Touchless Interaction in Surgery
When doctors operate surgery, they sometimes have to check computer tomography, magnetic resonance imagery, and fluoroscopy, along with various procedure-specific imaging applications. However, during the surgery, surgeons are always scrubbed and globed so that they cannot touch input devices without breaking asepsis. Then, surgeons have to remove globes and rescrub, taking precious time. It often produces frustration and delay. According to the research, surgeons need direct control of image data to mentally “get to grips” with what is going on in a procedure.
Before using Kinect to develop touchless imaging system, surgeons controlling mouse functions and air-based gestures were introduced. Afterward, touches control of medical images for surgical settings has grown significantly. The kinect sensor and software development kit were introduced. The kinect sensor is based on a laser and horizontally displaced infrared camera. The kinect helps navigate a predefined stack of MRI or CT images.
The team developed imagery system for vascular surgery at GSTT in London. In order to support collaborative work, the team provided color-coding to give surgeons a distinct pair of cursors corresponding their hands. In order to delvelope imagery system more precisely, the developers should understand the way how clinicians’ handle the equipments and their behavioural pattern.
If kinect imagery system is used for real surgery, I believe it will attribute to save lots of time of surgeons. The funny thing is that Kinect was developed for Xbox game machine. However, these days Kinect are being used in many areas such as art, science, and even medicine. I believe the Kinect has so much potential to change our future. I hope surgeon can operate surgery with Kinect as soon as possible so that they can have quick surgery without any pressure to touch actual imagery devices.
VoxBox: a Tangible Machine that Gathers Opinions from the Public at Events
There are many ways to conduct the survey. Surveys are possibly conducted by people or via phone, email. However, people are usually unfavorable about doing survey, because it takes their time and some people feel uncomfortable doing survey. Therefore, the team came up with VoxBox, a tangible system for gathering opinions on a range of topics in situations at an event through playful and engaging interaction. According to the research team, people are attracted to something that is novel, unusual and at odds with the environment. The Periscope is one of the exmaples, which was designed to provoke children to stop, wonder and interact. According to Houbern and Weichel, the introduction of a curious physical object linked to a public display attracted attention and significantly increased the numbers of people interacting with the display. Therefore, both curiosity and clear affordances are important to grasp people’s attention.
The research team’s approach was designing a large tangible interactive machine that could stand out, was obvious to interact with, was playful and would engage people to gather a diversity of responses and views. The design of Voxbox focused on recreational events such as festivals or fairs, and aimed to gather opinions about such events. In order to grasp people’s attention, Voxbox was designed for users to move through groups of questions, module by module. Each module used a different input mechanism that people were familiar with, like sliders, buttons, knobs, and spinners. The order of module was that the first module asked closed questions about demographics, the second about their current mood, the third about the crowd, the fourth about the event, and the fifth and final asked an open question. The fun mechanism was that a transparent tube at the side drops a ball step by step as the question modules were completed. After the survey, the participant gets a stress ball as reward. As a result, people were willing to talk and conduct survey using Voxbox. Unlike other surveys, the research team made the collected results visible to the users. Real-time results were shown on the website and on a set of visualizations on the reverse side of the system.
Actually, I am a person who doesn’t like doing survey unless the survey is very simply designed. Knowing Voxbox, tangible survey system, was pretty mind blowing to me. By looking at Voxbox, I want to be involve in survey. I hope I can see Voxbox like survey system often rather than boring survey methods.
“Moon Phrases”: A Social Media Faciliated Tool for Emotional Reflection and Wellness
In our lives, emotional wellness is very important. Emotional wellness introduces self-empathy, awareness and acceptance of our feelings. If a person has unhealthy mental process, it will be possibly accompanied by negative self-image, pessimism, skepticism, or depression.
These days, people have been using social media platforms, such as Twitter and Facebook, to share their current thought and opinions with their contacts. Therefore, social media provides a means for capturing behavioural attributes like individuals’ thinking, mood, communication, activities and socialisation. Using this tendency, the team investigated one’s mental wellness via social media such as Facebook and Twitter and came up with a tool named “Moon Phrases”, which tracks a user’s social activity online and thereafter enables behavioural reflection-with the potential to act as a fuzzy diagnostic and with the goal of enhancing emotional wellness in people’s lives. To elaborate more, Moon Phrases actually tracks the historical posting of a user over time on social media to quantify his/her behavior through affective expression and language use manifested in the posts. Therefore, the team pursued the hypothesis that language, affect, and social activity may be leveraged together to enable individuals reflect on their own behaviour over time and in a fine-grained manner.
