No abstract

Touch-sensitive fabrics let users operate wearable devices unobtrusively and with rich input gestures similar to those on modern smartphones and tablets. While hardware prototypes exist in the DIY crafting community, HCI designers and researchers have little data about how well these devices actually work in realistic situations. FabriTouch is the first flexible touch-sensitive fabric that provides such scientifically validated information. We show that placing a FabriTouch pad onto clothing and the body instead of a rigid support surface significantly reduces input speed but still allows for basic gestures. We also show the impact of sitting, standing, and walking on horizontal and vertical swipe gesture performance in a menu navigation task. Finally, we provide the details necessary to replicate our FabriTouch pad, to enable both the DIY crafting community and HCI researchers and designers to build on our work.

Audio augmented reality systems overlay the physical world with a virtual audio space. Today's smartphones provide enough processing power to create the impression of virtual sound sources being located in the real world. To achieve this, information about the user's location and orientation is necessary which requires additional hardware. In a real-world installation, however, we observed that instead of turning their head to localize sounds, users tend to turn their entire body. Therefore, we suggest to simply measure orientation of the user's body -or even just the mobile device she is holding -to generate the spatial audio. To verify this approach, we present two studies: Our first study in examines the user's head, body, and mobile device orientation when moving through an audio augmented reality system in a lab setting. Our second study analyzes the user experience in a real-world installation when using head, body, or device orientation to control the audio spatialization. We found that when navigating close to sound sources head tracking is necessary, but that it can potentially be replaced by device tracking in larger or more explorative usage scenarios. These findings help reduce the technical complexity of mobile audio augmented reality systems (MAARS), and enable their wider dissemination as mobile software-only apps.

Sustainability in (Inter)Action provides a forum for innovative thought, design, and research in the area of interaction design and environmental sustainability. The column explores how HCI can contribute to the complex and interdisciplinary efforts to address sustainability challenges. Elaine M. Huang, Editor

Audio guides are a common way to provide museum visitors with an opportunity for personalized, self-paced information retrieval. However, this personalization conflicts with some of the reasons many people go to museums, i.e., to socialize, to be with friends, and to discuss the exhibit as they experience it [1]. We developed an interactive museum experience based on audio augmented reality that lets the visitor interact with a virtual spatial audio soundscape. In this paper, we present some new interaction metaphors we use in the design of this audio space, as well as some techniques to generate a group experience within audio spaces.

Textile interfaces can be ubiquitously integrated into the fabrics that already surround us. So far, however, existing interfaces transfer concepts, such as buttons and sliders,to the textile domain without leveraging the affordances and qualities of fabric. This paper presents Grabrics, a two-dimensional textile sensor that is manipulated by grabbing a fold and moving it between your fingers. Grabrics textile nature allows it to be integrated invisibly into everyday clothing or into textile objects, like a living room sofa. We describe the construction and the fold-based interaction technique of Grabrics sensor. A preliminary user study shows that Grabrics can be folded and manipulated from any arbitrary position, and it can detect 2D stroke gestures reliably. The additional fee must be paid to ACM. This text field is large enough to hold the appropriate release statement assuming it is single spaced in a sans-serif 7 point font. Every submission will be assigned their own unique DOI string to be included here. AbstractTextile interfaces can be ubiquitously integrated into the fabrics that already surround us. So far, however, existing interfaces transfer concepts, such as buttons and sliders, to the textile domain without leveraging the affordances and qualities of fabric. This paper presents Grabrics, a twodimensional textile sensor that is manipulated by grabbing a fold and moving it between your fingers. Grabrics textile nature allows it to be integrated invisibly into everyday clothing or into textile objects, like a living room sofa. We describe the construction and the fold-based interaction technique of Grabrics sensor. A preliminary user study shows that Grabrics can be folded and manipulated from any arbitrary position, and it can detect 2D stroke gestures reliably.

Traditional urban-scale crowdsourcing approaches suffer from three caveats-lack of complete spatiotemporal coverage, lack of accurate information and lack of sustained engagement of crowd workers. In this paper, we argue that these caveats can be addressed by embedding crowdsourcing tasks into the daily routine of mobile workforces that roam around an urban area. As a use case, we take the bpost who deliver the letters and parcels to the citizens across entire Belgium. We present a study that explores the behavioural attributes of these mobile postal workers both quantitatively (6.3K) and qualitatively (6) to assess the opportunity of leveraging them for crowdsourcing tasks. We report their mobility pattern, workflow, and behavioural traits which collectively inform the design of a purpose-built crowdsourcing solution. In particular, our solution operates on two key techniques-route augmentation, and on-wearable interruptibility management. Together, these mechanisms enhance the spatial coverage, response accuracy and increase workers' engagement with crowdsourcing tasks. We describe these principal components in a wearable smartwatch application supported by a data management infrastructure. Finally, we report a first-of-its-kind real-world trial with ten postal workers for two weeks to assess the quality of road signs at the city centre of Antwerp. Our findings suggest that our solution was effective in achieving 89% spatial coverage and increasing response rate (83.6%) and accuracy (100%) of the crowdsourcing tasks. Although limited in scale, these and the rest of our findings highlight the way of building an efficient and purposeful crowdsourcing solution of the future. CCS Concepts: • Information systems → Crowdsourcing; • Human-centered computing → Ubiquitous computing; Mobile computing; Mobile devices.

No abstract