating system see Table 3 and software he she has already installed if it is not a part of his her system he she needs to install it Then there are three choices on how to create a personalized desktop enhanced by individual widgets 18 Adapted from http desktop google com images sidebar_g
19. New York NY John Wiley amp Sons Nielsen J amp Molich R 1990 Heuristic evaluation of user interfaces Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems Empowering people pp 249 256 New York NY USA ACM Olsen J D amp Nielsen T 2001 Laser pointer interaction Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems pp 17 22 New York NY USA ACM Opera Software 2010 Creating your first Opera widget Retrieved 2011 from Dev Opera http dev opera com articles view creating your first opera widget Parker K J Mandryk R L amp Inkpen K M 2005 TractorBeam seamless integration of local and remote pointing for tabletop displays Proceedings of Graphics Interface 2005 pp 33 40 Victoria British Columbia Canadian Human Computer Communications Society Pixologic Inc 2011 Getting Started with ZBrush guide Retrieved 2011 from http download pixologicO1 com download php f Plugins zbrush4 PDF ZBrush4 Fundamentals pdf zip Pokorny Z 1998 Astronomical Algorithms for Calculators Astronomick algoritmy pro kalkul tory Praha Hv zd rna a Planet rium hl m sta Prahy Popa A 1999 2011 GeomSpace User Manual Retrieved 2011 from GeomSpace http sourceforge net projects geomspace Preece J amp Keller L 1990 Human computer Interaction University Press Cambridge Great Britain Prentice Hall 123 Alena K
20. Sky Map left and Star Walk right both screenshots with inverted colors 38 Figure 13 An illustration of augmented reality without the use of computing resources only through a glass pane a terrain with ruins and the glass pane with ruins complement left observer s view through the glass pane Figure 15 Examples of desktop widgets screenshots taken from web Windows Gadgets a Google Desktop Gadgets b Opera Widgets c Yahoo Widgets d and Dashboard E exeseseresssetotetivoretusetetssseubu ov bot 45 Figure 16 Illustration of different editing modes in 3ds Max editor dragging a rotating b and scaling c esses n me meme enne 54 Figure 17 Screenshot of Archimedes Geo3D application suus 55 Figure 18 Screenshot of Cabri 3D application sssssssessssseeesssseresssssressssseees 56 Figure 19 Examples of hints for adding a new segment in Cabri 3D 57 Figure 20 A student working with Construct3D in our standard AR lab setup with a head mounted display Kaufmann 2009 esee o8 Figure 21 Screenshots of two tasks with interactive 2D scene from Naucteviac sk portal PASemsol 201 1 asusosssvavesasesetetesePebcca cad O CDM ETE o8 Figure 22 A lesson with 3D animation from Naucteviac sk portal Agemsoft AE E rer 59 Figure 23 Head mounted laser pointer and detail on laser
21. Support Based on User Model means the most often chosen option is always pre selected automatically As we do not use any other information sources e g browsing history to find out the user s usual bus stops and bus lines the widget has an empty local database except default data at the beginning The displayed information is loaded either from a local database or downloaded from the web When downloading is induced new data are stored in the local database Since departure schedules are changed from time to time these changes need to be translated into the local database update to provide the user with the most up to date information automatically every week but can be switched off The system automatically cleans up the database it erases data that are not used and are old The most important system task is to keep fresh data in the displayed area current departures therefore they are refreshed every minute Widget functionality The basic widget functionality is to display the upcoming five departures of the selected line from the chosen stop in a set direction These three choices can be done by the user or estimated by a system In the case of the user he she has to go through three steps which should be done in proper and intuitive order 1 Select a line number from a list within the dropdown menu Figure 36 point 1 selection is needed only if the user does not want the one automatically chosen 2
22. Table 2 Using the Hallway testing method 5 random people who pass by in the hallway are brought in to test the interface These 5 random users have to be indicative of a cross section of end users 6 Also known as Empirical Interface Evaluation Usability Tests User Evaluation Observational Techniques or Observational Evaluation Techniques these methods are derived from experiment and observation rather than theory 7 Also known as comfort or satisfaction 11 Alena Kovarova FIIT STU Bratislava Remote testing involves the use of a specially modified online survey allowing the quantification of user testing studies by providing the ability to generate large sample sizes Similar to an in lab study a remote usability test is task based and the platforms allow you to capture clicks and task times The tests are carried out in the user s own environment rather than labs helping further simulate real life scenario testing Additionally this style of user testing also provides an opportunity to segment feedback by demographic attitudinal and behavioral type Performance Measurement is a rigorous usability evaluation of a working system under realistic conditions to identify usability problems The user is given tasks to complete and the evaluator measures and compare relevant parameters such as percentage of tasks or subtasks successfully completed success rate time required for each task or subtask task time frequency and
23. a cursor coordinates c d a b 9 where inputs a b c d are distances of the found point from the top bottom left and right borders of guadrilateral given in coordinates of image from camera 70 Special Interaction Approaches and their Impact on Usability Interaction with Distant Objects 5 2 2 Voice Commands For selection and usage of more advanced functions we propose to use voice commands This requires a speech recognition module One of the possibility is to develop own module e g speech recognition system based on analyzing a captured voice using Fast Fourier Transform algorithm Brigham 1988 This gives the advantage of higher adaptability of such system every user can define his her own set of commands to control application Another possibility is to use voice recognition as there are already well designed engines even within operating systems e g in Microsoft Windows Vista or even in web browser Opera So when it is used such engine it only remains to come up with appropriate voice commands One can say the short and easy to remember commands are the best but such effort can lead to high error rate recognition engine has higher success rate with longer commands For this reason the first of the important steps is to choose such commands words or phrases which are easily distinguishable by the voice recognition engine even if the user does not have exact pronunciation The second step is to
24. and Informatics Comenius University in Bratislava Slovakia and few other teachers from high schools Finally we prepared a test for evaluation We tested two different groups on Stereo3D prototype and the third on InteractiveCube prototype High school students Stereo3D Our first test group was the first year high school students from Gr sslingov 18 in Bratislava 28 students They did not pass yet the curriculum containing cube cross sections which was also seen in some of the feedback questionnaire responses We accommodated our testing to their level of knowledge so their work with the application was not negatively influenced Before starting the test on high school the purpose and objectives of our application testing was explained to the students Since they had not studied that curriculum yet we explained them elementary 106 Special Interaction Approaches and their Impact on Usability Interaction Using Visual Help in Simple 3D Editors principles in short so they had the basic idea and could better understand what was expected in our application We prepared a few simple tasks on cube section for them e g the section plane was defined by adjacent cube corners Students were instructed how they can load the tasks to the application how they can check the correctness of their solutions and how to preview the correct solution if they have no idea how it should look like They received no additional information Stude
25. application for iPhones Screen with the closest departures from the closest stops according to actual time and the user s GPS position Since any widget can be personalized it can adjust itself to best serve the user and thus making the retrieving of information more comfortable and quicker In our case this adaptation is achieved by monitoring the user s choices and storing the number of selections for each choice in the user model This method can be applied in any other application domain that deals with regular departures e g logistics or catering It can be also used in any application domain where repetitiveness is present e g food shopping 97 Alena Kovarova FIIT STU Bratislava T Interaction Using Visual Help in Simple 3D Editors The third goal of this thesis was verification of increasing usability resulting from different methods of visualized information in 3D graphical editors The main emphasis was on graphical hint for a hovered object which previews the consequence of object s selection The analysis has shown see section 4 3 that various 3D environments whether game editors or educational applications have different useful features They help the user to control and use this environment On the other side there is still a room for various improvements 7 1 Improvements of GUI Elements The GUI design includes elements such as icons tooltips help changes of color or some other attribute differe
26. construction rule Construction steps alg X Zea 1 X5 XX LB projection X to B 25ZZ LB projection Z to B Z C 0 a ZZXX auxiliary plane aj a ZX auxiliary line C4 C4 ZX OZ X gt Cae a B section point wm BW M
27. correctly Any negative answer to these questions means an identified problem 2 1 2 Usability Testing Methods Unlike previous methods the usability testing is an empirical method and therefore requires observing real users This is a black box technique The goal of these tests is to determine problems which hinder the user from working with greater speed recall accuracy and emotional response e Performance How much time and how many steps are required for the user to complete basic tasks e Accuracy How many mistakes did users make fatal or recoverable e Recall How much does the user remember afterwards or after periods of non use e Emotional response How does the user feel about the tasks completed confident stressed There are several methods which can be used to find out if the UI has these four qualities Some of them are Coaching Method Co discovery Learning Subjects in Tandem Log File Analysis Performance Measurement Question asking Protocol Cooperative Evaluation Remote Testing Retrospective Testing Shadowing Method Teaching Method Think aloud Protocol Protocol Analysis Ivory amp Hearst 2001 Some of other newer methods are Component based Usability Testing Hallway Testing Hall Intercept Testing Rapid Iterative Testing and Evaluation RITE The ones closest to our research or those we used are shortly described in the following lines Comparison can be found in Table 1 and
28. e After initial setting up it is easy to use it any other time e g if the user would set it up on a roof or in a garden e Our method can be used even at the night e Interaction is natural even when interacting with the system controlled by a laser pointer or by voice commands it requires neither a keyboard nor a mouse Cons e It requires a glass pane or a glass table which can be uncomfortable to carry to the observation location e It is complicated to set up the system at the beginning it requires many steps e There are different circumstances which may complicate an observation e g partially reflective ground surface which creates more laser dots in camera image or any other light distractions e Due to the limited size of the glass and spherical character of the Sky it is not possible to observe the entire sky but only a part 5 5 Discussion According to our experimental results we have shown that our hypothesis is correct The proposed method of determining the user s line of sight and subsequently the determination of the object of interest Works correctly We proved that this type of application using our method does not need any expensive hardware or any special devices comparing to special devices with an accelerometer and or gyroscope All necessary equipment costs less than 25 a web camera 10 a laser pointer 3 a glass pane 10 m a compass 3 spirit level and ruler 1 smartphones wit
29. every other software In the following two subsections we closely look at the first and the second control concept to find out what types of control were already used are currently used and which of their characteristics fit for our purpose The third subsection contains a description of controls in existing educational software which is actually the closest related work This section ends with a summary 4 3 1 3D games There are different types of 3D real time rendering computer games Together with increasing computing power it was possible to implement a wider functionality and richer interactivity This historical development divides games into those that simulate a 3D world but a 23 Using 3D engines providing 3D world with 3D objects 48 Special Interaction Approaches and their Impact on Usability Current Interaction Approaches player can move only on the surface of this world and those where the player is able to move in all 6 degrees of freedom 3D world 2D movements The most widespread games of this type are first person shooter FPS games Such games require the player to only control two axes and their heading the player moves upon the earth in buildings in the hills The first famous games of this type were Wolfenstein Id Software LLC 2002 introduced in 1992 and Doom Id Software 1993 introduced in 1993 It was possible to control the game only by one input device e g keyboard mouse or joystick see
30. experience during the work that you were blocked by an object which overlapped the object you wanted to work with yes no a How did you solve this problem 24 Did you use the object erasing yes no a Do you find it natural and comfortable Natural 1 2 3 4 5 unnatural 25 Would you like to see a change in the controls If yes what Information text 26 Did you notice the information text during your work yes no 27 Did you use the information from the text in order to find out how to control the application yes no 28 Was the information in it helpful for your work with the application helpful 1 2 3 4 5 not helpful 29 Did you switch off the names of the points and segments yes no 30 Would you like to change something If yes please specify 2 4 3 4 3 6 3 8 1 1 2 9 14 9 2 4 icy 2 6 1 3 1 7 2 0 2 8 C 2 Graph l Sex 2 Age 3 How much time do you 4 Do you find the application 6 Do you find the application T Do you think the buttons 8 Did you understand the 10 Can you control the 11 Are the application controls 12 Adding an intersection was 13 Adding a point for the cross 14 Adding a line was 15 Did you find out how can you a Do you think that it was b Did you discover it by C Adding the parallel line was 16 Did you rotate the scene 17 Did you find the scene 18 Did you have a feeling that 19 D
31. it was not distracting at all FT 1 6 Information was seen helpful only by about a third of respondents FT 3 4 which is possibly caused by their education and background Average users InteractiveCube The last test was attended by 23 average users They found the application pleasant enough AU 2 0 They considered it very well designed AU 1 9 A half of testers would appreciate bigger letters but this is only matter of HTML code The application has well arranged buttons AU 1 7 which they consider understandable AU 1 9 for some of them were old fashion There was a suggestion Keep all buttons together Majority of users agreed that they can control the application intuitively AU 1 8 and the controls are comfortable enough AU 2 0 They sometimes missed a delete function even when it was there This was caused by conditional availability only in the mode of selection Moreover some objects cannot be deleted because they are a part of the task Due to this the intuitiveness of deletion felt down to AU 2 6 Adding a new line AU 1 5 or a point AU 2 0 was considered as without problems In case the objects got overlapped majority of users rotate the cube very few used zoom in 87 96 of testers found out how to create a parallel line it has to be dragged from the master line the rest did not one of the tester claimed he did not need it Only one third of all users considered manipulation with it as cle
32. kocky ktor je s as ou stredo kolsk ho u iva Testovanie pou vate mi uk zalo e tento n h ad je v tanou s as ou rozhrania viii Acknowledgement I wish to thank all the people who supported me during my doctoral study and had contributed to finishing this thesis First of all I would like to thank my supervisor Assoc Prof Martin Sperka who accepted me for the doctoral study and was very forthcoming during the whole seven year period I would like to thank my colleagues who helped me to explore the world of informatics so I could advance in this field I must thank also the management which did not lose the belief in me despite my delays namely Prof Maria Bielikova who always encouraged me As regards my scientific coming of age I express my thanks to my colleague and good friend Dr Michal Tvarozek who never spared me a criticism and offered an abundance of sound advice My thanks belongs also to Dr Iveta Kohanov for professional consultations in the field of pedagogy of mathematics I would like to thank also all my students who were inspired by my thoughts and worked under my supervision and thus contributed to this work I would particularly mention Ing Lucia Szalayov Ing Michal Sokolsky and the boys from the Netrollers team Ing Michal Dobis Ing Vladimir Hlavacek Ing Linh Hoang Xuan Ing Michal Jajcaj Ing Dusan Lamos My thanks to all my friends who supported me prayed for me helped m
33. mouse position which object it hovers above what is possible to do the content of hint changes it informs the user what can be done at the current mouse position 96 Special Interaction Approaches and their Impact on Usability Current Interaction Approaches Segment defined by this point Figure 19 Examples of hints for adding a new segment in Cabri 3D In Archimedes Geo3D the simple text hint is at upper left corner of canvas the same hint is at status bar Next to the mouse position the label of the hovered object is displayed If the addition of a new object requires more than one click e g a new segment the system does not show a preview of user s action e g the segment which ends at the mouse position until the second click Moreover the selected tool button is not visually emphasized thus the user cannot be sure if it is really pressed missing feedback Also neither hovered nor selected object in the scene is visually emphasized These features are significant usability deficiencies of Archimedes Geo3D user interface Although Cabri 3D has better user interface it does not work very well with drag and drop interaction style neither does Archimedes Geo3D By drag and drop the user can zoom or rotate the object or rotate the scene or make the dynamic change e g move a point But it does not work when the user wants to extend or shorten an object Another negative feature is impossibility to simply intera
34. of Psychology University of Michigan Kim N Lee S Lee B amp Lee J 2007 Vision Based Laser Pointer Interaction for Flexible Screens In J Jacko Ed Human Computer Interaction Interaction Platforms and Techniques Lecture Notes in Computer Science 4551 pp 845 853 Springer Berlin Heidelberg Kortenkamp U 1999 Foundations of Dynamic Geometry PhD Thesis Institut fur Theoretische Informatik ETH Zurich Kortenkamp U H amp Richter Gebert J 2000 User Manual for the Interactive Geometry Software Cinderella Heidelberg Springer 121 Alena Kovarova FIIT STU Bratislava Kovarova A amp Gregor J 2009 Solid Geometry and Virtual Reality SCO 2009 Proceedings of 6th conference on electronic support of education pp 93 98 Brno Kovarova A amp Polak M 2011 Virtual Reality Interaction via Mouse Gestures Spring Conference on Computer Graphics SCCG 2011 in cooperation with ACM and Eurographics pp 43 46 Vini n Comenius University Kovarova A amp Szalayova L 2010 Semantics in the Field of Widgets A Case Study in Public Transportation Departure Notifications In P M M Wallace Ed Semantics in Adaptive and Personalised Services Methods Tools and Applications Vol Studies in Computational Intelligence 279 pp 93 107 Berlin Heidelberg Springer Kov rov A Mesz ros V amp Zelman A 2008 Laser Pointer Map Interaction Virtual University Bratislav
35. of icPoint but for purposes of this work only the listed ones are described in detail 5 4 1 System Description The main screen of icPoint consists of a selected part of the night sky When working with an object usually a star it is marked and usually located in the middle of the screen whether it was designated by the laser pointer on the sky or searched through a find menu placed in the bottom area see Figure 29 and Figure 30 Four big buttons 195 Alena Kovarova FIIT STU Bratislava dominate the bottom part of this main screen providing the basic icPoint functionality They have to be large so the user can easily hit them by the laser pointer dot On the left side of the screen there is an auto hiding panel with multimedia information Figure 29 and on the right side there is an auto hiding panel with application settings Figure 30 pF E WIRT MUTET Last recognized azimuttvaltitude 193 88 v Currently displayed aziinuth altitude 193 88 Selected my object eVGhus 22 Ursa Major Menu Overall settings Maximal magnitude Display adus B Constellation names Constellation lines Current view Azimuth 192 8781 Altitude 87 67441 Voice control Run at startup Is running Corona Borealis Figure 30 Screenshot of icPoint project with the main screen displaying a part of the night sky with the selected star in the middle four large buttons placed at the bottom allow contr
36. often included among the control keys 4 3 2 Commercial and Free 3D Graphic Editors There are many different types of 3D editors Some are designed for technical drawing some for 3D animation and others for art and design Some because of their broad functionality require many hours of training while other editors can be handled by a beginner Some are free others paid Some are more widespread among users than others We can find various kinds of controls in these editors It depends on the type of user beginner advanced an editor is intended for and what is the subject of modeling For simple comparison we have selected the 5 common editors covering all the aforementioned categories Blender Diz 2010 Autodesk amp 3ds Max amp Autodesk Inc 2010 Autodesk Maya Autodesk Inc 2010 Google SketchUp Google 2011 and Pixologic ZBrush Pixologic Inc 2011 Blender is an open source editor similar to technical editors but many of its functionalities are intuitive and thus easily accessible to beginners 3ds Max and Maya are complex editors with a wide functionality both for 3D animation almost on the level of technical type both proprietary They differ in the specific features and even in some basic controls since each of the editors was originally developed by a different company SketchUp in its basic form is intended primarily for beginners it is free and it is also one of the technical editors ZBrush is unli
37. on the Internet using Wiki collaborative software Leuf amp Cunningham 2001 Here all members of the icPoint community can collect information that they found interesting and submit it to the icPoint wiki The submitted content is not limited to the types listed above but can also contain videos from space probes images and videos from telescopes This wide range of possibilities is accessible via the icPoint main application but also using a web interface called the icPointWiki web portal 5 4 Evaluation Our goal was to propose and verify a new method of computer aided interaction with remote objects within an outdoor environment using common and affordable equipment including input and output devices To verify this we set a hypothesis Our remote objects pointing method is applicable if the user points at the object of interest by a laser pointer through a glass pane captured by a web camera then the system is able to calculate and identify this object To evaluate this we instructed testers people from the target group about the usage of the system and then they got a simple task This test allowed us to verify three things e Proof of Concept whether the system can correctly identify the user s direction e Usability Evaluation whether the user is able to comfortably use our system e Acceptance Test whether this one use case meets the requirements of the given specification We tested also the other features
38. or after the change of the context the time or the location The stored categorized data enable the system to adjust the refreshed information to the user by estimating the user s choices see Figure 35 We choose a subset of data primarily by the user s location since this context is directly related to the choice of the bus stop The given flowchart Figure 35 represents an estimation to the question What to display see page 83 In the case of When to display question it is very similar The system checks whether there is a relevant change first in a location and second in time The change is relevant if e it differs from the last one e g the location difference is greater than 250 m and the time difference is greater than 30 min e and at the same time there exists a different context related subset of data 86 Special Interaction Approaches and their Impact on Usability Interaction Support Based on User Model Estimate user s choices Get user s current position and time Work with this Yes J data subset from now on Is there any data subset for current location NO Work with this Yes J data subset from now on Is there any data ubset for current time NO Y Choose the most often choice from data set Y Display estimated choices Figure 35 Flowchart for estimation of user s choices
39. part of the night sky It also provides additional multimedia content see Figure 29 stored in a local database to provide further data expansion Last recognized azimuth altitude 279 12 Planet detail Saturn Currently displayed azimuth altitude 279 12 Selected sky object Saturn To Ursa Major Leo Minor English Local name Saturn Cassini flyby Local name Saturn Cassini flyby oJ fca JEN Tet E 7 T 22 ax EEG oi wo soos 000 Moons and rings text Cancer Movie Showcases Satum and Rings Tilted Edge c U Toward the Sun ini oward the Sun Gemini Figure 29 Screenshot of icPoint project with main screen and left side panel which contains multimedia information about a selected sky object There are various types of possible multimedia content for example scientific information about stellar objects planetary 3D images but also historical background information e g the discovery of a planet the history of its name ancient tales An interesting idea 74 Special Interaction Approaches and their Impact on Usability Interaction with Distant Objects might be the possibility to collect stories and tales about stellar objects coming from various cultures of the world The system enables everyone to add text and multimedia content bound to a sky object sharing it with other users of our system For this purpose there was created a collaborative encyclopedia situated
40. previews the consequence of object s selection Our experiments showed that our approach was very successful 91 of users rated our graphical hint preview of possible action very positively This is the proof that this method works not only theoretically but also practically This method reduces the interaction time required to perform an extension line action the most often action in the system We consider the benefits of the graphical hint preview in systems where expected the user will quickly learn to use them but will use it only for a short time An example of it is our prototype We assume that in the long term use of such system these previews can become annoying This can be managed by allowing to disable these previews The disadvantage of this solution is just that the hint preview will show up when the mouse cursor is in a position where can be done given action This is on one side of a very sensible but on the other hand the user is not aware of this action possibility until the cursor will be moved there Since in our experiment we have not noticed this at all we 116 Special Interaction Approaches and their Impact on Usability Conclusions assume this disadvantage can be mastered by choosing appropriate environment During the questionnaires evaluation we noticed that different people prefer different styles of interaction Some like to combine the mouse and the keyboard others not Some prefer the drag and dro
41. scenarios and all of them have in common the need for the localization detection of the user s pointer whether it is a virtual projected pointer within a real environment or real pointer within a virtual projected environment In all of these solutions the calculation was based on data from the camera The larger distances require not only the camera but also a laser pointer The five mentioned solutions in the laser pointer group use the laser to point at objects several meters distant This allows system designers to work with a laser dot on the surface The dot point coordinates are detected using one or more cameras but prior calibration is necessary If the area is bounded it creates space for more specified interaction events The same problem short distances exists within virtual environments or with small environments In our case we deal with an outdoor environment where there is no surface objects of interest are too far and the area does not have bounds This is the reason why none of the indoor solutions using a laser pointer are suitable for our scenario Other solutions that are suitable to work with long distances tens of meters or longer require different hardware which does not satisfy our initial specification especially affordability Finally there is another method using only a glass plate with static image to enhance the user s observation which works for distances from meters to an astronomic uni