So, how Moon Phrases work? The design process involved user-cetered design. The team focused on Twitter as the social media tool, because of its data availability within their organization. Moon Phrases show trends of people’s social activity and affect over time. Also, it shows the usage of linguistic styles might relate to people’s social and psychological environment. It shows both positive affect and negative affect as manifested in the Twitter postings. Fuller moons indicate greater positive affect. The white/lighter shade represent positive affect corresponding 1-3 posts, and the orange/darker shade ones corresponded to more than three posts. Therefore, an end user gets a sense of the general volume of posting that leads to certain measurement of affect.
The research is very fascinating because I have never thought about visualising emotional wellness to certain shapes. I think if anyone can use Moon Phrases, they will be able to check their emotional wellness as well as their attitude in online. If people get to know that they are emotionally unstable, they can make changes in their lives so that they can be healed and live stable lives.
The Haptic Creature Project: Social Human-Robot Interaction through Affective Touch
The Haptic Creature Project is about investigating the use of affective touch in the social interaction between human and robot. The Haptic Creature is a robotic device that mimics a small lap animals like cat or dog. Unlike ordinary pets, the Haptic Creature interacts with the human through the modality of touch. An important aspect of social interaction in this project is affect display. For humans, vision and audition are the channel that display affect of human. However, Haptic Creature was built to senses touch of humans. The skin is the largest organ in the human body, which plays a major role in early development. So, affective touch of humans will enable them to communicates with the Haptic Creature. The brief overview of the Haptic Creature architecture is that Human -> Haptic Channel -> Low-Level Sensing -> Gesture Recogniser -> Emoter -> Physical Renderer -> L0w-Level Actuation -> Haptic Channel -> Human. So, the Haptic Channel feels the touch of human, the touch will be recognized by sensor, and the sensor will generate reaction.
In order to feel the Haptic Creature, a human sits with the creature on her lap and gently strokes it. Then, the Haptic Creature may consider this a pleasing interaction, thereby up-dating its emotional state to reflect happiness. In turn, the creature then renders this by brisk, rhythmic breathing; stiffening its ears; and a gentle purring vibration.
As a pet owner, sometime I hope my pet can read my emotion and react to it. However, most of the time, pet doesn’t know what is going on in reality. For example, whether I am happy or sad my dog is always happy and greets me. However, the Haptic Creature is different. It actually understands my emotion and reacts to it. So, I have more mutual feelings with the Haptic Creature. I strongly believe that one day, the Haptic Creature will replace pets. It might be used for people who have Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder or Alzheimer so that they can stay comfortable and relaxed.
Presence and Discernability in Conventional and Non-Photorealistic Immersive Augmented Reality
In the “Presence and Discernability in Conventional and Non-Photorealistic Immersive Augmented Reality”, they investigate the use of NPR in an immersive, stereoscopic, wide field-of-view head-mounted video see-through AR display. An experiment was processed by measuring discernibility and presence in three visual modes, conventional, stylized, and virtualized. To briefly explain three visual modes, the conventional mode is real-time graphics algorithms. The stylized mode applies some effects on real-image. The virtualized mode presents an extreme change in real-image. The three modes represent points on a spectrum that both tranform and diminish photorealism.
What was the tool that presented three visual modes? It was AR-Rift. AR is abbreviation of Augmented Reality. AR systems augment the real environment with virtual content in real-time. The goals of AR system are the seamless integration of virtual content with the real environment. With these concepts of Augment Reality, the experiment was conducted to see discernibility accuracy for each object in each condition and when real and virtual. As a result, in discernability accuracy and Discernability measuring experiment, conventional rendering was most accurate and discernible. Next, stylized and virtualised modes followed.
Reading the paper, I was little bit confused to understand what the paper wants to talk about. On the other hand, it was pretty interesting to know the different between visual modes and AR technology that have been used in many areas. Recently, Oculus was released and I believe that AR technology will totally show different world to us. I hope to experience Oculus as soon as possible and actually see the visual contents that I got to know through the paper.
The Reactable: Tangible and Tabletop Music Performance
Due to the rapid development of technology, many fields have been influenced by new technology. Even music has been influenced by technology, so now music is not only for listening but also for experiencing. According to “The Reactabl: Tangible and Tabletop Music Performance”, the Audiopad or the Jam-o-drum was a starting point of tangible and tabletop interfaces. Following famous tabletop interfaces, Reactable was introduced and it attracted many people’s attention. To introduce Reactable briefly, it is built upon a tabletop interface, which is controlled by manipulating tangible acrylic pucks on its surface. By putting theses pucks on the Reachable’s translucent and luminous round surface, by rotating them and connecting them to each other, performers can combine different elements like synthesizers, effects, sample loops or control elements in order to create a unique and flexible composition. When user place any puck on the Reactable’s surface, it is illuminated and starts to interact with the other neighbouring pucks. Users can see the interactions on screen. Therefore, music players are able to hear the sound and see the interaction between musical component. Actually, Icelandic singer-songwritier Bjork saw potential in Reactable and incorporated the Reactable on her world tour successfully.
