Recent multi-touch multi-user tabletop systems offer rich touch contact properties to applications. Not only they provide touch positions, but also finger orientations. Applications can use these properties separated for each finger or derive information by combining the given touch contact data. In this paper, we present an approach to map fingers to their associated joined hand contributing to potential enhancements for gesture recognition and user interaction. For instance, a gesture can be composed of multiple fingers of one hand or different hands. Therefore, we present a simple heuristic for mapping fingers to hands that makes use of constraints applied to the touch position combined with the finger orientation. We tested our approach with collected diverse touch contact data and analyze the results.
There seems to be a danger to carelessly replace routine tasks in homes through automation with IoT-technology. But since routines such as watering houseplants also have positive influences on inhabitants' wellbeing, they should be transformed through carefully performed designs. To this end, an attempt to use technology for augmenting a set of houseplants' nonverbal communication capabilities is presented. First, we describe in detail how implicit interactions have been designed to support inhabitants in watering their plants through meaningful interactions. Then, we report on a field study with 24 participants, comparing two alternative design implementations based on contrasting embodied interaction technologies (i.e., augmented reality and embedded computing technology). The study results highlight shortcomings of today's smartphone mediated augmented reality compared to physical interface alternatives, considering measurements of perceived attractiveness and expected effects on determinants of wellbeing, and discusses potentials of combining both modalities for future solutions.
Digitalization is penetrating every aspect of everyday life including a human's heart beating, which can easily be sensed by wearable sensors and displayed for others to see, feel, and potentially "bodily resonate" with. Previous work in studying human interactions and interaction designs with physiological data, such as a heart's pulse rate, have argued that feeding it back to the users may, for example support users' mindfulness and self-awareness during various everyday activities and ultimately support their wellbeing. Inspired by Somaesthetics as a discipline, which focuses on an appreciation of the living body's role in all our experiences, we designed and explored mobile tangible heart beat displays, which enable rich forms of bodily experiencing oneself and others in social proximity. In this paper, we first report on the design process of tangible heart displays and then present results of a field study with 30 pairs of participants. Participants were asked to use the tangible heart displays during watching movies together and report their experience in three different heart display conditions (i.e., displaying their own heart beat, their partner's heart beat, and watching a movie without a heart display). We found, for example that participants reported significant effects in experiencing sensory immersion when they felt their own heart beats compared to the condition without any heart beat display, and that feeling their partner's heart beats resulted in significant effects on social experience. We refer to resonance theory to discuss the results, highlighting the potential of how ubiquitous technology could utilize physiological data to provide resonance in a modern society facing social acceleration.
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