42. setting problems and then searching for solution or creating the standard one e G oplan G ospace AID CREEM 2009 it requires a text input often mathematical functions e Geometer s Sketchpad Jackiw 2009 Cinderella Kortenkamp amp Richter Gebert 2000 Geogebra International GeoGebra Institute 2011 and Geometry Master Caltrox Educational Software 2011 they work only with 2D geometry but they are well designed e GeomSpace Popa 1999 2011 and Mathsay Golden Oct Computer Network Service Co Ltd 2011 the user needs to work with digits a lot of input fields e Yenka Crocodile Clips 2000 2011 contains a lot of interactive animations working with 3D geometry but none working with drawing 26 We did not pay attention to the editors that are programmable software such as Maple Mathematica MatLab or educational software using Logo and or turtle graphics o4 Special Interaction Approaches and their Impact on Usability Current Interaction Approaches Majority of these solutions belong to a Dynamic Geometry field Dynamic Geometry is the theory of construction like descriptions of function like objects under parameter changes Kortenkamp U 1999 The main focus in this field is on ambiguities which occur when the user interacts with a construction and moves base points In our research we do not deal with this problem We are focused on user friendly interface Archimedes Geo3D and Cabri 3D Finally
43. simple intuitive and user friendly HS 2 3 FT 1 6 AU 2 0 The future teachers showed a big interest in it The ability to check the correctness of the solution and the ability to demonstrate the correct solution was evaluated very positively In following paragraphs are briefly described our results using our v values For detailed overview see Appendix C section C 1 Feedback questionnaires where next to each question for each group of testers is given its uj High school students Stereo3D The total number of high school students was 28 For most of them our application was comfortable HS 2 0 clear with appropriately spaced buttons HS 1 7 Their meaning constituted a problem for a few students but it can be attributed to the fact that they have heard about the cross section for the first time just before starting the application so they were not familiar with the construction method Students considered program controls very nice HS 2 0 and intuitive HS 2 2 and with a few exceptions no one had any problem with adding objects to the scene Rotating and moving scenes were evaluated very positively HS 1 3 and except for two students the assignment of these functions to the right and left mouse button suited them Quite a lot of students had problems to carry out the intended operation in the application HS 2 7 which may in part be attributed to the fact that they were not able to learn the cube section in the shor
44. text help by chance reading the text help 10 12 c Adding the parallel line was without problems 1 2 3 4 5 problematic 2 4 16 Did vou rotate the scene during vour work with the application ves no jus 17 Did you find the scene rotation natural natural 1 2 3 4 5 unnatural 2 1 18 Did you have a feeling that you can t do what you want because you didn t know how to perform it within the application yes no 3 1 19 Did you receive a sufficient feedback from the application Yes wasn t missing anything 1 2 3 4 2 3 5 didn t have an idea what is the application doing 20 Did you notice that you can use keyboard shortcuts Special Interaction Approaches and their Impact on Usability Appendix C Yes immediately 1 2 3 4 5 Arethere any a Did you use one of them at least once Which one s yes no these b Did you use at least one of them repeatedly Which one s yes no these c Did you use Ctrl or Shift Have you found it user friendly Yes no Yes no 21 Did you like Was it easier for you to use the controls that when editing the segments the application showed in grey color the planned extension of the relevant segment Yes that was great 1 2 3 4 bI hated those pop ups 22 Did you try to change the length of the segment using the drag and drop system yes no a Did you prefer to extend the segment by clicking or by dragging it Clicking dragging 23 Did you
45. the window with the information about the sky object Expands shows its content current object in the window with the information about the sky object Collapses hides its content current object in the window with the information about the sky object Uses the link in current object moves from star to the about sky objects select item next select item previous select item lower select item upper expand item collapse item use item link constellation and vice versa changes the content of information window read item content Reads the text in current object in the information window B 3 Widget Data model The most important is to store lines their stops and departures for terminal stops While there is a difference in timetables depending on the day type we enlarged our database with two small separated tables public and school holidays Figure 47 The line table contains data about the line previously loaded by the system There is a learning ability applied by lines so one of the attributes is used to specify the incremental value of the line selection count The line stops table is loaded by data parsing of the left part of the schedule list It contains information about stops of a respective line and time lag between each two upcoming stops in a route Here the learning capacity of the system is done by incrementing the station selection count selection of the station for specific line and direction The dep
46. the last two applications that meet our requirements are Archimedes Geo3D Goebel 2008 and Cabri 3D de Cotret amp de Cotret 2005 both proprietary Evaluation of these applications shows following characteristics of their user interfaces Both applications have a wide range of drawing tools contain all the essential possibilities of working with elementary objects which are well arranged and grouped in a toolbar see Figure 17 and Figure 18 s Ar Archimedes Geo3D ojej File Edit New object Macro Measure and calculate Typcaltasks Extras Help WA AA EB VO i9 4289 99000 7 Select an object in the construction Press 7 v XU Ols to cancel Objects Cube Sides 3 Edges l8 x 2 62 5 12 1 12 x 1 67 2 47 2 03 s x 2 36 1 86 3 00 s x 2 62 5 12 1 12 s x 1 67 2 47 2 03 x 1 04 1 87 2 18 s xm 0 35 2 48 2 85 si x 1 93 4 50 3 91 sl z xe 4 64 0 17 3 76 s x 5 33 0 78 1 27 si x 5 33 0 78 1 27 s x 1 04 1 87 2 18 s i Vertices Mea 945 iid P 3 52 1 95 3 82 iih W P4 2 18 4 73 2 06 PX 1 79 2 36 1 12 I9 x 3 52 1 95 3 82 s 1 34 H0 x 1 79 2 35 1 12 sf 1 2 P7 0 48 2 36 1 88 ff I11 x 2 18 4 73 2 06 s 3 9 y I12 xe 0 48 2 36 1 88 s 3 5 PX 2 18 1 35 3 24 m c 430 9579 3 Input Selected objects Select an objec
47. the reasonable proximity so the computer vision algorithms give satisfactory results they detect a point within the image shot captured by a camera Moreover this detected point of the laser pointer beam has to be small enough to identify the pointed object For long distances it does not work Here we set our goal to propose and verify a method of computer aided interaction with remote objects within an outdoor environment using common and affordable equipment including input and output devices There are different possible and expensive solutions but because we are focused on affordable devices our method uses only a computer a web camera a laser pointer and a glass pane 5 1 The User s Line of Sight Calculation The core of the problem is when the object pointed at is too far away In this case the neither direction of the laser beam nor its end dot on the surface is detectable visible in the camera image At first we explain why this cannot be solved by another type of pointer e g a simple pencil pen or the index finger Such a pointer can be tracked by the camera and its end can represent the position the user is pointing at However this method creates an unacceptable deviation caused by different positions of the user s hand the user s eyes and the fixed camera Even if the camera would be attached to the user s head which would eliminate problems with position it would create a problem with 61 Alena Kovarova F
48. translation of route Home gt Work system architecture Evaluating the pros and cons of different widget APIs we have decided to implement a widget using the Yahoo Konfabulator see section 4 2 2 This means we used mainly XML and JavaScript for programming and supported SQLite for our local database Our system can be divided in the following parts see Figure 38 User profiler actions local Task manager database I data raw data blic Parsers pu Pases HTML Downloader transport info calendar info Public transport information provider Calendar provider holidays Figure 38 Conceptual architecture of the public transportation departures widget GUI Graphics User Interface which is used to send data user choices to the Task manager and accordingly can ask the Task manager for new data from the local database The GUI can also send information about the user s choices to the User profiler 91 Alena Kovarova FIIT STU Bratislava The User profiler updates the number of the user s selections in the database and remembers the user s settings including his her favorite locations routes Anytime the user chooses a line number stop or direction its relevancy raises The Task manager e updates GUI departures either because of time or the user s different choice e updates the local database data downloaded from Public transport informatio
49. type of errors and duration of pauses indications of user frustration user satisfaction with requirements and the ways in which the user seeks assistance 2 1 3 Inquiry Methods Here usability evaluators obtain information about users likes dislikes needs and understanding of the system by talking to them observing them using the system in real work not for the purpose of usability testing or letting them answer questions verbally or in written form Inquiry methods include Contextual Inquiry Field Observation Ethnographic Study Focus Groups Interviews Logging Actual Use Proactive Field Study Questionnaires Screen Snapshots Self Reporting Logs Surveys Task Action Analysis User Feedback etc Ivory amp Hearst 2001 Hom 1996 2003 Comparison of the most used methods can be found in Table 1 and Table 2 Logging involves having the computer automatically collect statistics about the detailed use of the system Typically an interface log will contain statistics about the frequency with which each user has used each feature in the program and the frequency with which various events of interest have occurred Statistics showing the frequency of use of commands and other system features can be used to optimize frequently used features and to identify the features that are rarely used or not used Statistics showing the frequency of various error situations and the use of online help can be used to improve the usability of f
50. 003 12 2005 prof Vladimir Vojtek A 4 Supervised Theses and Projects Bachelor Theses Bc Peter Tutko Processing of physical experiments as educational multimedia june 2007 Ing Michal Smisek Multimedia Education via Internet may 2008 Ing Juraj Kollar Development of web pages using XML and transformation languages may 2008 Ing et Ing Rastislav Krsak Development of web pages using XML and transformation languages may 2008 Ing Matus Zjara X3D and its capabilities in creating three dimensional avatars june 2009 Bc Ondrej Ivancik X3D and its capabilities of creation three dimensional interactive scenes june 2009 Ing Andrej Koz k X3D and its capabilities in modeling three dimensional interactive scenes june 2009 Bc Juraj Jakabovic Recognition of Music Score and its Consecutive Translation into MIDI may 2010 Bc Marek Tak c Optical Recognition of Music Scores and Following Transfer into Midi File Format may 2010 Diploma Theses Ing Ivan Skovran Creation and comparison of educative 2D and 3D simulation december 2006 presented on SCO2007 Ing Lenka Litvov Multimedia application for mobile devices may 2009 Dean s award sponsored by Tatra Banka Foundation presented on IIT SRC 2009 won Circuits and Systems Communications Societies and Signal Processing Societies IEEE Chapter Prize Ing Martin Kozmon Application for creating 3D models using sketch based 2D modeling may 2009 presented o
51. 1 from Yahoo for Windows XP and ce MacOS known as Yahoo widgets examples on Figure 15 d Vs e Windows Desktop Gadgets Microsoft 2011 called Windows Sidebar W9 in Windows Vista from Microsoft for Windows with gadgets on the r Windows desktop examples in Figure 15 a e Google Desktop Gadgets Google 2009 from Google for Windows XP Google in a form of Google Desktop examples in Figure 15 b Desktop e Opera Widgets Opera Software 2010 from Opera for Beta MacOS vac 10 5 and Windows XP examples in Figure 15 c s e Dashboard Apple 2011 for web WebKit from Apple for MacOS X as the 22d desktop with widgets examples in Figure 15 e bar Most of them use a kind of API which processes mainly HTML E XHTML or XML and CSS files plus JavaScript sometimes Perl Python Ruby or C There are not major differences between the visuals see Figure 15 i SDK 17 WebKit http www webkit org also for S60 OS 44 Special Interaction Approaches and their Impact on Usability Current Interaction Approaches Front Page World Edition Todos de sueno con Israel expands Gara offensive se me pasa despues de European gas supplies disrupted comer Jorge Fernandez Tue Jan 06 2009 4 ntries report major U00052433774 as supplies cuses 0 EEEEEEEEEEEEA oO Gunmen raid Sri Lanka TV station TUE WED THU FRI SAT SUN Air India sacks fat hostesses 2
52. 2 0 2 1 252 T 1 5 24 0 2 3 2 3 0 Th h heck f a ee The user has to check With the type of a day and i the time and find him bookmarked the time then find herself the closest or saved him herself the closest It is no longer available i departure in the web page departure in the e timetable of specified timetable line o T 1 2 2 2 4 peus Feature Shows timetable for the current day with the highlighted closest departure It is very simple to bookmark the web page for specified line Bookmarked web page automatically shows the timetable for the current day For typing we assume the system browser web page has implemented the autocomplete function so we count 5 keys for typing the address 3 keys for typing the name of a stop and 2 keys for typing a line number For a drop down list we count BB P BB 0 2 1 1 0 2 1 5 All numbers are times in seconds 93 Alena Kovarova FIIT STU Bratislava To compare it with our solution we can use our cold start or situation when it is necessary to download a new line wrong estimation and correct estimation times e A new line 1 drop down list paste the correct web page address T 1 5 1 2 0 2 0 2 1 5 2 0 2 6 3 sec e When estimation is incorrect 2 drop down lists one click T 1 5 2 0 2 3 2 sec e When estimation is correct to run application if it is not T 0 2 sec we can also assume the widget is still running as well as
53. 210 4878 2 p 93 98 kovran Ivan Kov rov Alena Tvorba a porovnanie n u nej 2D a 3D simul cie In SCO 2007 Sharable Content Objects Brno Czech Republic 30 31 5 2007 Masarykova univerzita 2007 p 113 118 Other publications Kov rov Alena Digital Media Design Survey of Requirements on Interdisciplinary Study Program In Student Research Conference 2007 3rd Student Research Conference in Informatics and Information Technologies Bratislava April 18 2007 Bratislava STU v Bratislave FIIT 2007 ISBN 978 80 227 2631 3 p 293 300 Kov rov Alena Dobis Michal Hlav cek Vladimir Ling Xuan Jajcaj Michal Lamos DuSan icPoint Interactive Night Sky Observation In ICETA 2007 5th Int Conference on Emerging e Learning Technologies and Applications Stara Lesna Slovak Republic 6 8 9 2007 KoSice Elfa 2007 ISBN 978 80 8086 061 5 p 255 260 Kov rov Alena Sperka Martin Interactivity in Educational Applications Using Virtual Reality In Student Research Conference 2006 Proceedings in Informatics and Information Technologies Vydavate stvo STU v Bratislave 2006 ISBN 80 227 2395 9 p 293 300 Kov rov Alena Multimedia Support for Teaching Physics In Virtual University VU 04 5t International Conference Proceedings Bratislava Slovak Republic Dec 16 17 2004 Bratislava STU v Bratislave 2004 ISBN 80 227 2171 9 p 194 198 perka Martin Kov rov Alena Digit
54. 93 14 Table 2 Comparison of usability evaluation methods Dix Finlay Abword amp lzi 1 52100 Q U Y 97 07 7 7I OO l l 0 O T e 15 Table 3 Comparison of different widget engines according to the operating system they run and language they can be programmed in 46 Table 4 The default controls in Doom for the most often used functions 49 Table 5 View and scene manipulation differences in five 3D graphical editors 52 Table 6 Object manipulation differences in five 3D graphical editors o9 Table 7 The required number of interactions steps for retrieving time of Ue SIUS PU o RN 93 Table 8 Voice commands for basic icPoint screen ccc ccece eee eeeeeeeeeceeeeeeeennenes i Table 9 Voice commands for icPoint left side panel which contains information sub ai Ol CCl wien o sv oo ooo i Figures Figure 1 Two views on acceptance zzo sp ony okn p r norok ov DU UIN DUC UPS 16 Figure 2 A model for the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology Venkatesh Morris Davis amp Davis 2003 retener retos aene e e ena eae re es 18 Figure 3 A model of the attributes of system acceptability Nielsen 1993 p 25 m 19 Figure 4 Four categories of pointing at remote objec t o oosonvonoovoovonvc o 30 Figure 5 The setup of the prototype
55. Appendix A a A 1 Publications a A 2 Awards C A 3 Research Projects C A 4 Supervised Theses and Projects d Appendix B g xviii B 1 Number of Test Users B 2 icPoint B 3 Widget Appendix C C 1 Feedback questionnaires C 2 Graph C 3 Cube Section Construction Method X1X Alena Kovarova FIIT STU Bratislava 1 Introduction There are many different kinds of interaction with computers from devices such as a mouse and a Keyboard through different types of menus and toolbars up to mouse gesture recognition or eye movement capturing The dialog between a person and a computer has a history as long as computers themselves This communication depends on the technical progress in each time period Today a user can buy a variety of devices that can handle various specific situations Some of such devices even contain an embedded system and thus often replace personal computers e g cell phones Even though such devices offer a very interesting area of research our research has focused on conventional personal computers desktops or portables the most often used input and output devices and commonly available and affordable tools Since the potential of these devices is not yet fully explored our focus was on the possibilities of interaction improvement During our research we experimented with different types of input and output techniques and this thesis presents those that we consider the most interesting Our very first idea was t
56. Change a direction simple click Figure 36 point 3 needed only if the widget wrongly proposed the inverse one 3 Choose a stop from a list within the dropdown menu Figure 36 point 2 only those stops are shown that belong to the previously selected line This selection has to be done only if the automatically chosen stop is not the one wanted In the case of the first time line selection the first stop of the selected line is pre selected 3 Since there is no service that would give us the required information on demand only different web sites we decided to parse them Although we chose http imhd sk asa data source for our widget since it had a structured html code good enough to parse it to our database to parse a web page took several seconds due to many irregularities and inconsistencies in it This was contrary to our goal of time effectiveness Therefore we needed to store the data in our local database 89 Alena Kovarova FIIT STU Bratislava 202 Rajsk 14 10 3 202 Rajsk 14 22 15 202 Rajsk 14 34 27 202 Rajsk 14 46 38 202 Rajsk 14 58 51 Jj j p a Ww V1 data copyright http www imhd sk Figure 36 Widget layout description After these three steps whether they were done automatically or by the user the upcoming five departures are displayed from the current time The widget displays exactly line number direction departure time time left in minutes Figure 36 point 4 To al
57. Especially when the user already knows the exact place to look for it but nonexistence of personalized service forces him her to repeat the same sequence of actions each time he she is retrieving it This is not simple information searching for example looking for the weather or daily news but in our case information is spread within the different pages of a web site The user wants only one of the pages but to get it a selection is necessary It cannot be displayed without this selection Since the selection can differ each time data cannot be automatically retrieved from the web site For example it can be searched for a specific food recipe or the nearest bus departure To reduce the user s interaction steps in retrieving this type of information which requires selections there is only one option to make this selection by the system instead of the user This process requires knowing the user s intention In our case the user s intention is 81 Alena Kovarova FIIT STU Bratislava estimated by the system on the basis of the user behavior pattern created from the user monitoring see Figure 33 Our goal was not to discover these patterns but to experiment with already known general simple ones We represented them by the user model This model is used to estimate the user s choices and thus it minimizes the number of his her interaction steps Recording the user s choices does not burden the user It does not even require any i
58. IIT STU Bratislava camera calibration to calibrate the camera for every frame would increase the computing load too much To solve this problem using only affordable devices we propose to use a web camera a laser pointer and a transparent glass pane The camera has to be placed on a fixed position so it is not needed to calibrate it for every frame but only once at the beginning The laser pointer has to be as close to the user s eye as possible and parallel with his her straight view see Figure 23 Figure 23 Head mounted laser pointer and detail on laser This placement of the pointer eliminates the need to calculate the different positions of eyes and the pointer so there are no deviations caused by their different position It also enables the user to point the laser beam at the desired target simply by turning his her head Finally the transparent glass pane is used for capturing the laser beam as illustrated in the sketch below Figure 24 To calculate the direction of the laser beam which is an approximation of the user s sight direction we need to know two different points to define a line or one point and 2 angles alternatively The first point for our calculations appears on a glass table where the light emulated by the pointer falls Figure 24 point B The approximation of the user s sight direction is quite exact due to the fact that the user selects an object simply by pointing at it on the projection pla
59. Math Forum http mathforum org dynamic classroom html M kel E Viljanen K Alm O Tuominen J Valkeap O Kauppinen T et al 2007 Enabling the Semantic Web with Ready to Use Web Widgets International Semantic Web Conference pp 56 69 122 Special Interaction Approaches and their Impact on Usability References Microsoft 2011 Windows Desktop Gadgets Retrieved 2011 from MSDN http msdn microsoft com en us library dd834 1 42 aspx Microsoft Corporation 2011 Web Slices Microsoft Corporation Retrieved 2011 from Internet Explorer 8 features http windows microsoft com en US internet explorer products ie 8 features easier T 1 ie8webslices Moore G C amp Benbasat I 1991 September Development of an Instrument to Measure the Perceptions of Adopting an Information Technology Innovation Information Systems Research 2 3 192 222 Nielsen J 1993 Usability Engineering San Diego CA USA Academic Press Nielsen J 2000 March 19 Why You Only Need to Test with 5 Users Retrieved February 2 2011 from Jakob Nielsen s Alertbox http www useit com alertbox 20000319 html Nielsen J amp Landauer T K 1993 A mathematical model of the finding of usability problems Proceedings of ACM INTERCHT93 Conference on Human factors in computing systems pp 206 213 Amsterdam The Netherlands IOS Press Nielsen J amp Mack R L 1994 Usability Inspection Method
60. OCA s EE E T UE 21 23 26 27 KLM Keystroke Level Model eeeeeeeeeee eene nne nnn 13 88 92 LED Light Emitting Diode o cerei err bodov l von rear koko lon b ro ER Eh 34 TRA Theory of Reasoned Action eese epe sero Prope ono S PERPE E er nr on v 17 UL User IN eT aCe provo osossuol cvhva paio dn 7 8 9 11 22 23 26 107 115 UTAUT Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology 17 18 WASD key combination W moves forward S moves backward A strafes left and D strafes right esee 50 51 59 WIMP windows icons menus and a pointing device 22 24 58 Contents Introduction Usability and Acceptance in Human computer Interaction 2 1 PED Usability 2 1 1 Usability Inspection Methods 2 1 2 Usability Testing Methods 2 1 3 Inquiry Methods 2 1 4 Analytical Modeling Methods 2 1 5 Summary and Comparison of Evaluation Methods Acceptance 24254 User Acceptance Testing 2 2 2 Theories on Acceptance and Use of Technologies 2 2 3 User Interface Design Interaction Approaches 3 1 3 2 3 3 Interaction Styles Rules for a Good User Interface Hardware Supported Interaction 3 3 1 Other Input and Output Devices Current Interaction Approaches 4 1 4 2 4 3 Remote Object Interaction 4 1 1 Interaction from Indoor to Remote Indoor 4 1 2 Indoor Interaction within Table Distances 4 1 3 Laser Pointer 4 1 4 Outdoor Interaction 4 1 5 Su
61. SLOVAK UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY IN BRATISLAVA Faculty of Informatics and Information Technologies Alena Kov rov SPECIAL INTERACTION APPROACHES AND THEIR IMPACT ON USABILITY Dissertation Thesis FIIT 10890 38836 This thesis is submitted in fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Philosophiae Doctor PhD in the field of Applied Informatics Supervisor Assoc Prof Martin SPERKA Study program Applied Informatics Field of study 9 2 9 Applied Informatics Institute of Applied Informatics Faculty of Informatics and Information Technologies Slovak University of Technology in Bratislava August 2011 Bratislava SLOVENSK TECHNICK UNIVERZITA V BRATISLAVE Fakulta informatiky a informa nych technol gi Alena Kov rov SPECI LNE PR STUPY K INTERAKCII A ICH VPLYV NA POU ITE NOS Dizerta n pr ca FIIT 10890 38836 T to pr ca je predlo en pre naplnenie jednej z podmienok na z skanie vedecko akademickej hodnosti Philosophi Doctor v odbore doktorandsk ho t dia Aplikovan informatika kolite doc Ing Martin PERKA PhD Forma t dia denn Za iatok t dia 1 10 2004 tudijn program Aplikovan informatika tudijn odbor 9 2 9 Aplikovan informatika stav stav aplikovanej informatiky D tum August 2011 Mesto Bratislava Author Alena Kovarova Supervisor Assoc Prof Martin Sperka Slovak University of Technology in Bratislava now Pan European Unive
62. Table 4 but many players very often chose a keyboard W A S D Space bar Ctrl Alt Shift in combination with mouse movements Table 4 The default controls in Doom for the most often used functions Function Keyboard Mouse Joystick Turn right right arrow mouse right joy right Turn left left arrow mouse left joy left Move forward up arrow W iru mae punon joy up Move backward down arrow S mouse down joy down Alt lef Al Strafe left Alt left arrow Alt or button 3 comma A mouse left Alt right arrow Alt or button 3 Strate rigni period D mouse right Fire weapon Ctrl button 1 button 1 double click button 2 Use open Space bar or double click button 2 button 3 Strafe Alt button 3 button 3 Run Shift button 4 Later games have been enriched by look upward and downward fly upward or jump A key fly downward or squat Z key The first famous game of this type was Duke Nukem 3D 3D Realms 1996 introduced in 1996 3D world 3D movements Real 3D game demands that players keep their sense of orientation in a fully 3D environment with a flight model featuring six degrees of freedom 6DoF in zero gravity By employing six degrees of 24 Adapted from http doom wikia com wiki Controls 49 Alena Kovarova FIIT STU Bratislava movement the player is given additional control for vertical movement and banking introducing more movement controls than traditional FPS games The first famous game of t
63. The design should reuse internal and external components and behaviors maintaining consistency with purpose rather than merely arbitrary consistency thus reducing the need for users to rethink and remember Nielsen s and Shneiderman s five factors arise directly from the usability definition and give us the more theoretical view In contrast Constantine and Lockwood took the definition and searched for causes which resulted in their six principles and therefore these principles are more practical These are not the only principles very similar are Shneiderman s Eight Golden Rules of interface design Shneiderman 1998 And it is natural that the very same pattern can be found even in evaluation methods for example in Nielsen s 10 usability heuristics see page 10 These general factors laws and principles work as guidelines and there also has to be methods which can evaluate or measure system usability There are four basic ways of evaluating UIs Nielsen amp Mack 1994 Special Interaction Approaches and their Impact on Usability Usability and Acceptance in Human computer Interaction 1 Automatically usability measures computed by running a UI specification through some program 2 Empirically usability assessed by testing the interface with real users 3 Formally using exact models and formulas to calculate usability measures 4 Informally based on rules of thumb and the general skill and experience of the evalu
64. a Autor Mgr Alena Kov rov Dizerta n pr ca peci lne pr stupy k interakcii a ich vplyv na pou ite nos kolite pr ce doc Ing Martin PERKA PhD August 2011 Predkladan pr ca sa zaober r znymi druhmi interakci Je rozdelen do troch ast vktor ch prin a tri r zne n vrhy pre vylep enie doteraz existuj cich met d interakcie Prv vylep enie sa t ka pou itia be ne dostupn ho hardv ru na nov t l interakcie interakciu s objektmi mimo uzavret ch priestorov Na overenie tejto met dy sme implementovali pilotn syst m icPoint ktor pou vate ovi umo uje interagova s hviezdnou oblohou Druh vylep enie sa t ka zefekt vnenia procesu z skavania inform ci z Internetu Tu sa zaober me pr padom kedy pou vate presne vie kde sa h adan inform cia nach dza a navrhujeme met du zalo en na vyu it modelu pou vate a ktor ziskanie tejto inform cie ur ch uje Pre overenie sme implementovali widget podporuj ci vyh ad vanie odchodov spojov MHD pri ktorom sme dosiahli mnohon sobn zr chlenie z skavania h adanej inform cie Tretia as sa t ka vylep enie grafick ho rozhrania pre vzdel vacie 3D grafick editory oblas stereometrie kde sa zameriavame predov etk m na zobrazovanie n h adu pred vykonan m akcie Tento n h ad zobrazuje n sledok potenci lnej pou vate ovej akcie Pre overenie sme implementovali simul ciu rysovania rezu