Reading the article of The Reactable, I was able to feel the infinite realm of technology. I couldn’t image applying technology to music. For long time, music was just for pleasing our ears, but due to advanced technology, now music is pleasing our ears and eyes. It will introduce new world of music to musicians and ordinary people. These day, I have been learning VDMX, which is the program that visualize music to motion graphic. Using VDMX, I can create motion graphic that reacts to the music. I think Reactable and VDMX have similarity that both can visualzie music. I am very excited to see upcoming music technology. What will be the next? Can people smell music someday? Can people taste music in the future?
3Days in Juri&Lucy
<Characters>
Juri: Jiri is Lucy’s dog. She is 10 years old. she always wants to be around Lucy. Juri decides to have a journey to find her owner Lucy and leaves home.
Lucy: Lucy is Juri’s owner. She thinks that Juri is her best friend. She always wants to be around Juri. However, she stays at Songdo during the week days due to her school.
Bobble 1,2: They are mean dinosaurs who try to catch Juri with their bubbles and send her back home.
<Game Story>
Juri and Lucy have been friends for 10 years. They were always together no matter what. However, after Lucy entered Yonsei University, she has to stay in Songdo during week days. Juri was so upset because she wants to spend time with Lucy. So, Juri decided to leave home and visit Songdo to meet Lucy. However, there were mean Bobbles who were trained by Lucy’s mom to catch Juri with bubbles whenever they encounter Juri. Therefore, Juri has to avoid Bobbles and reach Songdo.
<3days in Juri and Lucy>
Day 1 
Juri “Lucy left home today. Whenever she leaves me, I am very upset. I want to find her. Why doesn’t she bring me to her school? Well… I just decided to have a long journey to look for Lucy. I know where she is. I heard that she is at Songdo. When I goes out for a walk, I will just ran away from mom(Lucy’s mom) and walk to Songdo.
(After running away from mom)
Wow. There are lots of apartment. Where should I go? All the street looks same. hmm.. well.. let me smell. Oh. This way. If I just go straight and turn right, I will be able to take highway to Songdo. Let’s walk, walk and walk. Lucy.. wait for me!! I miss you so much 😦
Day 2
YAY! I found the highway to Songdo! Wow. there are lots of car. I need to be careful. It is kinda scary. uh? wait.. Who the hack is that dinosaur? Why does he shoot bubbles to me? oh.. ehhh.. no.. he tries to catch me with his bubble. I need to run!! run run run !! he is following me. Finally, I was captured by the dinosaur and he send me to my home. I heard that my mom(Lucy’s mom) ordered dinosaurs to look for me and send me home safely. Well, riding bubble and coming back home was pretty fun. I am gonna leave home again very soon. Wait for me, Lucy!
Day 3 
While I was walking with my mom, I ran away from her again. Although she tried to catch me, I am faster than her haha. Well, I easily got out of apartment complex and found high way to Songdo. I saw those bobble dinosaurs who were looking for me, but I escaped from them. Now, finally I am at Songdo. Wow. Songdo is pretty amazing area. I see Lucy’s school. There is Yonsei University. umm.. I heard from Lucy that she is living at dorm F. Let’s walk to dorm F. huh? I think I see her. She is very surprised and she is running to me! YAY! I finally met her. I missed you, Lucy. Please don’t leave me anymore. I am gonna live with you at your dorm.
Technology Affordance
According to Donald Normans “Affordances, Conventions, and Design”, the word affordance was coined by the perceptual psychologist J.J. Gibson to refer to the actionable properties between the world and an actor. Affordances are relationship. Norman emphasised that notion of affordance is often over-used. Also, he mentioned that interfaces are virtual and do not have affordances like physical objects, instead interfaces are better conceptualised as ‘perceived’ affordance.
In “Technology Affordances” by William W. Gaver, affordances are defined as properties of the world that are compatible with an relevant for people’s interactions. He sees affordances in design as a way of focusing on strengths and weaknesses of technologies with respect to the possibilities they offer to people who use them. Gaver advised that considering affordances explicitly in design may help suggest ways to improve the usability of new artifacts.
As a student who are studying design, affordance is such a crucial aspect of design that I always consider of. When it comes to design, it is not easy to evaluate. However, I personally believe that affordance can be a standard of evaluating designs because designing is all about making life better. Reading papers from expert of Affordance, I got to think again about the definition of affordance and remind me that I always have to think more than visibility in design.
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