2014 Fiscal Year Research-status Report
Assisting Blind People to Interact with Public Displays
| Project/Area Number |
25330241
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| Research Institution | Kochi University of Technology |
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Principal Investigator |
金 起範 高知工科大学, 公私立大学の部局等, 研究員 (20646963)
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| Co-Investigator(Kenkyū-buntansha) |
任 向実 高知工科大学, 工学部, 教授 (00287442)
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| Project Period (FY) |
2013-04-01 – 2016-03-31
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| Keywords | 情報システム / ソフトウェア学 / 情報通信工学 |
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| Outline of Annual Research Achievements |
In second year of the project, we enhanced the assistive interface for the people with visual impairments and conducted various experiments. We specifically addressed assisting people with visual impairments to aim at a target on a large wall-mounted display. Using mid-air gestures aided by vibrotactile feedback, we compared three target-aiming geometric algorithms: Random (baseline) and two novel techniques; Cruciform and Radial. The results of our two experiments have been submitted to the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems and International Journal of Human-Computer Studies.
As the extensions of this research, we hosted the international symposium on Interaction Design and Human Factors (IDHF 2014) on November 25-26 in Kochi, Japan. Around fifty world class researchers from universities and industry research laboratories in Europe, America, Asia and Japan were attended and presented research findings, discussed their work, fostered collaborations and developed underlying methodological frameworks, to drive HCI field forward. We also could invite two SIGCHI Academy members, John Carroll from Penn State University and Aaron Marcus from AM+A, as keynote speakers for this conference.
A couple of graduate and undergraduate students who helped our project got a chance of presenting the progress of the work as posters and papers in IDHF 2014 conference. In addition, one of our papers was accepted for this conference and invited to be published in a special issue of Interacting with Computers: the interdisciplinary journal of Human-Computer Interaction.
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| Current Status of Research Progress |
Current Status of Research Progress
1: Research has progressed more than it was originally planned.
Reason
Our initial plan for the second year of the project was focusing on developing assistive interfaces and developing algorithms for geometric models of target search on the large display. We were successful in implementing those interfaces and algorithms and further we were able to conduct experiments with people with visual impairments. We also extended our interface for the context of the use of horizontal display by elderly users. These works led to the submission of the papers to the international conference and journal. In addition, we also investigated the application of vibrotactile haptic interface for the usage of mobile phones by people with visual impairments. The report of this work was also submitted to the international conference.
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| Strategy for Future Research Activity |
By extending current work, we plan to accomplish the following tasks in the final year of the projects.
(1) We will develop patterns for multi-user interactions with a large public display and study engagement in teamwork of people with visual impairments. This empirical study will consist of a series of controlled laboratory experiments.
(2) Using scenario-based design (Carroll 2000, Making Use: Scenario-Based Design of Human-Computer Interactions), we will evaluate how the affordances of in-situ usage of the display will impact the appropriateness of collaboration between people with visual impairments and non-blind people.
(3) To make the study maximally informative in evaluating collaborations by people with visual impairments, we will devise tasks whose nature can be specified in a manageable manner in terms of the user interfaces’ effectiveness in enabling people with visual impairments to make analogous judgments and perform equivalent actions as their non-blind partners.
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