65. a STU v Bratislave Kules B 2000 User Modeling for Adaptive and Adaptable Software Systems ACM Conference on Universal Usability Arlington VA USA ACM Kurz D Hantsch F Grobe M Schiewe A amp Bimber O 2007 Laser Pointer Tracking in Projector Augmented Architectural Environments Proceedings of the 2007 6th IEEE and ACM International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality pp 1 8 Washington DC USA IEEE Computer Society Leuf B amp Cunningham W 2001 The Wiki way quick collaboration on the Web Boston Massachusetts USA Addison Wesley Longman Publishing Co Inc Lewis C Polson P Wharton C amp Rieman J 1990 Testing a walkthrough methodology for theory based design of walk up and use interfaces Proceedings of CHI Seattle Washington April 1 5 1990 pp 235 242 New York ACM Long Jr A C Landay J A amp Rowe L A 1999 Implications for a gesture design tool Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems the CHI ts the limit pp 40 47 Pittsburgh PA USA ACM Press Addison Wesley Marinos D Geiger C Schwirten T amp G bel S 2010 Multitouch navigation in zoomable user interfaces for large diagrams ITS 10 ACM International Conference on Interactive Tabletops and Surfaces pp 275 276 New York NY USA ACM Math Forum Drexel 1994 2011 Interactive Geometry Classroom Resources Retrieved 2011 from The
66. a o Kiselkov Bianka Kov ov Martin Kozmon Lenka Litvov Michal Pol ik Jakub Teke 2008 presented on IIT SRC won the Best Poster Award and Czechoslovak Section IEEE Award Reaserchers night 2008 Reaserchers night 2009 icPoint Michal Dobi Vladim r Hlav ek Linh Hoang Xuan Michal Jajcaj Du an Lamo 2007 presented on IIT SRC 2007 ICETA 2007 ACM SRC 2007 won 4th place Europrix TTAO7 Award won Quality Seal Reaserchers night 2008 Happy Guitar Jozef Beno Martin Darula Andrej Fiflik Martin Darula Martin Komara Jozef Kri ka Ivan Skovran 2006 Semestral projects Adam Ad mek Multiplayer Game Portal presented on IIT SRC 2008 Lucia Szalayov Public Transportation Departures Widget presented on IIT SRC 2008 SMAP 2008 Alena Kovarova FIIT STU Bratislava Viktor Meszaros Andrej Zelman Laser Pointer Map Interaction presented on IIT SRC 2008 VU 2008 Reaserchers night 2008 Reaserchers night 2009 Michal Drahos Jozef Grexa Voice Controlled Graphic Editor presented on IIT SRC 2008 Peter Mindek Room information system presented on IIT SRC 2008 Peter Borga Vladimir Mihal User friendly live score monitoring and match data visualization presented on IIT SRC 2008 Special Interaction Approaches and their Impact on Usability Appendix B Appendix B B 1 Number of Test Users In 2000 Nielsen published the widely cited web article Nielsen 2000 Why you only nee
67. action does not have an exact meaning in connection with HCI We defined it for the purpose of this thesis as an interaction that is parallel to interaction in the real world whether it is human human interaction or human object environment interaction For example this includes speaking pointing typing and face gestures The term direct interaction also does not have an exact meaning and we defined is as an interaction where a user s input as an action has the same localization as a system s output as a reaction within a short time it is similar to direct manipulation but the localization is added E g if the user touches something the direct interaction would be any change in the place of the touch visual or other 11 Sometimes known as natural dialog concept or direct control 21 Alena Kovarova FIIT STU Bratislava 3 1 Interaction Styles According to Dix et al Dix Finlay Abword amp Beale 2004 there are a number of common interface styles including Command line interface Menus and navigation Natural language dialogue Question answer and query dialog Form fills and spreadsheets WIMP Point and click Three dimensional interfaces These and other styles are often not only styles but they also define the type of user interface UI Other examples of styles are Direct manipulation style Drag and drop Crossing based interfaces Choe Shinohara Chilana Dixon amp Wobbrock 2009 Gesture interfa
68. al Media Engineering and Design Proposals for the Interdisciplinary Study Program In ICETA 2007 5th Int Conference on Emerging e Learning Technologies and Applications Stara Lesn Slovak Republic 6 8 9 2007 KoSice Elfa 2007 ISBN 978 80 8086 061 5 p 341 346 Sperka Martin Kov rov Alena Interdisciplinary and International Study Programs in Digital Media Design and Engineering In Virtual University VU 07 8th International Conference Bratislava Slovak Republic Dec 13 14 2007 Bratislava STU v Bratislave 2007 ISBN 978 80 89316 09 0 p 160 164 Kov rov Alena Dajme tudentom virtu lnu sk senos In proceedings Trendy v e learningu Prague Czech Republic Feb 21 22 2005 2005 ISBN 80 01 03203 5 p 39 perka Martin Draho Peter Kov rov Alena Computer Graphics and Related Subjects at the FIIT STU and FI BVSP In Future of Computer Graphics Education FCGE 09 Spring Conference on Computer Graphics Special Interaction Approaches and their Impact on Usability Appendix A Budmerice Slovak Republic 22 4 2009 2009 ISBN 978 80 89313 46 4 p 5 7 A 2 Awards 6 10th place in the Czecho Slovak ACM SRC 2004 organized by the Czech chamber of ACM for the paper Interactive simulations of Elementary acm cz Student 200 a Physical Experiments http acm vsb cz student2004 inde x html Official Top Talent Quality Seal in the EUROPRIX Top Talent Award 2007 for th
69. aluation of our approach we chose an educational 3D editor working with solid geometry This can help students with lower spatial ability Cohen amp Hegarty 2007 to utilize it This is the area where users work in virtual 3D space with abstract 3D objects In our case this 3D space is projected on 2D screen Since the same principles are involved in all drawing tasks in order to prove our concepts we chose one specific task a cross section of a cube Students task description There is a cube only a wire frame model with 3 different points marked usually on its edges Figure 41 Figure 41 Cube with 3 points The task is to find a cross section on this cube A plane of section is defined by these 3 given points for example X Y and Z on Figure 41 Nowadays Slovak students solve this task by pencil and ruler in their workbooks Teachers teach them the constructing method which 101 Alena Kovarova FIIT STU Bratislava consist of extending segments mostly edges of the cube using parallel segments localizing intersections etc which leads to the determination of the rest of the points belonging to the section This method is described in more detail in Appendix C section C 3 Cube Section Construction Method To allow the user to do the same task but on the screen of a computer we need to provide tools for an interaction which consists of individual elementary steps of the construction process system description
70. amera itself is not sufficient because e pointing by a finger or another object requires good lighting conditions e the user has to be close enough to the computer and e the pointing accuracy is not satisfactory which fundamentally influences the cursor position accuracy on the screen To substitute mouse clicking we propose to use sound signals spoken commands 5 2 1 Laser Pointer as a Mouse To make it work the camera has to capture the computer screen It can be an ordinary web camera with basic resolution 640x480 For locating the laser pointer dot computer vision algorithms openCV library 5 are used The process of retrieving the laser dot position on the screen and finally to move a mouse cursor to that place consists of the following steps 1 Auto calibrate camera the system needs to find the position of the display within an image from the web camera and calibrate colors on start up Capture images with reasonable frequency 3 Using computer vision algorithms to detect a laser dot a small cluster of pixels colored similar to the laser color D 3 http www logitech com en gb mice pointers mice devices 3443 33 IrDA Data for personal computers laptops cell phones PDAs and incompatible IrDA Control for mice keyboards remote controls 34 http anyremote sourceforge net 35 http opencv willowgarage com wiki 69 Alena Kovarova FIIT STU Bratislava mostly red color among pixels whic
71. any inspection methods can be performed early in the usability engineering lifecycle In 1993 Dix et al Dix Finlay Abword amp Beale 2004 categorized these methods in following 4 classes Heuristic Evaluation Cognitive walkthrough Model Based Evaluation and Evaluations using previous studies Later in 1994 Nielsen and Mack published E g Automated expert review Also called Usability Evaluation Expert based Interface Evaluation Analytical Methods Expert Review or Evaluation through Expert Analysis Alena Kovarova FIIT STU Bratislava categorization dividing these methods in 7 classes where the first two are the same and the next five are Formal Usability Inspections Pluralistic Walkthroughs Feature Inspection Consistency Inspection and Standards Inspection Nielsen amp Mack Usability Inspection Method 1994 In 2001 Ivory and Hearst enriched this list by Perspective Based Inspection and Guideline Review and created a new class from Model Based Evaluation named Analytical Modeling Methods see section 2 1 4 Ivory amp Hearst 2001 Later on also these methods were developed Guideline Checklist Card Sorts Tree Tests Activity Analysis etc The most known are shortly described in following lines with accent on those we used in our research Comparison can be found in Table 1 and Table 2 Heuristic Evaluation Heuristic evaluation involves setting up a team of 3 5 independent evaluators who systematically ins
72. arly intuitive AU 2 4 and a half of them without any problem AU 2 4 A half of all testers found it out by a chance other half read it in information bar 91 of all users turn the scene during their work but not everybody was with this model of rotation satisfied AU 2 1 This was caused by different habits from different systems A half of the users had during their work with system feeling that they can t do what they want This was due to the nature of the test itself The users were in process of discovering the system abilities These feelings often changed when they reached the end of the testing session Our testers were not fully satisfied with the feedback AU 2 3 because they for example expected the system to let them know if there 110 Special Interaction Approaches and their Impact on Usability Interaction Using Visual Help in Simple 3D Editors is an intersection or not This was not implemented so that we preserve its educational value There were of course some relevant objections too Majority 2 3 of the users noticed and tried shortcuts right at the beginning but only a half of them 1 3 of all users kept using them and found it a good feature Everybody liked the preview of extended line AU 1 1 A half of the users tried to extend the line even by dragging it but 60 of all users simply preferred extension by clicking Everybody except 2 users noticed the information bar AU 1 3 and they read it to
73. arst 2001 2 1 5 Summary and Comparison of Evaluation Methods Every method has its advantages and disadvantages Some are good for web pages and others are better for office applications Each method is appropriate in other contexts We have chosen the method of evaluation according to our needs which resulted from the type of application that we have implemented as well as the possibilities we have had available for our evaluation more details can be found in chapters dedicated to our experiments The two following tables contain a brief comparison of the most often used methods Table 1 compares methods on the basis of the applicable stages number and type of needed personnel which usability issues are covered if it can be conducted remotely and if a method can provide quantitative data 13 Alena Kovarova FIIT STU Bratislava Table 1 Comparison of usability evaluation methods Hom 1996 2003 Usability Personnel gt R Applicable stages issues U o needed s covered Eg gt 2a O 9 S 5 z o 6 A o5 E w c a o 5 5 E a S o glo S 5 c gt 5 2 S o 9 8 z3 2g 94527 9 99899 95 SS tt 5 5 5 c OQ O 2 a 2 U tu Ao O S Cognitive Walkthrough X V L ee VA AN 0 2 V X X X Xx 8 Feature Inspection X X vv vi1 0 Ov X X v X D Heuristic Evaluation ee oe E E te O TY X VX Pluralistic Walkthrough X V X X X 1 1 2v X VX X Coaching Method E VO aly Ge X
74. arture table in the database represents the departure times out of the base station so the time of arrivals for a specific station is calculated using the initial departure time and summary of time lags until reaching the desired station As departures are differentiated based on the actual day working day weekend public holiday or school holiday this feature is taken into consideration Special Interaction Approaches and their Impact on Usability Appendix B pk int pk int pk int number int number int number int vehicle type int name string line stop string number of selections int direction from string time date terminal stop 1 string time shift int special boolean terminal stop 2 string holidays boolean weekend boolean number of selections int school holidays pk int public holidays pk int date from int date int date to int region string Figure 47 Physical data model of the widget database The previously mentioned day differentiation is being done by recognizing a week day working or not whereas a special feature for recognition of public or school holidays is represented within separate tables with these special days A list containing the school holidays is updated yearly this list can be taken from the site of The Ministry of Education of the Slovak Republic The attribute for region is necessary because some school holidays in our country ar
75. ators Under the current state of the art automatic methods are limited and formal methods are very difficult to apply and do not scale up well to handle larger UIs Empirical methods are the main way of evaluating UIs with user testing probably being the most commonly used method Often real users can be difficult or expensive to recruit in sufficient numbers to test all aspects of all the versions of an evolving design leading to the use of inspection as a way to Save users Several studies have shown that usability inspection methods are able to find many usability problems that are overlooked by user testing but that user testing also finds some problems that are overlooked by inspection meaning that the best results can often be achieved by combining several methods We were using these types of evaluation during UI development therefore in the next subsections a more detailed description follows mostly compiled from the HCI book Dix Finlay Abword amp Beale 2004 and Usability Engineering book Nielsen 1993 and James Hom s usability web site Hom 1996 2003 2 1 1 Usability Inspection Methods Usability inspection is a set of informal methods that are all based on having evaluators inspect the interface It is often used in cases where there is no alternative such as user testing Typically usability inspection is aimed at finding usability problems in a design its severity and the overall usability of an entire design M
76. basis for Web design Proceedings of ACM SIGCHI annual conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems Workshop on Organizing Web Site Information Pittsburgh PA USA ACM Slovak Ministry of Education 2011 Na konferencii diskutovali u itelia z cel ho Slovenska o digit lnom ucive Plan ta vedomost Teachers from all over Slovakia discussed on conference about Plan ta vedomost curriculum Retrieved 2011 from Slovak Ministry of Education information for media http www minedu sk index php lang sk amp rootId 8537 Slovak Ministry of Education 1997 U ebn osnovy gymn zi osemro n t dium Matematika 1797 97 15 Curriculum for eight year high school Mathematics Retrieved 2011 from http www2 statpedu sk Pedagogicke dokumenty Gymnazia 8roc Os novy osnovy mat gym 8r doc Strasbourg astronomical Data Center 2007 Public Astronomical Catalogues and Lists Retrieved from ftp cdsarc u strasbg fr pub cats Tuchinda R Szekely P amp Knoblock C A 2008 Building Mashups by example Proceedings of the 13th international conference on Intelligent user interfaces pp 139 148 New York NY USA ACM 124 Special Interaction Approaches and their Impact on Usability References van Dam A 1997 February Post WIMP user interfaces Commun ACM 40 2 63 67 Venkatesh V Morris M G Davis G B amp Davis F D 2003 User acceptance of information technology Toward a un
77. bers and also external testers altogether 10 testers The test took place on May M9 2007 We tested several different features of icPoint We list here only the one of the user s tasks that verifies sky object detection and identification It was performed with several stars of the Ursa Major and Bootes constellation Task Aim the laser pointer at the glass in such manner that the laser dot on the glass designates the chosen star Then confirm your choice by voice command This includes the system s correct determination of the user s angle of view correct object of interest determination and correct voice command recognition The user can also ask for information about the object All of this should be feasible under conditions where the user interacts with the system using only the laser pointer and voice commands During this experiment we used scientific data from public astronomical catalogues Strasbourg astronomical Data Center 2007 Currently our system uses the Hipparcos catalogue which is based on data gathered by the Hipparcos satellite during the years 1989 to 1993 The same catalogue is used by Stellarium software Gates 2009 The catalogue is filtered to contain only visible stars under 6 magnitudes to speed up searching for stars in the designated area of the sky Test Results The detection of stars was successful the system correctly detected the area of observed night sky within the system accuracy which moves a
78. blem frequency Instead choose a minimum problem frequency you want to detect p and the binomial will tell you how many users you need to observe to have a good chance of detecting problems with at least that probability of occurrence If you approach sample sizes this way you avoid the problem of the variability in problem frequency and don t have to make any assumptions about the total number of problems in an interface B 2 icPoint Minimal software requirements o processor 1 6 GHz operation memory 512 MB graphical card supporting DirectX 9 0 network card needed for IP camera free USB port needed for Web camera software Windows XP OS Net framework 2 0 Net framework 3 0 System libraries avicap32 dll gdi32 dll user32 dll Microsoft SAPI 5 1 and Microsoft Windows Media Player 11 O O O O AJ Voice commands Finally we decided to use Microsoft s SAPI engine to allow voice control and also for the speech synthesis Using this SAPI we left the user with the choice of any English words to control application features The list of available voice commands for basic icPoint screen is in following table Table 8 bold is used for the most often called commands The rest of the voice commands for the left side panel containing information about a sky object see Figure 29 are listed in Figure 9 To create higher intuitiveness of commands we created for 42 http msdn microsoft com en us library ee125663 28VS 85 29 as
79. cantly increase the user s efficiency while working with the widget This demonstrated that our hypothesis is correct and the proposed method fulfills our goal The efficiency as one of the basic parts of usability was increased because of reducing the time necessary for interaction entering inputs and generally reducing the number of interaction steps When compared with other methods in the best case the user using our widget does not have to interact with the widget at all Although users found it difficult to start to use our widget it is a matter of the provider But after overcoming the initial widget unfriendliness the users considered the widget a very pleasant and useful application They especially liked voice announcements Right now the widget works only for one specific information source but principally final implementation is dependent only on the data provider The method itself is independent and can be implemented with the same result for any domain dealing with line departures Our method is unique because besides using a user model it is accessible without a single click while any other solution requires at least one click often several interaction steps User models as well as widgets are becoming very popular They are already used in many different domains and in different types of applications It is not usual to combine them and our combination is very specific 115 Alena Kovarova FIIT STU Bratislava An i
80. ce Long Jr Landay amp Rowe 1999 Motion tracking interface Tangible UI Fishkin 2004 Voice UI Brewster 1994 Zoomable UI Marinos Geiger Schwirten amp G bel 2010 etc Several different styles can be simultaneously present in one user interface some styles are a specific subset of the other In our research we worked and experimented with the most widely spread UI for personal computers WYSIWYG 2 Graphic User Interface GUI with WIMP style direct manipulation including point and click drag and drop style and the simplest technique of 3D interfaces style sometimes also with gestures and voice UI Their brief description follows Dix Finlay Abword amp Beale 2004 WIMP windowing system It is the default interface style for the majority of interactive computer systems in use today It is a GUI based on windows icons menus and a pointing device typically a mouse13 van Dam 1997 Point and click To this category belong interfaces where virtually all actions take only a single selection e g a click of the mouse button or a touch on the touchscreen It is represented by highlighted words maps or iconic buttons in hypermedia e g World Wide Web pages Three dimensional interfaces Represented by virtual reality but it also covers the simplest technique where ordinary WIMP elements are given a 3D appearance using shading e g to highlight active areas 12 WYSIWYG an acronym for what you see
81. ch the area of his her interest by hand but can use a laser pointer 4 Outdoor The user cannot mark the object of interest even by laser pointer because the object is too far away 29 Alena Kovarova FIIT STU Bratislava 2 Indoor table A e e NI SS 1 Indoor indoor User2 Projection screen Camera Object of interest 3 Indoor room 4 Outdoor Figure 4 Four categories of pointing at remote object In the following subsections several solutions from each group are briefly introduced with a focus on interaction and devices needed to execute and process its execution 4 1 1 Interaction from Indoor to Remote Indoor One of the solutions where a picture taken by a camera is brought from a remote area to the user s screen through the web and in the same way he she can interact with it is the Ishihara and Ishihara study Remote direct pointing system using graycode Ishihara amp Ishihara 2006 The authors apply gray code to a remote direct pointing system Gray code is a method for automatic projection calibration Gray code binary patterns are projected to discover the locations of objects within the projector s perspective In addition to this main feature gray code is capable of identifying a location within the projector s perspective from wherever the gray code binary patterns can be seen The authors take advantage this of gray code to build a remote direct pointing system
82. consider the number of commands It has to be low enough or they have to be intuitive so the user can easily remember all the basic ones even when using it for the first time Some implementation details and lists of voice commands used in our pilot project can be found in Appendix B Voice commands 5 3 Object of Interest Identification To be able to evaluate our method we needed to choose the application domain and implement our method for it The important part in this is to implement the calculation for the object of interest This calculation method is domain dependent In the following paragraphs the domain is described as well as the principle of further calculations 5 3 1 Application Domain For evaluation of our method we chose an outdoor night sky observation where a computer provides visual textual and spoken information about celestial objects observed and pointed at by the user User description Our target group are people who like to observe stars and want to know their names which constellation they belong to and so on Generally they do not know anything about stars but the system can 71 Alena Kovarova FIIT STU Bratislava be used also by experienced amateur astronomers Users can be of any age but this type of interest is usual for teenage people User minimal requirements on the system To provide information about celestial objects it has to know where the user is looking Since the user does not know th
83. ct with overlapped object The user has to rotate the scene sometimes even zoom it in or use another complicated bypass to get rid of this overlap Construct3D Continuing in the list of relevant existing projects we have to mention also the project Construct3D Kaufmann amp Schmalstieg 2002 Kaufmann Schmalstieg amp Wagner 2000 We excluded it from the previous list because it works with augmented reality AR requiring very specific hardware head mounted displays special pen and several tracking cameras see Figure 20 More recently Kaufmann 2009 the author has introduced AR for dynamic differential geometry education in a wide range of ways For instance using the AR tool teachers and students can intuitively explore properties of interesting curves surfaces and others 57 Alena Kovarova FIIT STU Bratislava Figure 20 A student working with Construct3D in our standard AR lab setup with a head mounted display Kaufmann 2009 Hopefully the Construct3D and research connected to it shows the future of educational 3D geometry system Since its user interface does not use the WIMP style we do not include more detail about it here Plan ta vedomosti The Planet of Knowledge The last solution which is described in this section is Slovak portal Naucteviac sk Agemsoft 2011 Here are collected the best electronic educational materials from Slovak teachers enriched by professional interactive animations This
84. ctancy Effort Pa Behavioral Expectancy Bur enon gt Use Behavior Social Influence Facilitating Experience Conditions i Voluntariness of use Figure 2 A model for the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology Venkatesh Morris Davis amp Davis 2003 Venkatesh defined his four constructs as follows e Performance expectancy The degree to which an individual believes that using the system will help him her to attain gains in job performance e Effort expectancy The degree of ease associated with the use of the system e Social influence The degree to which an individual perceives that important others believe he she should use the new system e Facilitating conditions The degree to which an individual believes that an organizational and technical infrastructure exists to support use of the system UTAUT very precisely describes user s intentions and influences which form his her final willingness to use a system These influences can be different for each user thus we included in our questionnaires questions revealing them However there are designers of systems who understand the problem of system acceptability from another point of view Using this 18 Special Interaction Approaches and their Impact on Usability Usability and Acceptance in Human computer Interaction view the system acceptability attributes are determined and divided as depictured in Figure 3 Easy to learn Utility n to
85. ction in 3D Environments Using a Typical PC Our third goal was to verify whether different methods of visualized information increases usability of 3D graphical editors with emphasis on graphical hint for a hovered object within a graphic editor where this suggestion hint visualizes the consequence of object s selection To understand the systems providing different functionalities of various 3D worlds we analyzed them with a focus on their common features as well as their differences At first it has to be noticed that there are two basic different control concepts of the 3D world The first one is when the user is a center of the world where most of the interaction is oriented to this center and there are very limited possibilities to interact with the world around because it is already set This concept is mainly used in 3D games often as first person shooter FPS game genre The opposite concept the second one is when the user is a creator of the world so the main interaction is oriented outside to the world This second type can be found in each 3D graphic editor According to a chosen type of control concept we can find a typical set of allowed interactions For our purpose the second type is more interesting but still the first type cannot be overlooked because there are far more users who already know how to control a 3D game than a 3D editor These users have already some control habits and expect the same in
86. cu 77 Figure 33 Overview of our personalized interaction approach 82 Figure 34 Ontology model of data from public transportation departures 85 Figure 35 Flowchart for estimation of user s choices e oooonononnononnovoo ve 87 Figure 36 Widget layout description cece cece cence ee eeee ences enceeeneeeeneeeeeees 90 X V Figure 37 Widget setup for multiple lines within one route in Slovak language translation of route Home Work Figure 38 Conceptual architecture of the public transportation departures uetus hac wees none T 91 Figure 39 Time consumption comparison for obtaining information from various sources using different ways to speed up search eese 94 Figure 40 Screenshot of the iTransit application for iPhones Screen with the closest departures from the closest stops according to actual time and the User s GPS BOSILIOFLo e ervder oo oo 97 Fig re 41 Cube with 3 points sccscececececscdeerissececcsnssaiermimacmanmeaeecens 101 Figure 42 Screenshot of our pilot application Stereo3D sssssssessssseressssee 105 Figure 43 Screenshot of our pilot application InteractiveCube 105 Figure 44 Context menu for a line on Stereo3D esee 106 Figure 45 Preview of segment extension in InteractiveCube 106 Figure 46 Graph showing dependency between number of te
87. d to test with five users summarizing the past decade s research and bringing a mathematical model which states that for the number of usability problems found in a usability test with n users the formula is N 1 1 L where N is the total number of usability problems in the design and L is the proportion of usability problems discovered while testing a single user The typical value of L is 31 averaged across a large number of projects they studied Plotting the curve for L 31 gives the following result o 100 Cc J P 75 Uu z v S 5096 t au 25 o fo B 0 0 3 6 9 12 15 Number of Test Users Figure 46 Graph showing dependency between number of test users and found usability problems Nielsen amp Landauer 1993 This graph see Figure 46 was already known as the parabola of optimism Nielsen amp Landauer 1993 In 2010 Sauro wrote an article Sauro 2010 pointing out the problems of misinterpretation in Nielsen s model His article reiterates Alena Kovarova FIIT STU Bratislava the important caveats made for the past three decades about the magic number 5 1 You will definitely not see 85 of ALL problems you will see only 85 of the more obvious problems the ones that affect 31 or more of users 2 The sample size formula only applies when you test users from the same population performing the same tasks on the same applications 3 As a strategy don t try and guess the average pro
