Presentation for ITS 2012

Editor's Notes

• #2: Good morning everyone, I’m Genki Furumi, a master student, from the University of Tokyo.In this project, I collaborated with Daisuke Sakamoto and Takeo Igarashi.Today I will talk about a tabletop user interface widget for addressing occlusion by physical objects, called SnapRail.
• #3: This is the tabletop user interface widget, SnapRail. Assoon as a user put the physical object on the tabletop surface, a rail-shaped widget appears, and then the occluded virtual elements are replaced along the widget. As the result, the virtual elements avoid occlusion. And widgets unite / when the physical objects are placed close.In addition to that, a user can handle such virtual elements easily by using this widget in some ways.In this video, we did not use daily necessities, such as coffee mug and wallet, as physical objects.however we suppose this interface widget is suitable for daily use of tabletop device
• #4: Nowadays business use for tabletop is popular. For example, in the pub or museum,however daily use of tabletop have not been popular yet. Surfaces do not exist in everyday life.We suppose there are some problems. One of them isocclusion.In everyday life, people put physical objects, such as coffee mugs or wallet on a table.It happens that such objects occlude a piece of paper.The same as this, when people are using a tabletop, the digital contents might be occluded by physical object and this makes it difficult to handle the digital contents. So we addressed this issue.Related to this issue, some researches have been conducted so far.
• #5: Mainly two approaches are related with ours.Vogel’s group developed new interface, / which enables users / see the information which is occluded by the users own hands. They did not mentioned the physical object on devices.In Pentable project, novel context menus / for a cluttered tabletop setup are introduced.The user intentionally draws the context menus in avoiding obstacles on the tabletop.
• #6: We introduce the interactions of our interface in detail.Our interface consists of 2 interaction groups:First one is for visibility of virtual elements.And next one is for manipulability of virtual elements.So I introduce each interaction group.
• #7: First interaction group is for visibility of virtual elements in order to avoid a physical object occlusion.The user put the physical object on the tabletop surface arbitrarily, then the occluded virtual elements move. The destinations of the virtual elements are the widget, which appear after the physical object is put.When physical objects are put closely, the widgets belonging to each object unite. This interaction prevents one physical object to occlude the virtual elements belonging to the other physical objects.Next one is for manipulability of virtual elements.
• #8: This interaction consists of two parts: widget scrolling feature and snap or release feature.The user can easily manipulate the virtual elements behind the physical objects by scrolling the widget.The user can group the virtual elements by snap into the widget and also ungroup virtual elements by release from the widget. In developing these interactions, we assumed some limitations.
• #9: There are 2 main limitations.First, we did not assume that physical objects are slender.And second, we focus on occlusion of discrete virtual elements, such as icons.We do not assume that virtual elements are large, such as maps applications.
• #10: So we conducted a preliminary user study to evaluate the potential of this interface. The motivation of this user study is “evaluate the usability of our interface and collect the feedback ” (We did not know the our approach is the best approach.We proposed one option in this research.}
• #11: The task was quite simple. It was to find a specific 6 cards among 150 virtual cards / displayed on the tabletop surface with 2 physical objects.The 2 physical objects were movable on the tabletop but were not removable from the surface.And go to the other study’s conditions{The 6 cards were intentionally placed under or behind the physical object in order to force participants to use the SnapRail interface.}
• #12: The participants were 5 volunteer students.They have never used tabletop devices but they have experience to use multi touch devices like Android or iPhone.We let participants perform the task as I said before.After that , we asked them to fill out the System Usability Scale questionnaire and ask them to answer a open interview.The System Usability Scale questionnaire consists of 10 items.And each item is 7 point Likert scale.We conducted the study on this setup and received feedback from participants.
• #13: I would like to introduce the results.The score from the System-Usability-Scalequestionnaire was 76.7The score was high enough to show the potential for its practical use, Even though thisinterface is still in the prototyping stage, And they are selected questionnaire items, which got positive score.The participants reported that thisinterface was easy-to-use,, they felt confident using the interfaceAnd they would be able to use it without training beforehand.From these results, we consider that participants were satisfied in our interface.
• #14: We conducted an open interview as well.They gave us not only positive feedback for our interface design but also design implications.Like from the point of visibility and manipulability, they prefer to use this interface because they do not need to move their eyes frequently in searching for cards.We found the design implications for future implementation like they want to change the size of the widget easily and they want to scroll the virtual elements without swipe. They are very important comments so that we will improve our interface following these comments.
• #15: Finally, we conclude our work.We proposed a tabletop interface widget / for addressing occlusion by physical objects, called SnapRail.We conducted a preliminary user study to evaluate the potential of this interface.And received positive feedback.This is the end of my presentation. Thank you for your kind attention.And I’ll be taking questions or comments{This is some kind of concept design.We did not know the our approach is the best approach. We did not conduct the comparative user study.We proposed one option of the interaction design to address the occlusion issue.
• #17: It had a frame rate of 30 frames per second and pristine video quality.