88. d55_intl jpg 19 Adapted from http files myopera com DnSee files Desktop1 JPG 20 Adapted from http img442 imageshack us img442 6848 mine231t4 jpg 21 Adapted from http developer apple com library mac documentation userexperience conceptual applehiguidelines art mt dashboardview jpg 45 Alena Kovarova FIIT STU Bratislava 1 To find a widget on the web page with plenty of ready to use widgets download it manually set up it and use it 2 To read a tutorial for extending a generic widget and follow simple instructions to create a specific one here comes into the consideration also the programming language see Table 3 3 To read a tutorial for developers and program his her own widget What option will the user choose depends on the type of information that is expected to be displayed the way of displaying is not taken into account for now Table 3 Comparison of different widget engines according to the operating system they run and language they can be programmed in OS support Progr language support Serious Samurize SuperKaramba WebKit Yahoo Widgets m x 8 38 85 s 2 a S t Engine 5 S 6 adesklets X V X X v v X X Adobe MRI V v v X X X X MM CM V X NO EA Dashboard X X VV v v v v Dekopx V X X v v v x v gDesklets X V X X X v X X Google Desktop Gadgets V v viv X X X X Kapsules V X x x v v Xx Xx KlipFolio V X Xv X X X X Microsoft Gadgets X X v Xx v v v Opera
89. ding In the next paragraphs follows the detailed description of our suggestions see the first list which were evaluated in our pilot application see section 7 2 Shortcuts directly on tool buttons Using keyboard shortcuts is a well known method for speeding up the user s work The problem is that except for shortcuts common for any kind of application such as ctrl a ctrl s ctrl z and so on each application has its own shortcuts If a user wants to use these application specific shortcuts it increases demands on his her long term memory Another aspect is that beginner users usually do not use these shortcuts because they don t know remember them We suggest displaying these shortcuts directly on the tool buttons To create and display special keys By special keys we mean again keyboard shortcuts but these consist of only one key and they only switch to the other tool button during the time the key is held temporary state It is the same principle when holding Shift key for capital letter s We suggest this for the user who uses two different tools or more and needs to switch them very often and quickly in this case a special key saves time significantly e Original usual way two different shortcuts which usually consist of 2 2 but at least 1 1 keys e Quicker way the user needs to use only one special key hold it for necessary time 99 Alena Kovarova FIIT STU Bratislava As suggested p
90. ding the Law of reflection we are able to calculate the real 3D world spherical coordinates of a light emitter its azimuth and altitude Since we are pointing at far objects the geographical position accuracy within a meter is not necessary and parallel lines provide sufficient accuracy Formula derivation for angles For details of calculation we have outlined a figure see Figure 25 of the camera with its view representing the captured image 63 Alena Kovarova FIIT STU Bratislava I 8 F dp a oy AgI W Z apla ue ULHC 0 0 Mp Wp 2 fip 2 KM LRHC ws hy Figure 25 Outlined camera view The camera its position is represented by point C captures an image represented by a virtual rectangle in a plane p in terms of Euclidean geometry This rectangle has size wp X hp width x height where the upper left hand corner has Cartesian coordinates ULHC 0 O and lower left hand corner coordinates LRHC Wp helo The middle of this rectangle is Mp w 2 ho 215 The line CM L p and CMy dp Since each camera has in its specification the maximal horizontal h max and vertical Vmax angle of camera field we can calculate Wp h hmax 2 V t uL E max s an 2 d tan 2 a T AR EE T 1 tan 742 tan aax For every point Ap aex agy on the camera image is using 1 w p W p Qox 7 Qox 7 2a h tan a4 2 ye 2 e 1 tan mar P
91. door interaction can be understood as an interaction with objects within an outdoor environment There are plenty of interaction possibilities for interacting with virtual environments or small environments as large as a room Most of them belong to the category of Virtual Reality or Augmented Reality and although the user can interact with objects within such an environment or even though it looks like an outdoor space it is still indoors Moving to a real outdoor space one can find different devices mostly cell phones see Figure 12 that can handle its orientation or the user s GPS position or at least somehow communicate with other devices around m Aldebaran Go out and point your device upwards l Alnilam Figure 12 An example of applications for outdoor star observation Google Sky Map left and Star Walk 5 right both screenshots with inverted colors None of these solutions fits our goal because they significantly increase the final price Therefore we were interested in other possibilities which help the user by giving additional information on observed objects that are hundreds of meters distant or even further 14 http www google com mobile skymap 15 http vitotechnology com star walk html 38 Special Interaction Approaches and their Impact on Usability Current Interaction Approaches Outdoor remote object observation There is an old method which provides the observer with an enrich
92. e L amp Lockwood L 1999 Software for Use A Practical Guide to the Essential Models and Methods of Usage Centered Design Reading MA Addison Wesley Constantine L L amp Lockwood L A 1996 Usage centered software engineering New models methods and metrics Proceedings of the 1996 International Conference on Software Engineering Education and Practice SEEP 96 pp 2 9 Los Alamitos CA IEEE Computer Society Crocodile Clips 2000 2011 Retrieved 2011 from Yenka http yenka com ernek P 2005 U ebn osnovy pre stredn odborn koly tvorro n t dium Matematika CD 2004 16970 33680 1 092 The curriculum for secondary schools four year study Mathematics Retrieved 2011 from U ebn osnovy predmetov pre skupinu tudijn ch odborov SO http www2 statpedu sk Pedagogicke dokumenty SOS Osnovy Mate matika SOS doc Davis F D 1989 September Perceived Usefulness Perceived Ease Of Use And User Acceptance Of Information Technology MIS Quaterly 13 3 pp 319 340 Davis F D Bagozzi R amp Warshaw P 1989 User acceptance of computer technology A comparison of two theoretical models Management Science 35 8 pp 982 1003 de Cotret S amp de Cotret P R 2005 Cabri 3D User Manual Cabrilog 119 Alena Kovarova FIIT STU Bratislava Dix A Finlay J Abword G D amp Beale R 2004 Human Computer Interaction 3rd ed Scotprint Haddingto
93. e comfortable environment for the user especially when M browsing the favorite sites e g for e mails or on different types of social bubbles f networks Examples of the site specific browsers are Fluid for MacOS X Mozilla Prism Google Chrome or Bubbles These are web 4 Fluid applications which have the same core as web browsers but from the We outside they look like desktop applications They offer the drag amp drop function and have many other features they may have some settings which can be manually set up and then the user obtains his her information even quicker as in a web browser but they still do not guess the user s focus do not give a chance to filter specify which part of which web page and do not offer the option to choose a way of presentation Apart from bookmarking systems built in to web browsers users can take advantage of bookmarking web services such as the social bookmarking system Delicious Yahoo 2011 formerly del icio us Such m del icio us 42 Special Interaction Approaches and their Impact on Usability Current Interaction Approaches services provide them with the possibility to organize their bookmarks by using tags and to have their bookmarks available independently of the user s location and browser Another option which can significantly speed up user access to relevant information are personalized and adaptive web based systems Brusilovsky amp Millan 2007 especially whe
94. e object the computer has to calculate it at best completely without burdening the user Moreover since the user lies on the ground looking upwards he she has to be able to control the computer without a mouse and a keyboard Figure 28 Outdoor experimental interaction prototyping a user is lying under a glass pane placed on cardboard boxes aiming a laser beam to a star Environment description The most usual way for observing the night sky is to go out during a clear night lie down on the ground and look upwards The darker the night and surrounding is the better are observation conditions During our observation the user lies down under a horizontal glass plate see Figure 28 and uses our pilot project running on his her computer 5 3 2 Finding Sky Objects The pilot project we implemented is named icPoint read I see point It complies with our proposed method for determining the direction of the user s line of sight determined by two angles They serve as input parameters for further calculation to determine the part of the night sky the user is looking at and according to this to mark the closest visible sky object see Figure 29 on page 74 or Figure 30 on page 76 12 Special Interaction Approaches and their Impact on Usability Interaction with Distant Objects To find an object of interest we needed calculations based on conversions between coordinate systems and data from object catalogues To accomplish this w
95. e of interaction the interaction with objects in the outdoor environment To verify this method we have implemented the pilot system icPoint which enables the user to interact with a night sky The second proposal relates to the streamlining of the information retrieving from the Internet In this part we discuss the situation in which the user knows exactly where the required information is located We propose a method for accelerating the process of obtaining this information based on the user model utilization In order to verify this method we have implemented a widget which assists in searching for departure times of public transportation We have achieved considerably better times in obtaining the requested information The third part deals with the enhancement of a graphic user interface for educational 3d graphical editors in the field of solid geometry where we focus mainly on a preview hint visualized before an action is executed This preview shows the consequence of the user s potential action To verify our theory we have implemented a simulation of the cube cross section which is a part of secondary school curriculum Tests performed by users demonstrated that this preview is a useful and desired element of the interface Vil Anotacia Slovenska technicka univerzita v Bratislave FAKULTA INFORMATIKY A INFORMA N CH TECHNOL GI tudijn program Aplikovan informatika tudijn odbor 9 2 9 Aplikovan informatik
96. e or encouraged me as well as to those who took part in the conducted tests I thank Bob Stump who was always willing to hear about my research and often made English corrections and Dr Marian Marton whose willingness to help out knows no bounds I appreciate feedback and comments received from the reviewers Dr Bozena Mannova and Assoc Prof Andrej Ferko which helped me to improve quality of this work Last but not least I would like to thank my parents who provided me a background which was essential for me to be able to focus on my research 1X About the Author Alena Kov rov was born in Bratislava Slovakia on 4 June 1981 She received her Master degree in Mathematics with major in Computer Graphics and minor in Financial Mathematics 2004 from the Comenius University in Bratislava She is presently a PhD student at the Slovak University of Technology at Faculty of Informatics and Information Technologies in the field of Applied Informatics Her research interests are in the area of Human Computer Interaction with a special focus on usability She has published and presented her research results at international as well as local and national conferences The full list of publications is in Appendix A 1 and awards in A 2 Her other interests include singing playing musical instruments painting and cycling List of Tables and Figures Tables Table 1 Comparison of usability evaluation methods Hom 1996 200
97. e project icPoint coauthored as a part of a six member team Tatra Banka Foundation award for leading an exceptional diploma thesis in IT field written by Lenka Litvov Ta Multimedia application for mobile A A NADACI A devices ideme za najlep mi A 3 Research Projects E Talent Tatra Banka Foundation 01 2011 12 2011 Development of applications for mobile devices Assoc prof Michal er ansk project iTransit KG 244 022STU 4 2010 KEGA Supporting the teaching process for parallel and distributed data processing 01 2010 12 2011 Assoc prof Michal er ansk E Talent Tatra Banka Foundation 01 2010 12 2010 The use of massive parallelism for mobile transport timetables Assoc prof Michal er ansk project iTransit VG 1 0848 08 VEGA Connectionist computational models for computer grid environment 01 2008 12 2010 Assoc prof Michal er ansk 29079 IC 1 2005 1 DK ERASMUS PROG 3 Joint Degree in Media Development Engineering 9 2006 1 2010 Assoc prof Martin Sperka VG 1 3103 06 Information infrastructure for the processing of knowledge scattered in a distributed environment prof 1 2006 12 2008 prof Vladimir Vojtek Alena Kovarova FIIT STU Bratislava KEGA 3 3206 05 Interdisciplinary Study Program in Interactive Digital Media Design 7 2005 12 2008 Assoc prof Martin Sperka VG 1 0161 03 Information processing in a distributed environment of intelligent agents 1 2
98. e region dependent 5 The web site of The Ministry of Education of the Slovak Republic http www minedu sk k Alena Kovarova FIIT STU Bratislava Appendix C C 1 Feedback questionnaires Stereo3D application 44 44 General questions FT vj HS vj Sex male female How much time do you spend on a computer 1 6 hours 7 15 hours 16 and more hours The appearance of the application 1 Do you find the application pleasant Very pleasant 1 2 3 4 b doesn t look pleasant 1 6 2 3 2 Would you change its appearance If yes how Design 3 Do you find the application well designed Very well designed 1 2 3 4 5 badly designed 1 5 2 0 4 Do you think the buttons are arranged appropriately very appropriately 1 2 3 4 5 inappropriately 1 5 1 7 5 Did you understand the function of all buttons ves 1 2 3 4 5 had problem understanding them 1 1 2 2 6 Would you like to change something If yes please specify Controls 7 Can you control the application intuitively intuitively 1 2 3 4 5 non intuitively 1 3 2 2 8 Are the application controls comfortable comfortable 1 2 3 4 5 uncomfortable 1 8 2 0 9 Adding an intersection was without problems 1 2 3 4 5 problematic 2 2 2 8 10 Adding a point for the cross section was without problems 1 2 3 4 5 problematic 1 4 1 8 11 Adding a line was without problems 1 2 3 4 5 problematic 1 3 2
99. e used three basic coordinate systems to designate the position of an object on a celestial sphere Each of them uses a different fundamental plane and two coordinates for position e The horizontal coordinate system is based on the local horizon It uses azimuth and altitude and depends on the observer s position on the Earth and the time e The equatorial coordinate system is based on Earth s equator or better to its projection to the celestial sphere called the celestial equator o The first coordinate used in this system is Right ascension of the object it is the angle between the object and the vernal equinox point it is the point where the sun crosses the celestial equator on the March equinox around the celestial equator o The second coordinate is declination which is the height of the object above the celestial equator o Coordinates in this system depend very little on the observer s time or position on the Earth s surface there are effects of nutation and precession Therefore this coordinate system is used for the position of stars and other non Solar system objects e The third coordinate system uses ecliptic as its fundamental plane Ecliptic is a projection of the Earth s orbit around the Sun to the celestial sphere o The first coordinate is ecliptic longitude measured around ecliptic from the vernal equinox to the object o The second coordinate is ecliptic latitude which is the height of the object above the eclip
100. ecause they are too complicated and gives no added value to this text These two angles agy and egy represent the user s viewpoint The user needs to give the system only these values e Cameras view direction in world coordinates its azimuth and altitude it can be easily calculated when the user sets the camera under the corner of the glass pane aiming camera to the center of the pane after such setting up the user can give the system dimensions of the pane and its distance from the ground e Camera s field of view user chooses it from drop down list according the camera type e Observation position coordinates usually GPS coordinates With the observer s position from GPS the object of interest lying in his her line of sight can be calculated The coordinate system depends on the application domain This method can work also in the dark or simply when the camera cannot recognize the surroundings It is not necessary for the system to see the object of interest it is sufficient when it is possible to calculate it from a model The way of acquiring the model of the surroundings is domain dependent One possibility is to take a picture if 2D is enough of these surroundings during good light conditions Another possibility is for example if there is something moving in a predictable way then its position can be calculated usually in GPS coordinates If the camera cannot recognize the surroundings e g
101. ection point R p which is projection of point RE u The coordinates of point B alternatively Rp are calculated as cluster s center of gravity using its pixels coordinates Using equations 3 we can calculate azimuths and altitudes for points B and R Apc EB c Aro ERC B Ir R rg c 4g c era ABC BiG enoo kc R C nc 2b h tan 1 t Apo tan w an 2 Qc 2b V ED py o max Epc tan h 1 tan 2 Ec 2r h tan 1 1 t 1 r c tan w an 2 Qc Zr V py max fac tan 5 an c h C where known are coordinates of B and R from the image captured by camera B box boy o Ro x Mylo camera resolution hp X Wp camera C horizontal field with angles hmax Vmax and camera viewpoint ac c 31 n this case the distance his measured as the distance between the ground and the glass pane its underside vC 2 vU 27 66 Special Interaction Approaches and their Impact on Usability Interaction with Distant Objects Our unknowns are angles of B for origin U ag y and egy To calculate them we used the fact that R is a reflection and equations 4 B bx by bz cartesian S rsv CB 2727 PNRPERINE s c CBG Bc essent b Tgy COSEgy COSAgy Tp c COS Eg c COS Qg c dh by rgy COS Eg y S N g y Tg c COS Eg c S N dg c dyh 6 h b Tg y S N g y Tg c S N Egc 0 gt Tpu h sin
102. ed service or process Each of described styles of interaction is more or less intuitive and all of them have a potential to serve for direct interaction but it is dependent on the IO devices see section 3 3 3 2 Rules for a Good User Interface We are interested in making control as comfortable as possible For example to speed up control and make it more intuitive for the user independently of the input devices There are several things that help designers to design such an interface At first there have to be good triggers that represent and can trigger some of the system s available commands The majority of such triggers are visual but the system can handle also gestures usually from a mouse or spoken commands Since different types of UIs exist and not each of them is important for this 23 Alena Kovarova FIIT STU Bratislava work in this section the WIMP GUI is discussed because our applications run under this type of operating system Under GUI belongs everything that is visible on the screen and the user can somehow interact with it Concerning the current WIMPs which are modeled as a desktop metaphor the user can see and interact with windows and icons using a pointer These windows contain numerous widgets such as icons menus buttons with tooltips ordered usually in toolbars or ribbons dialog boxes etc From Nielsen s set of heuristics see p 10 we know that a good interface also needs e Help not on
103. ed view of the world around and which requires neither a computer nor any other electronic device Only thing needed is a well placed glass pane with specific information An example of using such a glass pane which gives a better view of the area distanced just a few meters from the observer is a pane depicting the parts of the ruins which are absent Thus observers can have a very specific idea how a given object looked in the times of its glory Figure 13 sv yi Figure 13 An illustration of augmented reality without the use of computing resources only through a glass pane a terrain with ruins and the glass pane with ruins complement left observer s view through the glass pane right 6 Another example can be found in the field of glass sundials Figure 14 Their history started in 1529 Sundials can accurately tell the dates of the solstices and equinoxes and can have date lines for birthdays or anniversaries too These examples show that glass has been used for centuries to give the observer information in which he she is interested A glass pane is used even today as a tool for observers in different situations dealing with long distances 16 Pictures adapted from http www visionpubl com past present show asp pag 6G amp id 6 39 Alena Kovarova FIIT STU Bratislava Figure 14 Spectra sundial 21st century Carmichael 2011 4 1 5 Summary All of these solutions work with different types of remote object
104. eens that are sensitive also to pressure and are able to distinguish different levels of it Since people have a pattern of pushing either strongly or lightly often a matter of their emotions or personality this type of device can be used for signature authentication among other things We named only a few examples There are more but for the purpose of our work it is not necessary to go into greater detail 28 Special Interaction Approaches and their Impact on Usability Current Interaction Approaches 4 Current Interaction Approaches The following three sections describe related work connected to all of our three goals each section for one goal 4 1 Remote Object Interaction Our first goal was to propose and verify a method of a computer aided interaction with remote objects in an environment off the computer screen using common and affordable equipment including input and output devices The problem of pointing at remote objects as an interaction problem can be understood at different levels 1 Indoor indoor The area of interest is remote but the user has a camera there and Internet connection can bring him her a picture of it Interacting with this picture the user can interact with objects within the remote area 2 Indoor table The user is very close to the area of his her interest but it is too big wide The user cannot reach each corner of the area by simple hand stretching 3 Indoor room The user cannot rea
105. ena Kovarova FIIT STU Bratislava InteractiveCube General questions vj 1 Sex male female 19 4 2 Age 30 3 How much time do you spend on a computer 1 6 hours 7 15 hours 16 and more hours gt 16 Feel amp Look 4 Do you find the application pleasant Very pleasant 1 2 3 4 b doesn t look pleasant 2 0 5 Would you change its appearance How Design 6 Do you find the application well designed Very well designed 1 2 3 4 5 badly designed 1 9 7 Do you think the buttons are arranged appropriately very appropriately 1 2 3 4 5 inappropriately 1 7 8 Did you understand the function of all buttons yes 1 2 3 4 5 had problem understanding them 1 9 9 Would you like to change something If yes please specify Controls 10 Can you control the application intuitively intuitively 1 2 3 4 5 non intuitively 1 8 11 Are the application controls comfortable comfortable 1 2 3 4 5 uncomfortable 2 0 12 Adding an intersection was without problems 1 2 3 4 5 problematic 2 0 13 Adding a point for the cross section was without problems 1 2 3 4 5 problematic 1 6 14 Adding a line was without problems 1 2 3 4 5 problematic 1 5 15 Did vou find out how can vou add a parallel line ves no 1 5 a Do vou think that it was intuitive ves 1 2 3 4 5b had problems to find it out 2 4 b Did vou discover it by chance or did vou read the
106. er three conditions e Touch Participants selected objects by touching the stylus to an item on the table e Point Users selected objects by pointing at them with a stylus using it like a laser pointer with a cursor appearing on the table e Reach and point Users selected objects by pointing at them similar to the point condition but were encouraged to reach out over the display to reduce the distance between stylus and target The Vacuum Facilitating the Manipulation of Distant Objects The Vacuum Bezerianos amp Balakrishnan 2005 is a new interaction technique that enables quick access to items on areas of a large display that are difficult for a user to reach without significant physical movement The vacuum is a circular widget bull s eye with a 32 Special Interaction Approaches and their Impact on Usability Current Interaction Approaches user controllable arc of influence that is centered at the widget s point of invocation and spans out to the edges of the display see Figure 7 Far away objects residing inside this influence arc are brought closer to the widget s center in the form of proxies that can be manipulated in lieu of the original Authors conducted two experiments which compare the vacuum to direct picking and an existing technique called drag and pick Their results show that the vacuum outperforms existing techniques when selecting multiple targets in a sequence performs similarly to existing tec
107. er forecast for the city where I live and I prefer to have it in textual and image form Since this is his her known area and the experienced user knows where and how to find manually the information he she is interested in the remaining problem is How to transform such a requirement into a computer language so that a computer can look for the information automatically instead of the user To understand this problem practically let s have a user who looks for information on bus departures from his her home to his her work It takes a little bit of time till he she opens the relevant web page in his her web browser it always takes him her a few seconds to perform this task which consists of several interaction steps The time depends on the degree to which the user is capable of customizing the system he she is working with and also on how much different settings allow him her to speed up obtaining the desired information Some time can be saved by cookies since they remember the last choices and represent a system adaptation The user s requirement can be formulated for example like this I want to know when my bus is going from where I am now and in the 41 Alena Kovarova FIIT STU Bratislava usual direction It is important to notice the words my where and usual because these assume an application is able to estimate his her choice of bus number where he she is and which direction he she wants to travel The follo
108. eract This vision based system is augmented with a natural interface that enables the user to interactively refine the suggested rectification This makes it very easy for users to execute fast and continuous commands The interaction model developed behaves like a smart interaction system The vision based interaction system requires no special hardware and runs on a standard computer Laser pointer interaction techniques using peripheral areas of screens Shizuki et al presented new interaction techniques that use a laser pointer to directly manipulate applications displayed on a large screen Shizuki Hisamatsu Takahashi amp Tanaka 2006 The techniques are based on goal crossing and the key is that the goals of crossing are the four peripheral screen areas which are extremely large This makes it very easy for users to execute commands and the crossing based interaction enables users to execute fast and continuous commands 36 Special Interaction Approaches and their Impact on Usability Current Interaction Approaches Figure 10 Three types of basic crossing Shizuki Hisamatsu Takahashi amp Tanaka 2006 a o F ora GT gt la ea _ toggle mode di y mb aS Figure 11 Crossing command mappings for a slideshow and a map viewer application Shizuki Hisamatsu Takahashi amp Tanaka 2006 The system consists of a laser pointer with an on off button a USB camera to capture the movement of the laser spo
109. ereo3D prototype Here the function drag and drop for segment extension Was not implemented We assume this interaction style would solve this kind of problem also for FT None of the testers of InteractionCube complained about shortness of segments lines 111 Alena Kovarova FIIT STU Bratislava This proved that for 39 of users were able to control our application by shortcuts which made their work quicker The most used key Ctrl indicate rapid adoption of its style of interaction temporary mode change similar to Shift key for capital letters Since 91 of users rated our graphical preview of possible action very positively this is the clear proof that this method works not only theoretically but also practically This method reduces the interaction time required to perform an extension line action the most often action in the system We assume that our last two hypothesis which we did not confirmed ultimately contribute to comfortable and faster work with the system it looked so during the testing but there are further testing needed to prove it clearly 7 3 Discussion To propose improvements or new interaction methods in the field of 3D graphics educational applications is not as easy as it may seem We already tried gestures Kovarova amp Polak 2011 we invented an original pointer working with the depth we used the anaglyph rendering Kovarova amp Gregor 2009 etc All these methods improve or facilitate comm
110. es the tests consist of the following five steps e The identification of functions that the software is expected to perform e The creation of input data based on the function s specifications e The determination of output based on the function s specifications e The execution of the test case e The comparison of actual and expected outputs 2 2 2 Theories on Acceptance and Use of New Technologies It is usually a problem to enforce a new kind of anything including a new kind of control People are used to an old style and the older they are the less they are willing to learn new things Age isn t the only factor There are several models and theories mainly derived from the social psychology field which summarize these factors 16 Special Interaction Approaches and their Impact on Usability Usability and Acceptance in Human computer Interaction Theory of Reasoned Action TRA Fishbein amp Ajzen 1975 Ajzen amp Fishbein Understanding Attitudes and Predicting Social Behavior 1980 posits that a person s volitional behavior is a function of an individual s attitude towards the behavior and subjective norms surrounding the performance of the behavior Simply said if a user intends to do something then it is likely that he she will do it Five years later Ajzen improved his theory and named it the Theory of Planned Behavior Ajzen 1985 where he suggests that what a person will do is dependent also on his her behavio
111. etrieving useful and comfortable We used three different methods for three tests e Usability Inspection Method KLM Keystroke Level Model see section 2 1 4 to compare our and other interaction methods e Usability Testing Method see page 11 Performance Measurement with one task dealing with a cold start done by 10 testers e Simple interview dealing with the acceptance where people from the target group were asked to try to use our application for several days 6 3 1 System Description We studied the domain of public transportation departures and found out that there is no service that would monitor the user s requirements and identify patterns in his her behavior Usually there are web pages which can remember the user s last choices cookies or the user can manually mark a page as a favorite bookmark According to our analysis see section 4 2 when dealing with information retrieving from the web where the type of information is very specific and short desktop widgets provide a suitable starting point Our widget displays in a very little space the closest departures of the chosen estimated stop direction and line of the public city transport see Figure 36 It uses our proposed method to estimate the user s choices and thus adjusts to the user s needs In our user model we included only repetitiveness without context time and position It 88 Special Interaction Approaches and their Impact on Usability Interaction
112. for Remote pen left Student s camera view where is shown how he draws a diagram representing the direction of the outer product and the magnitude right Ishihara amp Ishihara 2006 31 Figure 6 Top projected table hardware configuration Parker Mandryk akpen 2005 i a rn 32 Figure 7 Vacuum Bezerianos Balakrishnan 20095 eeeeeees 33 Figure 8 Basic object manipulation techniques such as translation a and rotation b are illustrated in long exposure photographs Augmentation can be projector based a c or via video see through d These application examples show basic augmentations of building structures a b d distance measurements c and material color simulations c Kurz Hantsch Grobe BCMIEWe c Biber 2 OO T J EEEE EEEE EEEE EEEE EEPE 35 Figure 9 The vision based interaction system The portable LCD projector and USB2 0 camera are placed at the front of the screen while the user can control the mouse function using a laser pointer Kim Lee Lee amp Lee 2007 A ee E ee en ere eee 36 Figure 10 Three types of basic crossing Shizuki Hisamatsu Takahashi amp iini cc bo 60 2 M 37 xiii Figure 11 Crossing command mappings for a slideshow and a map viewer application Shizuki Hisamatsu Takahashi amp Tanaka 2006 37 Figure 12 An example of applications for outdoor star observation Google
113. g desktop tools for architectural planning simulation and building surveying The hardware configuration of this system consists of two video cameras a low resolution wide angle context camera and a high resolution PTZ Pan tilt zoom detail camera A micro controller and two stepper motors with their controllers are utilized to rotate the detail camera and an attached laser module for detecting distances Both cameras are directly connected to a PC that controls motors camera settings and the laser module 35 Alena Kovarova FIIT STU Bratislava Vision based laser pointer interaction for flexible screens Kim et al present new interaction techniques that use a laser pointer to directly interact with a display on a large screen Kim Lee Lee amp Lee 2007 which can be very useful during group meetings and other non desk situations where people should be able to interact at a distance from a display surface Figure 9 The vision based interaction system The portable LCD projector and USB2 0 camera are placed at the front of the screen while the user can control the mouse function using a laser pointer Kim Lee Lee amp Lee 2007 The camera is subsequently used to detect the position of the pointing device such as a laser pointer dot on the screen allowing the laser pointer to emulate the pointing actions of the mouse The laser pointer will behave as an active point on the projected display where the user can int
114. gn for widgets in web services through usability evaluation Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Interaction Sciences Information Technology Culture and Human pp 1013 1018 Seoul Korea ACM Hewett Baecker Card Carey Gasen Mantei et al 2009 July 29 Definition and Overview of Human Computer Interaction Retrieved February 14 2011 from ACM SIGCHI Curricula for Human Computer Interaction http old sigchi org cdg cdg2 html Hom J 1996 2003 Retrieved February 07 2011 from The Usability Methods Toolbox http usability jameshom com and http www usabilityhome com Ch vez F d Vega F F Olague G amp Montero J L 2008 An independent and non intrusive laser pointer environment control device system Proceedings of the 5th international conference on Pervasive services ICPS 08 pp 37 46 New York NY USA ACM 120 Special Interaction Approaches and their Impact on Usability References Choe E K Shinohara K Chilana P K Dixon M amp Wobbrock J O 2009 Exploring the design of accessible goal crossing desktop widgets Proceedings of the 27th international conference extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems pp 3733 3738 New York NY USA ACM Id Software 1993 Doom 3 Retrieved 2011 from Id Software http idsoftware com games doom doom3 index html Id Software LLC 2002 Wolfenstein 3D Retrieved 2011 from Id Software http id
115. h accelerometer iPhone 4 for 650 or Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 for 380 19 Alena Kovarova FIIT STU Bratislava We can also compare icPoint with another solution which used less common and less affordable technologies such as an accelerometer It is easier for the user to use such devices for observing distant objects but it is also more expensive One of the disadvantages is the glass which can be uncomfortable to carry depending on the size on the other hand if someone installs the glass in the garden or on the roof it eliminates the problem with carrying it as well as the difficult initial setup Our solution is very sensitive to a variety of light phenomena which can sometimes occur e g somebody or something moved into the camera view field even worse when it emits light It can result in a wrong identification of the object of interest This is a natural consequence of using input from the camera The user has to be aware of this and choose the environment with minimal distractions We have used the known methods for eliminating these unwanted interferences The second sensitivity issue is accuracy By observation we found that the error of determining the object is within 3 degrees which corresponds to the measurement error when entering the initial data entry during setup and also to the distance of the user s eye from the laser pointer For ordinary observation it is an acceptable error and the user can simply use
116. h are different in two consecutive frames 4 Move mouse cursor to the position within the computer screen which was determined by the laser pointer To auto calibrate the camera we use a simple technique we change the color of the entire screen at the start up see Figure 27 This creates a significant change in camera image and thus the large quadrangular changed area is detected when comparing the earlier image from the camera to the current one For such detection we used a distance function This function determines the 4 edges they are found as positions of pixels having the maximum distance from the center of the area from all the pixels on its border where 3 out of 4 pixels are not on the same line Figure 27 Auto calibration screen with four different colors in rectangular areas serving for detection of screen angle within camera image Having determined the position of the screen the system excludes it from comparing the foreground to the background image since it is used to detect the user s line of sight see section 5 1 To find a point from the laser pointer on the screen our algorithm looks for the pixels whose color is similar to that of the laser It works very precisely since our GUI does not contain pixels of such color it adapts according to the laser color The relative position of the mouse cursor determined by the position of the laser point in the camera image is calculated as follows in equation 9 C
117. here system automatically detects the user s intention 4 Users will appreciate the representation of infinite object in finite form where these will be accommodated clipped to the preferred size The same goes for finite objects To evaluate these hypotheses we used following methods observation the users during their work questionnaires and interviews 7 2 1 Systems Descriptions We created two prototypes Stereo3D see Figure 42 and InteractiveCube see Figure 43 Their design was influenced by our experiences obtained from project StereoVR Portal Kovarova amp Gregor 2009 Both prototypes scenes contain a cube with three points defining 103 Alena Kovarova FIIT STU Bratislava the crossing plane They share a common basic functionality and features add a new point only if it is an intersection or delete it add a line connecting two points or a parallel one anchored to a point delete prolong or shorten the line define a cross section check the correctness of the cross section mouse wheel zooming in out the scene no button pressed on mouse dragging a selected object if there is any highlight a hovered object status bar shortcuts but they differ in details which helped us to easily evaluate the contribution of individual features otereo3D force the system show the use InteractiveCube drag and drop to extend or shorten the line segment drag and drop to create a parallel line
118. his type was Descent Interplay 1995 introduced in 1995 This game requires the player in a spaceship to navigate labyrinthine mines while fighting virus infected robots The control is very similar to Doom Id Software 1993 while some players might opt for a well stocked joystick others move for the mouse and keyboard combination The mouse is used to position ship s viewpoint left right up and down The two mouse buttons usually fire primary and secondary weapons As for the keyboard portion of this combo players tend to gravitate to the WASD combination W moves forward S moves backward A strafes left and D strafes right So far this set up is like a simple FPS but several other keys are rolling left or right the Q and E keys for strafing up and down players used to choose R and F as they are adjacent to the movement keys Even with the advent of mouse and keyboard combos in FPSs some players still prefer the keyboard only a set of four keys usually the arrow keys for the ship s viewpoint and another set of four usually WASD combo for moving forward backward and strafing left and right In present 3D games dominate those that offer only 2D movements on the surface The demands for better graphics increase demands on graphics cards The demands for better control of the games are not probably as big as for better graphics because even if we can now find more advanced control input devices such as a wii remote or a ga
119. hniques when selecting single targets located moderately far away and slightly worse with single targets located very far away in the presence of distracter targets along the path bull s eye animated transition item vacuumed arc edge influence arc Figure 7 Vacuum Bezerianos amp Balakrishnan 2005 The authors used a 16 wide 6 high back projected large display with imagery generated by 18 projectors 1024x768 resolution each in a 6x3 tiling for an effective resolution of 6144x2304 pixels The projectors are driven by a cluster of 18 workstations A camera based Vicon motion tracking system www vicon com tracked a pen s movement over the screen Although the system could track the pen in 3D space the authors used only x y screen movements a 5 inch hover zone and a single button 4 1 3 Laser Pointer The next level of remote area is when a user cannot reach the area of his her interest by hand but uses a laser pointer The distance between the object of interest and the user can be several meters These solutions are connected to big screens e g wall displays In 2001 Olsen and Nielsen T described a technique using a laser pointer and a camera to enable people to interact at a distance from a display surface e g group meetings and other non desk situations They described calibration techniques to synchronize the display and camera coordinates and a series of interactive techniques for navigation and 33 A
120. hpads and pointing stick tablets different types of pens etc Devices for hands or legs steering racing wheel pedals light gun dance pad etc Devices for eyes head are different types of o glasses for stereoscopic displays anaglyphic polarized semitransparent liquid crystal shutter glasses o displays and projectors head mounted display holographic display volumetric display 3D display etc o printers and other devices o environment CAVE can also require glasses Motion tracking devices usually camera like devices tracking a body part s position track reflex or illuminating points or magnets tracked by magnetic system track color patterns or simply send any taken picture to recognition algorithms and recognizing various actions and movements e g whether the user is standing moving sitting waving smiling touching triggers etc o Motion sensing devices wii remote play station move Kinect or any device with a built in accelerometer Position tracking devices detecting the user s position GPS detects position on the Earth and with the combination of a camera image can detect even the surroundings any device with a built in gyroscope can measure orientation toward the Earth surface Concerning devices for hands or for the index finger there are some that are better designed than others for human natural 27 Alena Kovarova FIIT STU Bratislava interaction They include pens and touchscr
121. i Wang and his colleagues work Wang Ding amp Jiang 2005 Their model is not meant for widgets but it also deals with public transportation They are oriented to public transport query as a transfer trip scheme route query and station query That isa wider range of public transport domain than ours thus also their ontology model is wider and a little bit different 85 Alena Kovarova FIIT STU Bratislava 6 2 2 Personalization To provide the user with the closest departure times the system has to have three inputs set choices line number stop direction Without personalization all of them have to be chosen by the user Working with the user model the system can estimate all three inputs User model The user model represents the user s behavior patterns In our case it is the repetitiveness of his her choices the three inputs number stop direction Since these are already a part of the domain model the user model is an overlay model of our domain model The user s inputs are continuously monitored and since these inputs can be time and location conditioned contextual each choice is also categorized e Repetitiveness o Line number o Line direction o Line stop e User context o Time of the request hour day and month o Place of the request Al of the user s choices are stored in their corresponding category e g in a local database The displayed content is refreshed either when the system is started
122. icely aligned To be as close as possible to this vision people came to the point of choosing a favorite newspaper favorite channels and programs favorite web pages simply said favorite information sources But this is still not enough Alena Kovarova FIIT STU Bratislava even within these favorite sources it is still necessary to search and to filter This simply reflects the fact that the majority of the available information sources are built for the masses and therefore do not have any implemented personalization personal adaptation features to serve the needs of each individual person People do a considerable part of such information retrieval conditionally or repetitively or even regularly This allows us to capture extract discover patterns store and finally use this user s behavior to estimate predict the user s needs Applying these predictions the user can obtain the needed information with a fewer number of actions or even without a single click Goal 2 To propose and verify a method which on the basis of observing the users actions stores his her choices and thus reduces the demands on the user s interaction when retrieving web information Category Human Machine Fit and Adaptation System adaptation customization and tailorability techniques 3 A lot of applications with wide functionality deal with the problem of how to offer this functionality How does the application let users know what they can d
123. id you receive a sufficient 20 Did you notice that you can a Did you use one of them at b Did you use at least one of C Did you use Ctrl or Shift 21 Did you like when editing the 22 Did you try to change the a Did you prefer to extend the 23 Did you experience during 24 Did you use the object erasing a Do you find it natural and 26 Did you notice the 27 Did you use the information 28 Was the information in it 29 Did you switch off the names Alena Kovarova FIIT STU Bratislava Special Interaction Approaches and their Impact on Usability Appendix C C 3 Cube Section Construction Method This task is working with 6 basic planes which define a cube H G ABCD bottom plane P EFGH up plane v BCGF right plane p ADHE left plane ABFE front plane 6 DCGH back plane x All of them together are called cube planes There are parallel pairs bottom and up right and left front and back The three set points define section plane There are three rules which are used to find the section Eu E 1 If two points of the section belong to one of the cube s plane connect them you get line intersection of the cube plane and the section plane and find intersections of this line and cube s edges sometimes it is useful to find all four of them where two belong to the cube s edges and two belong to extended cube s edges Alena Kovarova FIIT STU Bratislava
124. ified view MIS Quarterly 27 3 425 478 Wang J Ding Z amp Jiang C 2005 An Ontology based Public Transport Query System First International Conference on Semantics Knowledge and Grid 2005 pp 62 64 Beijing IEEE Wong J amp Hong J I 2007 Making mashups with marmite towards end user programming for the web Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems CHI 07 pp 1435 1444 New York NY USA ACM Yahoo 2011 Delicious Retrieved 2011 from The tastiest bookmarks on the web http www delicious com Yahoo 2011 Konfabulator Reference Manual Retrieved 2011 from Yahoo Widgets http manual widgets yahoo com 125 Special Interaction Approaches and their Impact on Usability Appendix A Appendix A A 1 Publications Publications with international recognition B Kovarova Alena Szalayova Lucia Semantics in the field of widgets a case study in public transportation departure notification In Semantics in Adaptive and Personalised Services Methods Tools and Applications M Wallace Ph Mylonas I Anagnostopoulos M Bielikova Eds Studies in Computational Intelligence Series 10 3 2010 Springer 2010 ISBN 978 3 642 11683 4 p 93 107 Szalayova Lucia Kovarova Alena Personalized Widget for Public Transportation Departures In Semantic Media Adaptation and Personalization Proceedings Third International Workshop Prague Czech Republic 15
125. ign should organize the UI purposefully in meaningful and useful ways based on clear consistent models that are apparent and recognizable to users Alena Kovarova FIIT STU Bratislava putting related things together and separating unrelated things differentiating dissimilar things and making similar things resemble one another The structure principle is concerned with overall UI architecture 2 The simplicity principle The design should make simple common tasks easy communicating clearly and simply in the user s own language and providing good shortcuts that are meaningfully related to longer procedures 3 The visibility principle The design should make all needed options and materials for a given task visible without distracting the user with extraneous or redundant information Good designs do not overwhelm users with alternatives or confuse with unneeded information 4 The feedback principle The design should keep users informed of actions or interpretations changes of state or condition and errors or exceptions that are relevant and of interest to the user through clear concise and unambiguous language familiar to users 5 The tolerance principle The design should be flexible and tolerant reducing the cost of mistakes and misuse by allowing undoing and redoing while also preventing errors wherever possible by tolerating varied inputs and sequences and by interpreting all reasonable actions 6 The reuse principle
126. ility of direct manipulation with 3D objects PT Zdan ch rovinn ch tvarov vyberte ten ktor je rezom kocky definovany vrcholmi DBFH Ak je 3 rozmern teleso pre at rovinou dostaneme rovn povrch wod ktor naz vame reztelesa i aa Cc m 6 ot anie ox 0010 070G prieh adnos tvorec O koso tvorec O ob nik O deltoid 00 03 00 16 F5 amp Figure 22 A lesson with 3D animation from Naucteviac sk portal Agemsoft 2011 4 3 4 Summary All of the mentioned solutions have its pros and cons Games typically uses following control elements e mouse e WASD keys e Shift Ctrl Alt and Space and other keys This makes them easy to control but they have very narrow range of interaction as regards the creation of new objects 3D editors have on the other hand wide range of tools for creation of a new and diverse object But since every editor use different key mouse control for it they provide the user with very good feedback by visualizing already selected mode tool object in form of e changed attributes of selected object color highlight vibration e changed shape of the selected object envelope see Figure 16 59 Alena Kovarova FIIT STU Bratislava e changed shape of mouse pointer e hints in textual form and they e show the preview of object during its creation when more than one click is needed e snap an object to another ob
127. in the night or in the dark foggy weather the system cannot autocalibrate itself calculate camera s azimuth and altitude so the user has to set it manually This input is critical for the accuracy of further calculations otherwise the system will provide wrong outputs 5 2 Interaction with Computer without Mouse and Keyboard Aforementioned interaction method has a drawback because it is not comfortable for the user to control the computer in the usual way 68 Special Interaction Approaches and their Impact on Usability Interaction with Distant Objects using mouse and keyboard For this reason we were looking for another way of interaction There are several possibilities We preferred devices that can control cursor movement on the screen pointing devices In previous analysis see section 3 3 1 Other Input and Output Devices we introduced several types of them but those more common and affordable mouse types i e require a pad And the others are more expensive such as an air mouse We also considered using a remote controller Laptop remote control is not commonly used Other option is a common remote TV controller but it communicates via different protocol Insam 2002 Cell phones using Bluetooth Wi Fi or IrDA Data protocol can serve as a remote controller as well Finally we decided to use a laser pointer and camera because they reduce the demands on the number of different interactive hardware devices The c
128. is what you get The term describes a system in which content displayed during editing appears very similar to the final output 13 Sometimes abbreviated from Window Icon Mouse and Pull down menu 22 Special Interaction Approaches and their Impact on Usability Interaction Approaches Direct manipulation This style involves the continuous representation of objects of interest and rapid reversible incremental actions and feedback that correspond at least loosely to the physical world It is represented by e g resizing a graphical shape such as a rectangle by dragging its corners or edges with a mouse but this style can be applied also to interfaces for blind or vision impaired users using a combination of tactile and sonic devices and software Drag and drop It is the action of clicking on a virtual object and dragging it to a different location or onto another virtual object to invoke many kinds of actions Gesture It is a movement of the hands face or other parts of the body which can be captured by camera or by an input device usually a mouse A gesture can represent a command for the system It is represented e g by mouse gestures multi touch gestures for touchscreens or face gestures Gestures are also Pointing Selection Point and click Drag and drop Rollover Menu traversal and Goal crossing Voice user interface It allows the user to interact through a voice speech platform in order to initiate an automat
129. ishes the primary target group to 17 19 years old students users 102 Special Interaction Approaches and their Impact on Usability Interaction Using Visual Help in Simple 3D Editors The secondary target group is the age range from 17 up within high school and technical university students since they come into contact with abstract 3D objects either some type of construction or more complex 3D objects visualization There are also other types of users the teacher and the system administrator but they are not relevant for our case study therefore no detailed description is included Environment description Dealing with educational 3D editor the environment can be either a class where each student works with a computer or it can be a home PC 7 2 Evaluation Our third goal was to verify whether different methods of visualized information increases usability of 3D graphical editors The main emphasis was on graphical hint for a hovered object which previews the consequence of object s selection To verify this we set following hypotheses 1 Some users will notice the keyboard shortcuts on the tool buttons and try to use them but they will prefer use the special keys for most often used tools especially those users who are more familiar with 3D editors 2 Users will appreciate the action preview during scene editing which visualize the consequence of their action 3 Users will like grouped buttons into modes w
130. istory of acceptance theories which summarize all personal and social influence factors These have to be considered in usability evaluations 2 1 Usability In human computer interaction or computer science usability is often explained as the user friendliness or ease of use of a given computer system The ISO 9241 11 standard defines usability as the extent to which a product can be used by specified users to achieve specified goals with effectiveness efficiency and satisfaction in a specified context of use There are several points of view which describe the conditions under which these qualities are achieved Special Interaction Approaches and their Impact on Usability Usability and Acceptance in Human computer Interaction Consultant Jakob Nielsen and computer science professor Ben Shneiderman state that the usability of a system predicts five factors of good system design Nielsen 1993 p 26 Shneiderman 1980 1 Learnability How easy is it for users to learn the system and accomplish basic tasks the first time they encounter the system 2 Efficiency Once users have learned to operate the system how quickly can they perform their tasks If the system is designed to replace a legacy system how does the new system affect task efficiency 3 Memorability After a period of non use how easy is it for users to return to the system and resume their tasks 4 Errors How likely are errors to occur within the system
131. ject or a grid Although 3D editors are powerful tools with many useful features they do not cover requirements for drawing procedures needed in geometric constructions The last category is educational 3D geometry editors Taking into account only the best ones Cabri 3D and Archimedes Geo3D one of their disadvantage is apart from Naucteviac sk that they offer full control to the user On the other hand the portal Naucteviac sk does not allow the teachers to create complex interactive tasks and educational lessons for students the teachers are dependent on developers The main advantage of this portal is its separation of teachers and students e students does not have the same rights for editing the scene as teachers which is often necessary Moreover only this portal provides e afeedback on the accuracy of the student s solution Some of mentioned solution used e shortcuts some not but without reading manual it was difficult for novice to use remember them The last issue is e infinite objects which make the user disoriented in the space 60 Special Interaction Approaches and their Impact on Usability Interaction with Distant Objects O Interaction with Distant Objects Our analysis has shown see section 4 1 that there are many different ways and situations when pointing is useful and it is often done by a laser pointer the dot which is captured by a camera This method works only if the object pointed at is in
132. ke the previous an editor for artists because the principle of objects is fundamentally different it uses the metaphor of shaping clay and is proprietary 25 For engineers CAD CAM rapid prototyping ol Alena Kovarova FIIT STU Bratislava Table 5 View and scene manipulation differences in five 3D graphical editors Google ZBRUSH SketchUp Blender 3ds Max Maya SketchUp Zbrush default number of 1 4 4 1 1 views Space bar translation Shift MMB MMB MM Alt MMB MM x amp y Alt LMB 9 the scene MM Shift MM axes and MM MW z axe Uo navigation c Koranon MMB MM cubeinright c MP MMB MM LMB MM the scene MM z up corner gt zooming ALT RMB Alt LMB the scene iiid Mid MM SN Alt MM click at changing 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 navigation Shift RMB view VOZ cube t b f n B MM c MM mouse movement LMB left mouse button MW rolling mouse wheel RMB right mouse button M MB middle mouse button pressed wheel if out of the object otherwise RMB instead of LMB Table 5 shows the fundamental differences in selected editors for viewing possible view choices as well as simple change of the scene orientation As it can be seen more technical editors provide 4 views while one view is more understandable for beginners Basic functions such as a function to control the view and the scene differ between editors too Table 6 shows differences in the use of object from insertion and manip
133. lated it also in seconds using the following times Kieras 2001 e K Keystroke Average skilled typist 55 wpm 0 2 sec e T n Type a sequence of n characters on a keyboard n K sec e P Point with mouse to a target on the display 1 1 sec e B Press or release mouse button 0 1 sec e BB Click mouse button 0 2 sec 92 Special Interaction Approaches and their Impact on Usability Interaction Support Based on User Model H Home hands to keyboard or mouse 0 4 sec M Mental act of routine thinking or perception 1 2 sec Table 7 The required number of interactions steps for retrieving time of data source http www dpb sk Type the address 1 departure http www ihmd sk Type the address 1 http www cp sk 3 click on a button click on a button D Without SOS ASOD TAOS O0 AS Por x H 5s i 257 02171272 53 Ch 1 drop down list 2 3 times drop down list 11 drop down list 1 times typing 1 click With 1 click on the click on a stop name on the confirmation bookmarked confirmation button button web site T 1 5 0 2 1 2 2 T 1 5 3 0 2 4 7 4 1 T 1 5 0 2 2 3 0 2 2 9 search field type the With number of a line 1 cookies 2 3 times click on a stop name drop down list 1 click bookmarked Does not provide 1 the user has to check on the confirmation site using neither cookies nor i the day and the time button cookies or search field u T 0 2
134. learn how to control the application AU 1 7 However only a half of them considered it helpful enough AU 2 0 A half of the users tried to turn off the objects labels AU 2 8 Summary The test results shows that the most experienced users were FT since they already worked with similar system GeoGebra and they also knew the construction method for cube cross section On the other side the less experienced with the least knowledge were HS in this group the most difficulties occurred Now coming back to our hypotheses according the questionnaires results the evaluation shows that 1 1 3 of users immediately and the second 1 3 at the very beginning of the application use noticed the shortcuts 39 of all users even tried to use it The most often used key was Ctrl This proves our first hypothesis 2 91 of all users agreed that it was great to have a preview during scene editing which visualized the consequence of their action This proves our second hypothesis 3 Since only one user from all three groups complained about unclear possibilities when not every function is visible in menu this can indirectly indicate that the rest of the users liked grouped buttons into modes where system automatically detects the user s intention 4 We did not clearly show that the users will appreciate the representation of infinite object in finite form because the only group that did not like it was group of FT which tested St
135. lected star hide information Closes the window with the information about the sky objects Increases the maximum visible magnitude by 0 5 Decreases the maximum visible magnitude by 0 5 Increases the display radius by 5 degrees Decreases the display radius by 5 degrees Executes the recognition of direction user s sight to stars Stops the recognition of direction user s sight to stars Displays the constellation lines in the image of night sky Hides constellation lines in the image of night sky Displays the names of the stars in the image of night sky Hides the names of the stars in the image of night sky Displays the constellation name Hides the names of constellations Table 9 Voice commands for icPoint left side panel which contains information Command start mouse recognition stop mouse recognition select item one select item nine about a sky object Meaning Executes the mouse cursor control Stops the mouse cursor Selects the object 1 9 in the window with information Alena Kovarova FIIT STU Bratislava Use this command to change selected expandable control expander at the same level Selects following object in the window with the information about the sky object Selects preceding object in the window with the information about the sky object Selects first object contained within current expander in the window with the information about the sky object Selects first object contained within current expander in
136. lena Kovarova FIIT STU Bratislava different types of entry Olsen amp Nielsen 2001 These interaction techniques consist of five events which the user can evoke by laser e LaserOn X Y e LaserOff X Y e LaserExtendedOff X Y e LaserMove X Y e LaserDwell X Y These techniques were later used and enhanced for different specific situations five of them are briefly introduced in the following paragraphs An Independent and Non Intrusive Laser Pointer Environment Control Device System A laser pointer can be used to control different things One is the control of a computer environment for the handicapped The system designed by Chavez et al looks for a laser spot position which is projected on the environment by using a laser pointer Handicapped people can thus select the device they want by using the laser pointer Once the laser spot is found the device is controlled by means of a domotic system using KNX architecture The system is able to recognize and act on the device that the handicapped person wants to use Chavez Vega Olague amp Montero 2008 The video camera used by the system is a household video camera with 800 000 pixels in the CCD The laser pointer used is a laser pointer class II with maximum power lt 1mW and a wave length of 630 680 nm Laser Pointer Tracking in Projector Augmented Architectural Environments Kurz et al presented a system that employs a custom built pan tilt zoom camera fo
137. leviate the user from continual time checking i e how many minutes remain to a departure we implemented also one extra feature sound The widget can announce the time of the next departure e g Next bus arrives at 12 00 That is in 3 minutes Of course this function can be turned off Figure 36 point 5 Finally every application should have a Help feature Figure 36 point 6 Our Help contains a user manual To make it more user friendly we gave the user the possibility to set up his her favorite locations manually These predefined locations adjust the widget from the first touch and eliminate the cold start effect The user can choose several lines for every location with corresponding stops and directions which he she usually travels with for example from home school or office The user can name it e g school gt home route The output is the same as in the basic functionality only the upcoming five departures differ in the line number and the name of stop Departures are ordered in the usual way according to time of departure see Figure 37 90 Special Interaction Approaches and their Impact on Usability Interaction Support Based on User Model doma gt praca 201 Hlavn stanica 08 35 75 Kadn rova 08 39 202 Rajsk 08 41 201 Hlavn stanica 08 45 202 Rajsk 08 51 data copyright http FAP TTY i 1 Figure 37 Widget setup for multiple lines within one route in Slovak language
138. ly as a documentation but also as different types of hints e g tooltips e Visible system status via status bar type of pointer or by change of the basic characteristic of the activated object e Minimize user memory load use also icons and symbols instead of simple text e Flexibility and efficiency of use provide shortcuts and hotkeys function keys accesskeys toolbars which allow the user to accommodate the application by setting create automatic adaptation personalisation e Match between system and the real world allow snapping aligning and different gestures There are many other interface characteristics but we listed especially those that we dealt with during our research 3 3 Hardware Supported Interaction To understand exactly how interaction works and what the pros and cons of input and output devices are i e what is intuitive about them and what is not or how they restrict users it is necessary to look at them more closely Special attention is paid to standard devices since these are exactly our target devices Keyboard Many computer like devices have a keyboard It is an inseparable part of our personal computers and together with the mouse a routine input device There are different types of keyboards but most of them have about 100 keys usually in 5 rows For special interaction needs such as shortcuts the keys Shift Alt and Ctrl are used in combination with other keys There is no clear pa
139. mepad there are still many games and players staying with the traditional mouse and keyboard control It does not matter if it is FPS adventure role playing games known as RPGs construction and management simulation games life simulations vehicle simulation strategy or any other genre the players are used to a very similar game controls as it was 15 years ago Mouse movements can change the view point a movement direction or simply moves the mouse focus This can be often performed in combination with the keyboard keys WASD and or arrow keys The left mouse button is mapped to the most often used action to run an active object to fire a weapon to select an object etc if there is already a selected object it can designate an application object which is similar to drag and drop style The right mouse button is often mapped to the second mode of control which is not as often used as the one on the left button or it simply provides a context menu The wheel is often used for scrolling in selected menu or for zooming in and out The other keys on the keyboard can be mapped to other game functions which function is 50 Special Interaction Approaches and their Impact on Usability Current Interaction Approaches mapped to which key is dependent on how often the function is used and how far the key is from a basic hand position usual basic hand position is on WASD keys and therefore Q E R F Shift Ctrl Alt and Space keys are
140. mmary Lowering the Demands on the User s Interaction 13 15 16 New 16 19 21 22 23 24 27 29 29 30 31 33 38 40 41 4 2 1 Fast Information Retrieval Through Web Browsers 4 2 2 Widgets and Gadgets 4 2 3 Summary Interaction in 3D Environments Using a Typical PC 4 3 1 3D games 4 3 2 Commercial and Free 3D Graphic Editors 4 3 3 Educational 3D Editors 4 3 4 Summary Interaction with Distant Objects xvii 42 43 46 48 48 ol o4 59 61 9 1 The User s Line of Sight Calculation 61 SN Interaction with Computer without Mouse and Keyboard 68 9 2 1 Laser Pointer as a Mouse 69 9 2 2 Voice Commands 71 5 3 Object of Interest Identification 71 9 3 1 Application Domain 71 DO Finding Sky Objects 72 9 3 3 Information about Sky Objects 74 9 4 Evaluation 75 9 4 1 System Description T5 5 4 2 Experiment 78 5 5 Discussion 19 6 Interaction Support Based on User Model 81 6 1 Reducing the Number of the User s Interaction Steps81 6 2 Personalized Information Retrieving for Public Transportation Departures 83 6 2 1 Application Domain 83 6 2 2 Personalization 86 6 3 Evaluation 88 6 3 1 system Description 88 6 3 2 Experiment 92 6 4 Discussion 96 T Interaction Using Visual Help in Simple 3D Editors 98 7 1 Improvements of GUI Elements 98 7 1 1 Application Domain 101 17 2 Evaluation 103 7 2 1 oystems Descriptions 103 7 2 2 Experiments 106 7 2 3 Test results 109 7 3 Discussion 112 8 Conclusions 114 References 118
141. mportant part of the presented results has been published at international venues endorsed by ACM and IEEE in 2008 and 2010 see Appendix A section A 1 Publications CM ER Presently we participate in the project iTransit which provides GIEEE the closest departures and even more functionality iTransit already works with the user s context time and position which creates a comfortable interface E g after one click the user can get the required information and that makes this solution comparable with ours We plan to implement also a user model for repetitiveness and maybe also as a widget for different mobile operating systems Since any widget can be personalized it can adjust itself to best serve the user and thus making the retrieving of information more comfortable and quicker In our case this adaptation is achieved by monitoring the user s choices and storing the number of selections for each choice in the user model This method can be applied in any other application domain that deals with regular departures e g logistics or catering It can be also used in any application domain where repetitiveness is present e g automatic functionality invocation if the application notices a sequence which the user is repetitively calling Goal 3 Verification of increasing usability resulting from different methods of visualized information in 3D graphical editors The main emphasis was on graphical hint for a hovered object which
142. muth of is the angle of the object around the horizon usually measured from the north point towards the east in this work we mark it with Greek letter a 29 The altitude sometimes referred to as elevation is the angle between the object and the observer s plane local horizon in this work we mark it with Greek letter e 30 Since web cameras can be turned only in horizontal and vertical direction we do not need any other correction for camera view angle such as rotation around its own axis 65 Alena Kovarova FIIT STU Bratislava need to know the position of the glass pane plane u relative to the ground plane v and the distance h between the glass pane and the user alternatively the camera The natural position for glass is either vertical or horizontal The following equations work with a horizontal glass pane ullv but for a vertical glass pane calculations are very similar Using Cartesian coordinate system with origin in U we have UC d d h d h 0 U Cartesian A ds Ay a eur Q AU E41 mne Q Ac Eac U Cartesian U horizontal C horizontal Ay TAy COS Ay COS QA y Tac COS Eac COS Ac dh dy Tau COS E4 y S N d4 y Tac COS Ea c sin a c dyh 4 az Nay SINEgy Tac sln c 0 If A u then az h In our captured image there are two dots two clusters of pixels one where the beam crosses the glass point B p which is projection of point B u and one natural refl
143. n UK Pearson Education Limited Diz O V 2010 Blender 2 5 Basic Interface Retrieved 2011 from www blendnuts com http www blendtuts com 2010 06 blender 25 interface html Dumitrascu S 2000 2011 Geometria Interactive Geometry Software Retrieved 2011 from http www geocentral net geometria en Fishbein M amp Ajzen I 1975 Belief Attitude Intention and Behavior An Introduction to Theory and Research Reading MA Addison Wesley Fishkin K P 2004 September A taxonomy for and analysis of tangible interfaces Personal and Ubiquitous Computing 8 5 347 358 Gates M 2009 Stellarium User Guide Retrieved 2011 from Stellarium http downloads sourceforge net stellarium stellarium user guide 0 10 2 1 pdf Goebel A 2008 Documentation for Archimedes Geo3D Retrieved July 14 2011 from raumgeometrie de http raumgeometrie de Golden Oct Computer Network Service Co Ltd 2011 Mathsay Retrieved 2011 from http www mathsay com Google 2009 Google Desktop Retrieved 2011 from http desktop google com Google 2011 New to Google SketchUp Video Tutorials Retrieved 2011 from http sketchup google com intl en training videos new to gsu html Hajduk A Hajdukov M Chochol D Pa u P Pittich E Porub an V et al 1987 Encyclopedia of Astronomy Encyklop dia astron mie Bratislava Obzor Han M amp Park P 2009 A study of interface desi
144. n IIT SRC 2009 Ing J n Gregor Solid geometry and virtual reality may 2009 presented on SCO 2009 Ing Marek Pol k Forms of interaction in virtual reality usable in the process of education may 2010 Special Interaction Approaches and their Impact on Usability Appendix A presented on SCCG 2011 Ing Michal Draho Interaction in Virtual Reality Control may 2010 Ing Viktor M sz ros Application for supporting common learning methods in classrooms with use of indirect control may 2011 Ing Samuel Stevanak Interactive Learning Using Mobile Device may 2011 Ing R bert Sopko Personalized Interactive Education through Mobile Devices may 2011 Ing Peter Voron k Intelligent Image Resizing may 2011 Ing Michal Sokolsky Three Dimensional World of Solid Geometry may 2011 presented on ICL2011 Team Projects Virtual FIIT Filip Hlav ek Jan Hudec Pavol Me an k Matus Novotny Michal Pal ek Rastislav Pe k Ivan Polko 2011 presented on IIT SRC 2011 TP Cup 2011 274 place Reaserchers night 2011 Virtual FIIT ubom r Lackovi Martin Mihalovi Pavol Nagl Marcela Polerecka Martin Uhlik Peter Voron k 2010 presented on Reaserchers night 2010 Interactive Weather Desktop Prototype au k Tom Dankov ik Peter jakubec Martin Jakub ci Lubos Ukrop Martin Zachar 2009 presented on IIT SRC 2009 won The Czech ACM Chapter Prize Reaserchers night 2009 Bloodlezz S
145. n and had to find out themselves how to control the application They had three tasks of different difficulty including the most complex one They were not limited in time but majority of them did not spent with testing more than 5 minutes After the testing they filled the questionnaires for the result see next subsection These differ from the previous ones only The most complex task is when points on three non neighboring edges of the cube 107 Alena Kovarova FIIT STU Bratislava in detail the questions were accommodated to InteractiveCube prototype functionality Questionnaires The feedback questionnaire was divided into four areas e Look amp Feel how do they like it e Arrangement a good arrangement of elements is important so the user recognizes the features of the program without the assistance and it has to be easy to navigate e Controls they are the most important part from the user s point of view If application has problematic controls or the user does not know or understand how to control it it has lost every chance for further using e Status Bar its aim was to provide on going information and application feedback to the user To make it more noticeable the status bar flashed every time its information was changed For this reason one of the questions was if the users noticed this flashing noticed new information and whether this flashing does not disturb them in their work The majority of
146. n combined with site specific browsers An appropriately trained personalized web based system can often display the information the user is looking for directly on the first page Such personalization and adaptation is obtained via well designed user models The user model is a reflection of users understanding of a product It includes how they perceive the objects and activities involved in the operation of the product Shubin 1999 It contains all information that the system knows about the user It is generally initialized either with default values or by querying the user and then maintained kept updated by the system Users may be able to review and edit their profile User actions and events at various conceptual levels such as mouse clicks task completion and requests for help are analyzed an analysis engine combines the user model with other models of the system to derive new facts about the user and update the user model with the derived facts or initiate an action in the application such as interrupting the user with a suggestion The analysis engine also responds to queries from the application Kules 2000 4 2 2 Widgets and Gadgets Without implementing its own engine or a robust system achance for reducing interaction steps can be found in widgets sometimes also called gadgets or mashups Mashups are services that combine two or more information sources to create a new service Tuchinda et al specify four tasks i
147. n dependency means to group different IP addresses according e g subnet mask 255 255 255 0 or to group different GPS positions if their distance is less than e g 250 meters To reduce the user s interaction steps the system has to have algorithms which set what and when the interface has to display and how to solve the situation when the displayed content is not correct i e the user wanted other information the system estimation was wrong Using the user s behavior patterns repetitiveness whether with time and location dependency or without it the algorithm follows these rules 1 What to display Primary content the most often used choice it can be time and location dependent 2 When to display Widget can run itself according to the time dependency 3 Howto solve incorrect adaptation Give choices o What choices to offer Secondary content the next most often choice s it can be time location and previous choices dependent 6 2 Personalized Information Retrieving for Public Transportation Departures To add more details about our method the domain has to be set The important part in this is to create a model of this domain and then to enrich it by the user model This gives us the overlay model Brusilovsky amp Millan 2007 In the following paragraphs the domain itself as well as the domain and user model is described 6 2 1 Application Domain For evaluation of our method we chose the domain of public
148. n implementation is moving an object under the pointer but sometimes it can move the pointer itself e g within a menu Working within a 3D space the wheel is often used for zooming in and zooming out The intuition of this indirect control can be found in moving zooming an object under the pointer resembling turning the wheel on the mouse Similar but with direct control more intuitive can be found e g on iPhones the UlPicker element which is a space saving version of combo box for a small touchscreen It looks as a wheel and can be turned by the index finger Monitor Whereas the human sight is the best sense a monitor as an output device representing the seeing vision modality has a very January 18 important role in the interaction Again as well as with the keyboard and the mouse it is important to make things as close as possible to the reality and if it is not possible it should be the most intuitive This means that every often used function and reaction of an application has to be easy to find easy to determine easy to understand For this purpose there are GUI elements such as menus toolbars or ribbons with icon buttons status bars and so on These are usual and 25 Alena Kovarova FIIT STU Bratislava standardized ways to offer the user the control he she needs more about UIs in section 3 1 Interaction Styles Sometimes it is not enough and different companies design their own new way of e g
149. n provider if there is an Internet connection and e cleans up the local database due to performance optimization the Task Manager will erase the least selected lines out of the database after a certain period The Downloader downloads from the designated web page therefore an Internet connection is needed when the user wants to download new time tables or a new calendar The input of the Parser is raw data HTML code of a web page which is parsed and stored in the corresponding columns of the local database wherefrom it will be loaded for the user as requested The physical data model of the widget local database with its description can be found in Appendix B the section B 3 Widget For other implementation details see our paper Kovarova amp Szalayova semantics in the Field of Widgets A Case Study in Public Transportation Departure Notifications 2010 6 3 2 Experiment Usability Inspection To count the number of interaction steps or more precisely the time required to perform these steps we used the KLM Keystroke Level Model see end of section 2 1 4 To compare our solution we took three different web sites which provide the same information in different ways All of these ways are typical for retrieving the information requiring selections and are very similar to all other solutions dealing with our type of problem In the following table Table 7 we summarized all necessary interactions For a better idea we calcu
150. n the construction of mashups Tuchinda Szekely amp Knoblock 2008 i data retrieval ii source modeling iii data cleaning iv data integration Mashups are currently widely researched and much research is being carried out especially in order to facilitate the creation of mashups Wong amp Hong 2007 43 Alena Kovarova FIIT STU Bratislava A widget on the other hand encapsulates a single information source and is responsible for the three first tasks i ii and iii Thus widgets are not some elements that help the user to navigate or to orientate or to pick a choice but they are single purpose mini web Japplications which typically have a minimal size and are dedicated to bring a simple solution based effect while a user is working with a computer Widget functionality is oriented to one specific goal to display very specific information They can be of two types either for the web web widgets or for the desktop widgets Caceres 2008 The latter ones can be used for computer as well as mobile devices Research has already been done on their usability Han amp Park 2009 their adaptive managing Bostr m et al 2008 and the web widgets were used also to enable the semantic web M kel et al 2007 We focused on the desktop widget for computers which can be freely located and easily combined within the desktop The most often used engines for widgets or gadgets are e Konfabulator Yahoo 201
151. ne with the laser beam We needed to figure out where the second point the user s eye is We cannot take its position as static while everyone moves his her head frequently and the position of the eye is changing However thanks to the positioning of the laser pointer close to the eye we can just look for this source of light see Figure 24 point U 62 Special Interaction Approaches and their Impact on Usability Interaction with Distant Objects Laser pointer attached to head Invisible laser bea Object of interest gt gt gt gt gt gt gt gt gt gt gt gt Visible dot place where beam crosses the glass 9 P m 2 x 9 7 e Glass pane e g 50x50cm Place where the beam s reflection is visible Fixed camera with its angle of view Figure 24 An example user and devices location within user s space and environment In this case we used a feature of all common laser pointers they emit not just the one directional light as a real laser might do A big portion of the emitted light stays non directional so there appears another point on the plane of projection as its natural reflection see Figure 24 point R points R and B are easily distinguishable because R has less red and more white color Here accor
152. nitial manual setup This recording together with subsequent estimation creates an adaptable interface which displays contextual information in a noninvasive manner user input personalize GUI monitor evaluate update find user model pattern Figure 33 Overview of our personalized interaction approach The above mentioned patterns are domain dependent but the most often observed and determined are those that are repetitive and often correlate with time and location Here repetitiveness represents user preferences and the time together with the location represents the user s context We propose to use them in the following way e Repetitiveness the system displays the most often used user s choice e User context o Time the system finds the time dependency in repetitiveness for example when the user is searching for specific information every Monday the displayed content can be time dependent o Location the system finds the location dependency in repetitiveness for example when the user is often searching 82 Special Interaction Approaches and their Impact on Usability Interaction Support Based on User Model for specific information while connected to the Internet with a certain IP address or at a certain GPS location the displayed content can be location dependent Finding the time dependency means to have categories for each hour each day in a week or in a month and each month in a year Locatio
153. nt pointer shape context menus menus etc To improve some of them we suggested the following e To display keyboard shortcuts directly on tool buttons e To create and display special keys for most often used tools e To show an action preview during scene editing preview the consequence of the action e To reduce the number of buttons in a toolbar e To show an infinite object in a finite form with possibility of their extending or shortening e To rotate the scene in case of overlapping objects when adding snapping a new object to an existing overlapped one 98 Special Interaction Approaches and their Impact on Usability Interaction Using Visual Help in Simple 3D Editors Of course we also suggest keeping already used standards and some habits which users can have from similar applications even if these habits are not standard The most interesting for us are e To display hints in tooltips an information panel and or a status bar short information on the next possible action executable current position of the mouse especially when the user hovers over an object e To allow using the mouse to perform most of operations e To change visual feedback attributes of selected hovered object color highlight or vibration e To change a shape of the mouse pointer to indicate the type of a mode action e To show the preview of an object during its creation when more than one click is needed for example rubber ben
154. nts had limited time to try to solve the tasks After it they received and filled feedback questionnaire for the result see next subsection Future teachers Stereo3D The second group was future teachers students of bachelor degree at the Faculty of Mathematics Physics and Informatics Comenius University in Bratislava 11 students The method of testing them was similar However since they have sufficient knowledge on cube sections they just received information on how to load a task to our application The prepared tasks were more complicated than in previous group Their difficulty was incrementally increasing One of the aims of the experiment was to test a comprehensiveness of our UI we let the students to work with application from the teacher s perspective i e they were not provided with further information they had to find out themselves how to control the application Students had a few minutes to test applications and examples of tasks and subsequently received the same questionnaires as the high school students for the result see next subsection Average users InteractiveCube The third group of testers belongs to the secondary target group of users 23 testers Majority of our testers had either mathematical or computer science education and most of them spend on computer more than 16 hours per day They were on average 30 years old The method of testing was again similar Testers did not receive any instructio
155. o invent and to implement a better interaction in any possible way Our focus was mainly on the educational domain where we tried to create a more intuitive natural interaction We identified three key areas within the human computer interaction field where we applied our effort 1 Cover new domains of interaction by using standard equipment in new ways 2 Explore a specific type of domain which has the potential of reducing the number of interaction steps 3 Apply already known principles from one domain to another 1 such as a mouse a keyboard loudspeakers or headphones a microphone or a headset and a web camera Special Interaction Approaches and their Impact on Usability Introduction We tried to determine which application domain is optimal for each of the specified areas We preferred educational areas Finally we chose the following domains and their corresponding goals according to SIGCHI categorization Hewett et al 2009 1 There are many different domains where people do not use a computer because it is difficult to transfer the user s tasks to the computer One of these domains is the situation where the user wants to point at a remote object off the computer screen as input information for the computer An example of this situation is a man standing on an elevated site above the town taking his her computer pointing to a building and wanting to know hear its name or possibly any other relevant information abou
156. o with an already selected tool or mode The often observed behavior is that the users try to use it By trial and error they discover its functionality especially if they are not motivated to read a manual or even tooltips and they do not have experience with anything similar Although it can be a very useful way of learning to control the application we consider it slow We suggested visualizing each type of information in different more or less known forms A new idea on what to visualize and how can be found for example in Microsoft Word 2007 where after hovering over a format a preview of reformatted text appears and on rollout it restores to the original formatting This means that the consequence of a selection is visible before the selection itself This idea can be used also in other domains We chose the domain of graphic editors where to create a visible consequence is not as trivial as with formatting the text Such a solution has potential to be used in educational applications dealing with technical drawing Goal 3 To verify whether different methods of visualized information increase usability of 3D graphical editors with emphasis on graphical hint for a hovered object within a graphic editor where this suggestion visualizes the consequence of object s selection Special Interaction Approaches and their Impact on Usability Introduction This goal belongs to the following SIGCHI category Dialogue Techniques Dialogue Out
157. olling icPoint by a laser pointer panel on the right side contains application settings Minimal hardware icPoint requirements Portable computer notebook laptop USB camera or IP camera with minimum resolution 640x480 The better cam is the one with longer exposure the camera field of view or its type has to be known Laser pointer fixed in frame in headset in frame of glasses next to right eye Transparent material glass and legs for its stabilization conference table with glass surface is easily available at home 36 For minimal software requirements check Appendix B Minimal software requirements 76 Special Interaction Approaches and their Impact on Usability Interaction with Distant Objects e Compass spirit level ruler and known GPS position increase the accuracy An example of hardware usage is visible on Figure 31 and Figure 32 compass camera notebook y Figure 31 Hardware usage for icPoint comfortable usage of table with transparent glass laser pointer camera PN D Figure 32 Outdoor interaction with remote objects a user is lying under a glass table and aiming a laser beam at a star Alena Kovarova FIIT STU Bratislava 5 4 2 Experiment We tested our pilot project during the whole process of its development This helped us to determine deficiencies in the actual control or computational algorithms and then fix them The final test involves our development team mem
158. ovarova FIIT STU Bratislava Raskin J 2000 The humane interface new directions for designing interactive systems New York NY USA ACM Press Addison Wesley Publishing Co Reiterova M amp Grmanova A 2005 U ebn osvnovy pre stredn odborn koly tvorro n t dium Matematika CD 2004 16970 33680 1 092 Curricula for secondary vocational school four year study Mathematics Retrieved 2011 from U ebn osnovy predmetov pre skupinu tudijn ch odborov SOU 4 ro n http www2 statpedu sk buxus docs Pedagogicke dokumenty SOU 4 ucebne osnovy UO SOU 4 matematika pdf Rogers E M 1995 Diffusion of Innovations 4th ed New York Free Press Sauro J 2010 March 8 Why you only need to test with five users Retrieved February 2 2011 from Measuring Usability http www measuringusability com five users php Shizuki B Hisamatsu T Takahashi S amp Tanaka J 2006 Laser pointer interaction techniques using peripheral areas of screens Proceedings of the working conference on Advanced visual interfaces AVI 06 pp 95 98 New York NY USA ACM Shneiderman B 1980 Software psychology Human factors in computer and information systems Winthrop computer systems series Winthrop Publishers Shneiderman B 1998 Designing the user Interface Strategies for Effective Human Computer Interaction 3rd ed USA Addison Wesley Longman Inc Shubin H 1999 User models as a
159. p A Pmax tan Pr 27 The size of this rectangle is dependent on distance CM dp which is not set So we set the distance d so that the size of rectangle e g in cm was the same as the resolution of camera image in pixels This solution also makes further conversions between the image and rectangle easier We assume the pixel width is the same as its height 64 Special Interaction Approaches and their Impact on Usability Interaction with Distant Objects 2a h tana TM 1 tan mar p 2a Ymax tan mE 1 tan f i Cz where a is the size of the angle ZCA M and e is the size of the angle ZCApyMo Now we need to recalculate all these angles into world spherical coordinates with origin in C camera horizontal coordinate system see Figure 26 y to the East Figure 26 Horizontal coordinate system with origin in C To do so we need to know the view angle of the camera its azimuth and altitude a and amp 2 9 which gives us the point A in the world coordinates A r c Ga c Eac Chorizontal Where Q AC t4 T Qc and EAC SA ec These can be transformed using equation 2 in 2a h dac Qa ac tan 1 tan mar ac i Wo 2 3 2a V io TB ee tan le tan max Ec h 2 Final calculation is a conversion of origin of world horizontal coordinate system from C camera to U user see Figure 24 Here we 28 The azi
160. p style others prefer to click We cannot implement only one style that suits everyone An interesting result of testing however was that the users who use the mouse along the keyboard shortcut keys switch keys learned very quickly to use the temporary switch mapped on Ctrl key Such switch can be used in any application There is only a question how to let the users know about this feature how to motivate them to try it and then use it regularly A problem may occur only when the user would want to switch between more than two modes options But such situation occurs very rarely usually with the experts Unlike the other similar applications see section 4 3 3 in our prototype we have two above mentioned unique features which accelerate and facilitate the users interaction with 3D editor for solid geometry Moreover according to the math teachers the most valuable feature is the automatic correctness evaluation ability which they never experienced in previous applications An important part of the presented results will be published and presented at Interaction Collaborative Learning Conference in Piestany on September 2224 2011 117 Alena Kovarova FIIT STU Bratislava References 3D Realms 1996 Duke Nukem 3D Retrieved 2011 from 3D Realms http www 3drealms com duke3d Agemsoft 2011 Naucteviac sk Retrieved 2011 from Plan ta vedomosti The Planet of Knowledge http www naucteviac sk Ahlborn B A
161. pect the design by means of broad guidelines for good practice A well known set of heuristics is the one proposed by Nielsen Nielsen amp Molich 1990 e Visibility of system status provide feedback e Match between system and the real world speak the user s language e User control and freedom provide clearly marked exits including undo and redo e Consistency and standards e Error prevention e Recognition rather than recall minimize user memory load by making objects actions and options visible e Flexibility and efficiency of use provide short cuts e Aesthetic and minimalist design simple and natural dialogue e Help users recognize diagnose and recover from errors e Help and documentation Cognitive Walkthrough In cognitive walkthrough Lewis Polson Wharton amp Rieman 1990 an analyst goes through all of the possible courses of action the user might take and at each of them analyzes these three points Often considered as one of Discount Usability Technique 5 Can be found also at Nielsen s web page http www useit com papers heuristic heuristic list html 10 Special Interaction Approaches and their Impact on Usability Usability and Acceptance in Human computer Interaction e Will the correct action be made sufficiently evident to users e Will users connect the correct action s description with what they are trying to achieve e Will users interpret the system s response to the chosen action
162. portal is part of the Plan ta vedomost project which Slovak Ministry of Education plans to introduce in Slovak schools Slovak Ministry of Education 2011 We focused on the part dedicated to 2D and 3D geometry especially its interactive animations Our experience with these animations is summarized in following lines o Os dfe A fw t N y F ove uz ot CAN FEES 299eaco e e e 090980 eee Y Figure 21 Screenshots of two tasks with interactive 2D scene from Naucteviac sk portal Agemsoft 201 1 Apart from the fact that it is all in Slovak the simulations of 2D drawing seem very intuitive because they display the real rulers the straight one the triangular one and the protractor compasses are not so well depicted see Figure 21 The process of interactive drawing tries o8 Special Interaction Approaches and their Impact on Usability Current Interaction Approaches to have traditional properties such as snapping the point to the right position but it is not very natural it results in frequent false clicks and there is only one way how to correct it to delete the object and try to click it again This feature is very user unfriendly This portal contains 3D animations which can be played and stopped as a video see left side of Figure 22 or in form of rotating object the user can rotate it using 6 rotation buttons no drag and drop implemented see right side of Figure 22 There is no possib
163. pplication are met The second is derived from social psychology where different theories discuss what motivates or hinder users to use a new technology Quantitative data help to determine accuracy speed and recall E g number of mistakes the user made time at which the task was performed time that something was remembered 10 Oualitative data testers describe something which can be either recorded or can be gathered through questionnaires with both multiple choice and open ended questions 15 Alena Kovarova FIIT STU Bratislava Did it meet requirements on specification Are we willing to use it Application Software engineers Figure 1 Two views on acceptance 2 2 1 User Acceptance Testing Acceptance tests are black box system tests It is a process to obtain confirmation that a system meets mutually agreed upon requirements Each acceptance test represents some expected result from the system e g according to the each defined use case Customers are responsible for verifying the correctness of the acceptance tests It is usually one of the final stages of a project and often occurs before a client or customer accepts the new system This testing process is similar to functional testing The difference is the functional testing can be handled by self executing scripts or test programs in simulated environment but acceptance testing must be carried out directly by users in their environment In both cas
164. puts Screen layout issues The work is organized as follows In chapter 2 we provide an introduction to the topic of usability and in chapter 3 to interaction approaches These two chapters contain brief definitions or descriptions of concepts used in our research Chapter 4 is devoted to related work connected to all three goals after which follow chapters 5 6 and 7 each focusing on one of our goals their description and evaluation The work is closed in chapter 8 where we summarize our contributions and outline future work Alena Kovarova FIIT STU Bratislava 2 Usability and Acceptance in Human computer Interaction When working with human computer interaction whether it is proposing an unusual way of control eliminating the number of interaction steps or a more suggestive user interface all these approaches deal with the question Will users like this What exactly the word like means and how it depends on other factors is a matter of usability and acceptance In the next sections three basic characteristics of usability are cited followed by a list of usability evaluation methods Only the most often used or the ones we have used in our experiments are briefly explained These and other methods are presented in the form of two comparative tables from which their differences can be seen A later subsection presents Nielsen s explanation of Why you only need to test with five users The chapter ends with a brief h
165. px Special Interaction Approaches and their Impact on Usability Appendix B some functions several possibilities They were collected during different phases of our testing where users were involved Table 8 Voice commands for basic icPoint screen Command mouse down close application quit application update background update display update sky use current sight show stars next star further star previous star closer star show object information show star information show constellation information increase magnitude decrease magnitude increase view angle decrease view angle start sky recognition stop sky recognition show constellation lines hide constellation lines show star names hide star names show constellation names hide constellation names Meaning Raises the mouse left button click event Ends the application This command is important for correct image recognition Use it when the hardware is positioned properly and you are not pointing anywhere using the laser pointer it is turned off Use F5 key to do the same job Redraws the celestial sphere in the application Selects next further from the center of the screen sky object Selects the preceding closer to the center of the screen object Displays the window containing information about the selected sky objects star or planet Displays the window containing information about the constellation that contains currently se
166. questions offer answers scaled to a scale from 1 to 5 grade where 1 usually means the fulfilled expectation Some of the questions offer only the yes no answer which we mapped on 1 and 5 If there was a different answer pair we mapped it on 2 and 4 For the rare question of type What would you change there was an empty field no numerical expression for this type The full text of the questionnaire can be found in Appendix C section C 1 Feedback questionnaires C 1 Feedback questionnaire and graph of answers in section C 2 Graph Since our graph is not easy to read we decided to express the test results in quickly understandable form we represent each answer vj by value calculated as weighted average of all responses in test group mila 208r j where vj is value of f answer for the whole test group i goes through all possible grades that can have a single answer from a single tester and aij is the number of testers which graded their j answer by the grade i Since 1 goes from 1 to 5 the closer is the value vj to 1 the result is better closer to 5 the worse For easier handling we have created for our three groups following abbreviations High school students HS future teachers FT average users AU 108 Special Interaction Approaches and their Impact on Usability Interaction Using Visual Help in Simple 3D Editors 7 2 3 Test results Our prototypes were accepted positively The users considered it
167. r laser pointer tracking in arbitrary real environments Kurz Hantsch Grobe Schiewe amp Bimber 2007 Once placed in a room it carries out a fully automatic selfregistration registrations of projectors and sampling of surface parameters such as geometry and reflectivity After these steps it can be used for tracking a laser spot on the surface as well as an LED marker in 3D space using inter playing fish eye context and controllable detail cameras 34 Special Interaction Approaches and their Impact on Usability Current Interaction Approaches Figure 8 Basic object manipulation techniques such as translation a and rotation b are illustrated in long exposure photographs Augmentation can be projector based a c or via video see through d These application examples show basic augmentations of building structures a b d distance measurements c and material color simulations c Kurz Hantsch Grobe Schiewe amp Bimber 2007 The captured surface information can be used for masking out areas that are problematic for laser pointer tracking and for guiding geometric and radiometric image correction techniques that enable a projector based augmentation on arbitrary surfaces Figure 8 The system as a distributed software framework couples laser pointer tracking for interaction projector based augmented reality AR as well as video see through AR for visualizations with the domain specific functionality of existin
168. ral control defined as one s perception of the difficulty of performing a behavior including required effort and resources Another extension of TRA is the Technology Acceptance Model created by Davis Davis 1989 Davis Bagozzi amp Warshaw 1989 where he suggests that a person s intention to use a system is determined by perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use Innovation Diffusion Theory proposed by Rogers Rogers 1995 suggested that the rate of adoption of innovations is impacted by five factors relative advantage compatibility trialability observability and complexity This list was later expanded in the context of IS research to include voluntariness image ease of use result demonstrability and visibility Moore amp Benbasat 1991 All these theories and several others were unified by Venkatesh et al Venkatesh Morris Davis amp Davis 2003 in Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology UTAUT Venkatesh et al extend Davis s model to take into account four new constructs performance expectancy effort expectancy social influence and facilitating conditions that bear significant influence on behavioral intention and ultimately usage of technologies The variables of gender age experience and voluntariness of use are posited to mediate the impact of the four key constructs on usage intention and behavior as shown on Figure 2 17 Alena Kovarova FIIT STU Bratislava Age Performance Expe
169. rallel in the real word to the keyboard gt it is unintuitive 24 Special Interaction Approaches and their Impact on Usability Interaction Approaches Mouse A basic type of mouse has two buttons and one wheel There also exist many other types of mice with more buttons to which users can map different functions but they are not in our focus Mice are very valuable devices that unlike keyboards are very close to a human type of interaction people are used to pointing to things with their index f finger and to the same finger left button of mouse is mapped selection N as an indirect kind of control Only direct control is more intuitive which is present in e g touch screens but mice have a higher degree of precision The second valuable mouse property is mouse movements consistently mapped to pointer movements It is again indirect control but still intuitive If there is a 3D workspace mouse movements can be mapped differently which is described in detail in section 4 3 1 on page 48 The next mouse function is right click done by the middle finger It is usually mapped to a context menu which is connected to selection and it often simplifies the user s interaction There is no parallel with right click in the real world unintuitive so it has to be learned but it is also a standard so many users already know this feature The mouse wheel usually serves for moving focus within an object of interest The most commo
170. reviously we propose writing this special key directly on the tool button as a label which lowers demands on long term memory and helps beginners to use it Utilizing experiences from games see subsection 4 3 1 we experimented with Shift Ctrl Alt and Space keys To show an action preview during scene editing This idea can be found for example in Microsoft Word 2007 where after hovering over a new format a preview of reformatted text appears and on rollout the original formatting is restored This means that the consequence of a selection is visible before the selection itself We transfer this idea to 3D editor where a preview of an editing action the system visualize the consequence of the possible action will appear on roll over the object and disappear on its rollout This creates a visual hint for possible user s action click To reduce the number of buttons in toolbar Working with 3D graphical educational editors there is basic set of functionalities tools The more complex is the program the more buttons tools there are Some of these tools can be grouped in the case when the system can automatically differentiate the correct element of the group For example such a group can be adding a parallel line a perpendicular line a parallel segment a perpendicular segment extending a segment shortening a segment A system can recognize the user intention the chosen element of group according direction of mouse mo
171. round 3 degrees in means of angular distance on the surface of a sphere The correct determination of celestial object depended on its magnitude since our system preferred the brightest one from the closest neighborhood of determined direction This was the way how to deal with 3 degrees system accuracy knowing that the users mostly pointed at the brightest stars objects This led to perfect 100 correct detection of the brightest objects which were the most frequent case and the success rate decreases with increasing magnitude to 0 this was the least common case If the object was detected incorrectly 7 Very bright objects have negative magnitudes the faintest were of sixth magnitude m 6 that the limit of human visual perception without the aid of a telescope Stars with magnitude more than 6 are not visible by human eye 38 Depends on actual visibility observation conditions and on the user s character 78 Special Interaction Approaches and their Impact on Usability Interaction with Distant Objects because of its higher magnitude less brightness the user knew the simple voice command which jumped to the next brightest object in detected area After one two or maximum three jumps the correct star object was selected During our tests we gathered from users the following pros and cons Pros e Our method does not require any special or expensive hardware e Itis portable if the glass pane is not too big
172. rsity Bratislava Reviewers Dr Bozena Mannova Czech Technical University in Prague Assoc Prof Andrej Ferko Comenius University in Bratislava Keywords Interaction User Interface Laser Pointer Adaptive Personalized Desktop widget Departures Solid Geometry Education 3D ACM Subject Classification H 3 4 Information Storage and Retrieval Systems and Software User profiles and alert services H 5 1 Information Systems INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION Multimedia Information Systems Artificial augmented and virtual realities H 5 2 Information Systems INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION User Interfaces D 2 2 H 1 2 I 3 6 Graphical user interfaces GUI Input devices and strategies Interaction styles G 4 Mathematics of Computing MATHEMATICAL SOFTWARE User interfaces 2011 Alena Kovarova Slovak University of Technology in Bratislava 111 Autorka Alena Kov rov kolite doc Ing Martin PERKA PhD Slovenska technicka univerzita v Bratislave t 6 Paneur pska vysoka Skola Bratislava Oponenti Ing Bozena Mannov Ph D esk vysok u en technick v Praze Doc RNDr Andrej Ferko PhD Univerzita Komensk ho v Bratislave K ov Interakcia pou vate sk rozhranie laserov ukazovadlo slov adapt vny personalizovan desktop widget odchody stereometria vzdel vanie 3D ACM Subject Classification H 3 4 Information Storage and Re
173. s so we let the widget after its first run display instruction guidelines But they were usually skipped by the testers As testers realized during their first attempts that the widget displays only one default line our guidelines were used to get the information on how to extend the widget s functionality The other test dealt with acceptance We interviewed several of testers again 10 students of our faculty after they completed our task Task 2 To use our widget for a few days weeks We asked them what they liked and disliked and why Result 2 The fact that some of them used our widget also after we finished the testing shows us that these users were very satisfied which is what they claimed during our interview From the interview we gathered the following pros and cons There are not many of them the widget was in general rated in a very positive way Pros e One special feature of the widget is sound the widget can announce the time of the next departure This feature was also tested the speech was accomplished by using the Windows functionality of automatic reading of a given text This voice functionality was evaluated as being very popular by the users e Since our testers had not bookmarked web pages for individual lines the effect of using our widget was for them even more noticeable and appreciated Cons e Testers observed the specific feature of the application due to data parsing after the URL was set that
174. sability and Acceptance in Human computer Interaction qualitative quantitative or both the level of information provided high or low the immediacy of response recall may be incomplete the intrusiveness whether users notice tracking which can influence their behavior the time the resources how much equipment time money participants experts are needed the level of expertise high medium low Table 2 Comparison of usability evaluation methods Dix Finlay Abword amp Beale 2004 2 v 5 o v 0 p o gt d e QD i O gt 523 uzg S 9 0 56 5 32 2E 3 Z i c 8722852532 E BR E 3 8 nv 3 iL O O S E S LU uj Cognitive walkthrough All V X X v X L NA X M L H Heuristic evaluation All V X X Y X H NA X L L M Model based Design v X X v X L NA X M L H Experiment All V x v x v L H V V H M M Interviews All V V x v v H X X LLL Questionnaire All V AOX A QVO S WHY OX EX x LENSES RE Think aloud Imp v v X v X HL v wv H L M Protocol analysis Imp VW v X v X HL v v H H H Post task walkthrough Imp v v X v X HL X X M L M H High M Medium L Low Assuming a simple paper and pencil record 7 Including video audio and system recording what is intrusive except system logs 2 2 Acceptance Dealing with acceptance there are two views from different sides see Figure 1 The first is a black box software testing the test determine if the requirements on the specification of a
175. sently we participate in the project iTransit which provides the closest departures and even more functionality route planner searching according to a stop name according to a line number etc iTransit already works with the user s context time and position see Figure 40 which creates a comfortable interface This screen is available after one click making this solution comparable with ours We also plan to implement there a user model for repetitiveness and maybe also as a widget for different mobile operating systems Our method is unique in that besides using a user model it also takes advantage of widgets These two features make information accessible without a single click while any other solution requires at least one click often several interaction steps 40 Available at itms itunes apple com sk app itransit id389445189 mt 8 more info at www itransit sk 96 Special Interaction Approaches and their Impact on Usability Interaction Support Based on User Model uil T Mobile SK 15 56 99 Gab ZOO 32m s 31 smer Cintor n Sl vi ie dolie 16 06 10 min 16 26 30 min CI 39 smer Cintor n Sl vi ie dolie 15 56 0 min 16 16 20 min ZOO 128m a 92 smer Vozov a Petr alka 16 08 12 min 16 28 32 min ZOO 131m a 31 smer Trnavsk m to 16 12 16 min 16 32 36 min 39 smer Suhvezdna 16 02 6 min 16 22 26 min ay Odchody Figure 40 Screenshot of the iTransit
176. so a laser pointer mouse cursor control in combination with voice recognition Moreover the user can read or listen to information about sky objects stored on a local computer and get new information through our web service An important part of the presented results has been published at ICETA 2007 see Appendix A section A 1 Publications and icPoint was awarded with Quality Seal in Europrix Top Talent Award competition see Appendix A section A 2 Awards 114 Special Interaction Approaches and their Impact on Usability Conclusions The method for pointing at distant objects can be used in any other situation e g pointing at mountain peaks building roofs city panoramas or archeological parks Here however the glass would be positioned vertically and calculations for determining the object of interest would differ as well as the objects data representation Any of these implementations could be extended to an examination mode where the user is asked to show the object and the system would determine whether it was the right direction We created such a system for pointing at objects within indoor spaces Kovarova Meszaros amp Zelman 2008 Goal 2 To propose and verify a method which on the basis of observing the user s actions stores his her choices and thus reduces the demands on the user s interaction when retrieving web information Our experiments have shown that the UI adaptation using user model can signifi
177. software com games wolfenstein wolf3d index html Insam E 2002 IrDA INTERFACING TO PCs Retrieved March 21 2011 from Electronics World http www eix co uk Articles IrDA Welcome htm International GeoGebra Institute 2011 Geogebra Retrieved 2011 from http www geogebra org Interplay 1995 Descent Retrieved 2011 from Interplay http interplay com games descent php Ishihara M amp Ishihara Y 2006 An approach to remote direct pointing using gray code Proceedings of the working conference on Advanced visual interfaces pp 75 78 New York NY USA ACM Ivory M Y amp Hearst M A 2001 December The state of the art in automating usability evaluation of user interfaces ACM Computing Surveys 33 4 470 516 Jackiw N 2009 The Geometer s Sketchpad v5 0 Emeryville Key Curriculum Press Kaufmann H 2009 Dynamic Differential Geometry in Education Journal for Geometry and Graphics 13 4 131 144 Kaufmann H amp Schmalstieg D 2002 Mathematics and geometry education with collaborative augmented reality ACM SIGGRAPH 2002 conference abstracts and applications pp 37 41 San Antonio Texas ACM Kaufmann H Schmalstieg D amp Wagner M 2000 Construct3D A Virtual Reality Application for Mathematics and Geometry Education Education and Information Technologies 5 4 263 276 Kieras D 2001 Using the keystroke level model to estimate execution Ann Arbor Department
178. st users and found usability problems Nielsen amp Landauer 1993 esee g Figure 47 Physical data model of the widget database eeeseesesse k Figure 48 An example of the first construction rule eere r Figure 49 An example of the second construction rule eeuuuuss S Figure 50 An example of the third construction rule eeeeeeeeeeeees t XV List of abbreviations 2D two dimensional eese 26 32 50 53 54 58 68 101 3D three dimensional22 25 26 27 32 33 34 48 49 50 51 54 58 63 74 101 103 o6Dob siz degrees ol Ir66 OLD eericarenee iaae niku h pinov 49 API Application Programming Interface eese 44 45 AR Due siete USA U son o II NOD MUN Eer 35 57 AU Average SES zor nn 108 109 110 111 CCD Charge Coupled Device a major technology for digital imaging 31 34 FPS First Person Shooter ccccccccccccccccsccccvcccvecccccceccssveees 48 49 50 DI Future teach a eer eee ee Dus 108 109 110 111 1 GPS Global Positioning System cccceceeeee eee eenes 27 38 68 77 83 GUI Graphical User Interface 22 24 25 70 91 92 98 HCI Human Computer Interaction c cc ccc cece eee eeeeeeeeeeeeeneeeees 9 21 HS High school students ss stust sisenov tekodar vom s riari 108 109 111 1 I Input
179. stance between the object of interest and the user can be about one meter The two following examples propose an extension of the original interaction method to cope with unreachable area TractorBeam Parker et al Parker Mandryk amp Inkpen 2005 proposed augmenting a stylus to allow remote pointing Results from their work demonstrate that remote pointing is faster than stylus touch input for large targets slower for small distant targets and comparable in all other cases They found when given a choice people utilized the pointing interaction technique more often than stylus touch Based on these results they developed the TractorBeam a hybrid point touch input technique that allows users to seamlessly reach distant objects on tabletop displays 31 Alena Kovarova FIIT STU Bratislava The hardware setup for the top projected tabletop display that was used consisted of a ceiling mounted projector mirror desktop PC and wooden table The output from the PC was projected onto the mirror which reflected the image onto the table Figure 6 Input was received via a tethered stylus and receiver attached to a Polhemus Fastrak six degrees of freedom 3D tracking system mirror projector Projection onto table Polhemus Fastrak receiver to Fastrak hase Figure 6 Top projected table hardware configuration Parker Mandryk amp Inkpen 2005 A multi directional task 2D Fitts discrete task was used und
180. t in the construction Figure 17 Screenshot of Archimedes Geo3D application None of these two applications provides shortcuts to work with tools thus the drawing consists of relentless moving and clicking mouse cursor over the toolbar and back to the scene Equally arduous is a selection of one of the grouped tools for example group for adding a line add a segment prolonging an existing segment add a line defined by two points or defined by a point and parallel line etc Some of these 55 Alena Kovarova FIIT STU Bratislava tools can be automatically detected by the system itself but the majority has to be chosen directly by the user The next feature of Archimedes Geo3D is a basic axial cross with numeric axes that on one side can assist in the orientation in space on the other side may be constraining The base horizontal plane in Cabri 3D can cause the same problem Both applications have a problem with infinite objects line plane because their size length often make the whole scene unclear NEM EN x Cabri 3D alenka cabri3D kocka cq3 _ ra File Edit Display Document Window Help Ee a x mod o0 4 TH Figure 18 Screenshot of Cabri 3D application Both applications provide hints during inserting a new object In Cabri 3D it is implemented in form of a textbox on the mouse position see Figure 19 the hovered object changes its color and starts to vibrate According to the
181. t it A similar situation is in the mountains where a person wants to know the name of a peak he she is pointing to Another example is a man lying down on his her back in the night watching stars wanting to know the name of the one to which he she is pointing Here we did not consider a solution requiring an accelerometer as it is neither a common nor affordable part for computers Goal 1 To propose and verify a new method of computer aided interaction with remote objects within an outdoor environment using common and affordable equipment including input and output devices This goal belongs to the following SIGCHI categories Dialogue Techniques Dialogue Inputs Input techniques pointing and selection Dialogue Interaction Techniques Dialogue type and techniques 2 Due to the continually growing volume of information that is made freely available online people often find themselves in the inconvenient situation where they have to invest a disproportional effort and time to gain the information they need This process includes for example decisions such as which electronic newspaper to read which sports section to monitor which broadcast to watch which web pages contain relevant information or simply whether the needed information is worth the time and effort This is of course a daily struggle most of us would appreciate the time saving and effort saving option of having this personalized information wait for us somewhere n
182. t or even longer This inspires us to use the glass plate also in our solution 40 Special Interaction Approaches and their Impact on Usability Current Interaction Approaches 4 2 Lowering the Demands on the User s Interaction Our second goal was to propose and verify a method which stores the user s actions and thus reduces the demands on his her interaction when retrieving web information This is a form of adaptable user interface It can be found in operating systems For example the Microsoft Windows Start menu offers in quick choices the most used and most recently used applications Other similar arrangements can be found in many applications where menus are shortened to only those items that have been already selected in the past This problem however is not sufficiently addressed in the field of information retrieval from the Internet so we focused on lowering demands when the user repetitively looks for specific information in a specified field It means the user knows where to search for and how to filter the information available at the location his her favorite source In other words in our case the user is able to formulate his her requirements in greater details and can be explicit Examples of such requirements could be I want to monitor this specific list of stocks on the stock market and I have no interest in the fluctuation of other stocks or of the general index Or I need to have the current weath
183. t projected on the screen and a presenter s computer The presenter can use the laser pointer to control projected software by moving the laser spot and turning the beam on or off He she can control the slideshow using the laser pointer avoiding the necessity of returning to the computer which may be positioned far away A Practical System for Laser Pointer Interaction on Large Displays While the previous works explain well the different systems for the laser pointer as an interaction device whose dot location is extracted and used as a cursor position from an image of the display captured by the camera Ahlborn et al focused on some important practical concerns such as the design of atracking system and key practical implementation details They presented a robust and efficient dot detection algorithm that allows us to use their system under a variety of lighting conditions and to reduce the amount of image parsing required to find a laser position by an order of magnitude Ahlborn Thompson Kreylos Hamann amp Staadt 2005 37 Alena Kovarova FIIT STU Bratislava Their system contains a PC a display system of a 3 x 2 tiled display with a total resolution of 3072 x 1536 pixels four Canon VC C4 cameras each with a resolution of 720 x 480 attached to WinTV frame grabbers the laser pointer class IIIa red A Linux Infra Red Controller LIRC device is used for detection of button presses 4 1 4 Outdoor Interaction Out
184. t time they had available for testing We believe that the longer test application would reduce the percentage More than half of the students noticed the status bar during the work HS 2 5 and over a third noticed the help information HS 2 5 The vast majority was not distracted by it during their work HS 4 6 Future teachers Stereo3D We had 11 university students future teachers They evaluated the application very positively FT 1 6 Almost all elements of the application worked nicely and clearly FT 1 5 the buttons were conveniently arranged FT 1 5 and there was no problem to understand it FT 1 1 Controls were intuitive and comfortable FT 1 3 the only exception was adding objects to the scene Shifting and rotation of the scene was natural and fully complied with the use of the left and right buttons FT 1 0 1 5 We can negatively evaluate the fact that almost a third of respondents reported that they sometimes felt that they could 109 Alena Kovarova FIIT STU Bratislava not perform the intended operation FT 3 8 The origin of this problem may be in an additional pop up menu that appears when the user point at an object in the scene after a short interval One solution might be the reduction of this interval which however could cause too frequent menu popping up when moving the mouse in the scene The status bar was noticed by three quarters of respondents FT 1 8 and the vast majority indicated that
185. tage can be mastered by choosing appropriate environment During the questionnaires evaluation we noticed that different people prefer different styles of interaction Some like to combine the mouse and the keyboard others not Some prefer the drag and drop style others prefer to click We cannot implement only one style that suits everyone An interesting result of testing however was that the users who use the mouse along the keyboard shortcut keys switch keys learned very quickly to use the temporary switch mapped on Ctrl key Such switch can be used in any application There is only a question how to let the users know about this feature how to motivate them to try it and then use it regularly A problem may occur only when the user would want to switch between more than two modes options But such situation occurs very rarely usually with the experts Unlike the other similar applications see section 4 3 3 in our prototype we have two above mentioned unique features which accelerate and facilitate the users interaction with 3D editor for solid geometry Moreover according to the math teachers the most valuable feature is the automatic correctness evaluation ability which they never experienced in previous applications An important part of the presented results will be published and presented at Interaction Collaborative Learning Conference in Piestany on September 2224 2001 113 Alena Kovarova FIIT STU Bratislava
186. the web browser and thus count T 0 sec 7 6 u o 2 d v d v B 3 a o uDPB 1 BIMHD 0 uCP y il widget s ov SJ S 6 A Q Figure 39 Time consumption comparison for obtaining information from various sources using different ways to speed up search The graph Figure 39 shows times for obtaining information on a line departure Since the majority of users use the same lines the probability of the correct estimation is high Thus our personalized widget in most cases reduces the number of interaction steps It saves the user s time and makes the information retrieving quicker User evaluation We also did two evaluations among the students of the Faculty of Informatics and Information Technologies of the Slovak University of Technology in Bratislava in December 2007 This test is a simple performance measurement and was performed by 10 volunteers who use the computer on a daily basis 94 Special Interaction Approaches and their Impact on Usability Interaction Support Based on User Model Task 1 To download the set of a new line of public transport to our widget and let it display departures for one of its stops in a certain direction Test Results 1 Overall it took generally less than three minutes for users to find the desired departure The long period was caused by a complicated data source it was not possible to do it automatically and all the steps had to be done by the user We were aware of thi
187. the widget got nonresponsive for a moment We were aware of this negative feature it had been documented within the guidelines These pros and cons are related to different implementation details not to our method 95 Alena Kovarova FIIT STU Bratislava 6 4 Discussion According to the results of our experiment we have shown that our hypothesis is correct The proposed method fulfills our goal At its best the user does not have to interact with widgets at all We assume this is the most often case The users found it difficult to start to use our widget This is visible in the result from the second test and also in our graph Figure 39 where the first violet column is the highest from the group This undesired result is caused by the information source whose provider protects data in different ways and thus makes it complicated to use the data in our widget But after overcoming the initial widget unfriendliness the users considered the widget as a very pleasant and useful application Right now the widget works only for one specific information source but in principle the final implementation is only dependent on the data provider The method itself is independent and can be implemented with the same result for any domain dealing with line departures An important part of the presented results has been published at international venues endorsed by ACM and IEEE in 2008 and 2010 see Appendix A section A 1 Publications Pre
188. tic o This coordinate system is used for objects in the Solar system planets moons etc More information about coordinate systems and conversions between them can be found in literature Hajduk et al 1987 Pokorny 1998 formulas are not stated in this work To enrich our pilot project by planets we needed equations for calculating the position of visible planets These equations can be found in Astronomical Algorithms for Calculators Pokorny 1998 To achieve the best performance the positions of only five visible planets and Earth s Moon are calculated Mercury Venus Mars Jupiter and 73 Alena Kovarova FIIT STU Bratislava Saturn icPoint calculates their coordinates in the ecliptic coordinate system and then converts these to the equatorial coordinate system When our system identifies a star it has to convert horizontal coordinates originated from a processed camera image and search in multiple catalogues for visible objects in the specified area of the sky icPoint is able to create catalogue instances each catalogue implementation is capable of searching for visible objects near specified coordinates in the equatorial coordinate system 5 3 3 Information about Sky Objects As was already mentioned the icPoint project is capable of identifying sky objects by determining which object is pointed at by the user Based on the selected sky object the system is able to produce a simulated image of the corresponding
189. tion with minimal time effort and minimal manual initial customization In other words our system has to fulfill the user s requirements in a way that minimizes the number of interaction steps and accelerates information access Domain model The main element of our domain is a line This line has a number 1 2 is of given type bus tram and has a route with several stops Each stop of the line has its order within the line route has its time shift how long it takes from the first stop of the line to the chosen stop is in a certain direction towards one or the other terminal stop 84 Special Interaction Approaches and their Impact on Usability Interaction Support Based on User Model Each stop has a name The first and the last stop of the route are terminals Each terminal has its departure time schedules They depend on the type of day regular working day Saturday Sunday public holiday school vacation etc All of these relationships and data types are represented in the following domain ontology model Figure 34 Stop of a direction the line S Qt Stop So 5 Sh sto d p ovde KO O S js scheduled at e Yo 4 Type of has label ssc sting Figure 34 Ontology model of data from public transportation departures This is the minimal model of domain for our purpose The model can be extended especially when a different system deals with a broader task as for example in Junl
190. tional conference on Human computer interaction with mobile devices and services pp 327 330 Amsterdam The Netherlands ACM 118 Special Interaction Approaches and their Impact on Usability References Brewster S 1994 Providing a structured method for integrating non speech audio into human computer interfaces PhD thesis University of York Human Computer Interaction Group Department of Computer Science Brigham E O 1988 The fast Fourier transform and its applications Upper Saddle River New Jersey Prentice Hall Inc Brusilovsky P amp Millan E 2007 User models for adaptive hypermedia and adaptive educational systems In P Brusilovsky A Kobsa amp W Nejdl Ed The adaptive web LNSC 4321 pp 3 53 Berlin Heidelberg Springer Verlag Caceres M 2008 Q1 Widgets 1 0 The Widget Landscape Retrieved 03 05 2011 from W3C http www w3 org TR widgets land Caltrox Educational Software 2011 Geometry Master 3 0 Retrieved 2011 from Caltrox Educational Software http www caltrox com products geometry htm Carmichael J L 2011 Etched Glass Sundials 21st Century Retrieved 2011 from Stained glass sundials http advanceassociates com Sundials Stained_Glass sundials_EGP html Cohen C A amp Hegarty M 2007 Sources of Difficulty in Imagining Cross Sections of 3D Objects The 29th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society Nashville Tennessee USA Constantin
191. trieval Systems and Software User profiles and alert services H 5 1 Information Systems INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION Multimedia Information Systems Artificial augmented and virtual realities H 5 2 Information Systems INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION User Interfaces D 2 2 H 1 2 I 3 6 Graphical user interfaces GUI Input devices and strategies Interaction styles G 4 Mathematics of Computing MATHEMATICAL SOFTWARE User interfaces 2011 Alena Kovarova Slovenska technicka univerzita v Bratislave 1V Declaration on Word of Honor I Alena Kovarova declare on my honor that I wrote the present thesis using the knowledge obtained during the course of my study Where information has been derived from other sources I confirm that this has been indicated in this thesis Bratislava 11 8 2011 Author s signature Annotation Slovak University of Technology in Bratislava FACULTY OF INFORMATICS AND INFORMATION TECHNOLOGIES Study program Applied Informatics Field of study Applied Informatics Author MSc Alena Kovarova Dissertation Thesis Special Interaction Approaches and their Impact on Usability Supervisor Assoc Prof Martin SPERKA 2011 August The present work examines various interaction styles It is divided into three parts introducing three proposals for enhancement of existing interaction methods The first proposal focuses on applying the common hardware to a new styl
192. ulation up to deletion Of special interest is the fact that every editor has three modes moving turning scaling between which it is necessary to switch Only Blender has implemented recognition of gestures and the system itself can automatically detect the mode it is obviously slower than a keyboard shortcut but very useful for beginners These three modes are usually visually clearly distinguishable see example in Figure 16 In all editors the operation of 52 Special Interaction Approaches and their Impact on Usability Current Interaction Approaches inserting a new object requires more interaction steps the shortest way is to click on the toolbar object Table 6 Object manipulation differences in five 3D graphical editors had Q 2 2 O Q c had Sas T o S 2 oO a 5 o s g 2 o a M o o Qo o 2 N Q u o 2 EOD ToS bo O a c a ws c 2 a X O v x dd bo HE p m o 2 UNB c c o o 4 42 e O i bo O S u 42 mo v 3 2 o bd 53 Blender press Space bar for context menu and then click Add then click type of object on cursor position oriented toward actual view Shift S invokes context menu with snapping possibilities select the mode on a toolbar or press g r s and then LMB MM can be used gestures X key 3ds Max in right panel click first tab Create and then click type of
193. unication between a user and a computer from a theoretical point of view But theory is not always consistent with practice Our previous testing has shown that some of our ideas are inconvenient for users or otherwise difficult or sometimes we just found out that people are comfortable and do not like to let go their old habits In this chapter we described our last idea The experiment showed that unlike our previous ideas this time our approach was very successful We believe that this is the result of our focus on the information the users perceive visually and we got inspired by solutions working in other areas We consider the benefits of the graphical hint preview in systems where expected the user will quickly learn to use them but will use it only for a short time An example of it is our prototype We assume that in the long term use of such system these previews can become annoying This can be managed by allowing to disable these previews The disadvantage of this solution is just that the hint preview will show up when the mouse cursor is in a position where can be done given action This is on one side of a very sensible but on the other hand the user is not aware of this action possibility until the cursor will be moved there Since in our experiment we have not noticed this at all we Tubs Special Interaction Approaches and their Impact on Usability Interaction Using Visual Help in Simple 3D Editors assume this disadvan
194. user generated or system generated How severe are these errors and how easily can users recover from the errors o Satisfaction How pleasant is it to use the system The satisfaction of a user is often directly correlated with other concepts of usability learnability efficiency memorability and error handling To evaluate the usability of a system both the user interface UI and functionality must be considered An intuitive UI can lower the learning curve of the system and increase the efficiency of typical tasks but it must offer sufficient functionality to remain useful User interface engineering has been subject to extensive research and many guidelines and principles have been proposed to improve the quality of UI design Raskin in his book The Humane Interface Raskin 2000 suggests two paramount laws of UI design e First Law A computer shall not harm your work or through inactivity allow your work to come to harm e Second Law A computer shall not waste your time or require you to do more work than is strictly necessary In other words users should be able to perform their tasks in an efficient manner without any interruption The computer system should work with them not against them Larry Constantine and Lucy Lockwood in their usage centered design suggest that UI design should be directed by 6 principles Constantine amp Lockwood 1999 Constantine amp Lockwood 1996 1 The structure principle Des
195. uture 8 Also known as Unmoderated or Asynchronous Usability Testing 12 Special Interaction Approaches and their Impact on Usability Usability and Acceptance in Human computer Interaction releases of the system by redesigning the features causing the most errors and most access for online help This technique can be used at the test or deployment stages of software development 2 1 4 Analytical Modeling Methods According Dix et al Dix Finlay Abword amp Beale 2004 the Model Based Evaluation covers different types of models which model some aspect of users understanding knowledge intention or processing They categorized cognitive models as follows e Hierarchical representation of the users task and goal structure here belongs e g GOMS Goals Operators Methods and Selection model and CCT Cognitive Complexity Theory e Linguistic and grammatical models here belongs e g BNF Backus Naur Form and TAG Task Action Grammar e Physical and device level models here belongs e g KLM Keystroke Level Model which gives detailed predictions about user performance acquisition and execution of simple command sequences taking less than 20 seconds taking into account the human motor system Ivory and Hearst surveyed following Analytical Modeling Methods GOMS Analysis UIDE Analysis Cognitive Task Analysis Task Environment Analysis Knowledge Analysis Design Analysis Programmable User Models Ivory amp He
196. v V V V Xx x x x Plasma V V Viv v v wv wv Screenlets X V X X X v X X V X x v v wv wv wv X v Xv x v v wv V X v v X X Xx v yov ox VAN V Xt Rose XX 4 2 3 Summary Just like the site specific browser the ready to use widgets meet the demand of the majority of Internet users Therefore nonstandard Special Interaction Approaches and their Impact on Usability Current Interaction Approaches requirements are not covered by the first choice existence of already implemented widget If there is already a service as an RSS or a web service which can be requested for information extending a generic widget is sometimes enough But in case of non existent ready to use widget or service the only choice is to program it This last one also gives a space for the developer to implement some features which can offer the user some kind of automatic adaptation or personalization But generally there is no effort to implement widgets for one purpose with a broad usage i e independent of information source those which obtain information from the Internet all are exactly one site or exactly one web service oriented In general obtaining information from the Internet is not personalized and users have to manually set up the system or hope for the web site with implemented harmless cookies 22 Really Simple Syndication a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works 4T Alena Kovarova FIIT STU Bratislava 4 3 Intera
197. vement To show infinite object in finite form During our analysis of educational applications working with 3D space see subsection 4 3 3 we noticed that the infinite objects caused different problems e Viewpoint of working area is overfilled by these infinite objects e The scene looks messy e The infinite objects can be obstacles when interacting with other objects In a small survey between users they suggested to allow making infinite object especially lines as long as the user wants to set his her own clipping area As in previous case with infinite objects the users prefer limited objects to be displayed clipped to the desired size especially extendable or shortenable segments 100 Special Interaction Approaches and their Impact on Usability Interaction Using Visual Help in Simple 3D Editors To rotate the scene in case of overlapping objects One of the problems of 3D space is overlapping objects At first the user does not have the clear idea about the depth Then the user may try to reach the object which is in greater depth Different applications solve it in different ways e g using Tab key to switch to the next object but most of them allow the user to get the object to the front position We suggested and experiment with automatic scene rotation when the application detects the user has a problem e g he she tries to add a point on intersection of two skew lines 7 1 1 Application Domain For ev
198. voice commands to get to the adjacent object The method for pointing at distanced objects can be used in any other situation e g pointing at mountain peaks or building roofs city panoramas archeological parks Here however the glass would be positioned vertically and calculations for determining the object of interest would differ as well as the objects data representation Any of these implementations could be extended to an examination mode where the user is asked to show the object and the system would determine whether it was the right direction We created such a system for pointing at objects within indoor spaces Kovarova Meszaros amp Zelman 2008 80 Special Interaction Approaches and their Impact on Usability Interaction Support Based on User Model 6 Interaction Support Based on User Model The second goal of this work was to propose and verify a method of interaction supported by the user model see end of section 4 2 1 This model can be created by different methods The method we are using is based on observing the user s behavior The user s actions his her choices are recorded evaluated and incorporated in the user model When the user is retrieving web information this model can be used to reduce the demands on the interaction 6 1 Reducing the Number of the User s Interaction Steps The analysis has shown see section 4 2 that retrieving specific information on the web can be very complicated
199. wing subsections describe various ways that help the user to quickly obtain desired information from the Internet by means of reducing the number of interaction steps We start with a description of classic web browsers and their possibilities and finish with widgets and gadgets We do not deal with highly specialized web applications 4 2 1 Fast Information Retrieval Through Web Browsers The most favorite way of retrieving information from the web is the well known browsing For this purpose there are web browsers e g Microsoft Internet Explorer Mozilla Firefox Safari or Opera Some ways the average web browser can save time are to set up some settings e g to save his her favorite web page via Add to Favorites to make some page as his her home page to Show the windows and tabs from the last time when the web browser starts Such settings allow the user to set up different options about web pages but there is no possibility to specify or to ask for specific information within the web page if the user wants just a part of the page Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 brought a little improvement with Web Slices Microsoft Corporation 2011 which use simple HTML markup to represent a clipping of a web page enabling users to subscribe to content directly within a web page Moving from generic web browsers other type of acceleration can be found in site specific browsers This type of browser is designed to e create a mor
200. y user owns these 3 devices it will take some time to enable computers to interact through them in a way that is intuitive for people Presently systems working with these advanced technologies require the user to learn new interaction habits which affect the learnability of the system E g the user needs to pronounce correctly or needs to train a speech recognition system for his her own type of pronunciation After that the user needs to learn a set of commands that can be spoken In case of visual commands captured by a camera the user needs to learn which movement means which command We experimented with interaction through all of these basic devices to provide users easier and more intuitive interaction 26 Special Interaction Approaches and their Impact on Usability Interaction Approaches 3 3 1 Other Input and Output Devices In addition to standard IO devices there exists a plethora of other devices which try to serve the user in a more natural way the way he she is used to interact in the real world In the following lines there is a categorized list of them We divided them into groups depending on the part of the user s body that they relate to Pointing devices for hands and fingers joystick trackball various space navigators gloves and other different types of haptic devices various keyboards game controller gamepad game paddle etc Pointing devices for the index finger touchscreens multi touch screens touc

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