Natural interaction

In this paper we present a work-in-progress interactive exhibit for the museum of Onna, a little town near to L'Aquila (Italy), almost completely destroyed by the earthquake of April 2009. The installation will be developed as an environment in which visitors of the museum can interact with a natural interaction system and then discover the history of the disaster via rich multimedia contents. Visitors are detected through the adoption of an RFID-based technology, which allows to store their interaction history and build an interest profile used to enrich the experience. Different scenarios have been implemented and tested in order to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed solution.

The work station is the most important part of any CAD/CAM system in industrial operation. Uniform operating procedures and easy access to archives, engineering data, and product models are key requirements of a work station in an integrated system. Environmental and ergonomic aspects are also of increasing importance for the general acceptance of this technology. A work station should take into account the various backgrounds and training of the people who will use it.1 So far, however, most work stations employing interactive graphic displays have been designed to suit the available hardware features rather than the user's needs. The limited dynamics of storage tubes and raster displays inhibit interaction between the user and the computeri.e., man-machine communication. The effectiveness and ease of man-machine communication depend on the kinds of accommodations that a computing system accords the user. Appropriate channels, devices, protocols, and controlling parameters are needed for communication in either direction. But the real aim in constructing CAD/CAM systems should be to achieve man-model communication, a higher function than man-machine communication. Manmachine communication deals with the input and output devices required for the exchange of information between a computer and a user; man-model communication deals with the interactions necessary to define, interrogate, and confirm the computer-based model. In this article we refer to such interaction as "dialogs. " The model involved in the dialog is typically stored in virtual memory and often involves transfers via a database management system. To achieve successful man-model dialogs, a designer must have not only the tools and protocols of man-machine communication but also an unobstructed sense of the model and a feeling of free interaction. Available work stations Work stations, as we know them, take several different forms. They are usually categorized by their graphics capabilities, their processing power, their program

In daily human interactions spatial reasoning occupies an important place. With this ability we can build relations between objects and people, and we can predict the capabilities and the knowledge of the people around us. An interactive robot is also expected to have these abilities in order to establish an efficient and natural interaction.

Bioproductive land is one of the most significant natural resources. People use the land for receiving ecological services. This leads to humans using and favouring certain species, while competing with all other species. Land use can create diverse cultural landscapes of outstanding aesthetic, economic and ecological value, but it may equally result in land degradation, soil loss and impoverished ecosystems. Hence land use is shaped by processes of society-nature interaction. These processes can detract from sustainability-in other words, society-nature interaction may deplete the natural capital upon which the provision of ecosystem services for humans depends. Sustainability indicators aim at monitoring key aspects of society-nature interaction in order to generate information needed to document the current state and the history leading up to it. Moreover, they are useful to communicate complex sustainability problems within the scientific community, to policy-makers and the broad public. This paper introduces a special issue that seeks to contribute to the development of sustainability indicators that track society-nature interaction. We focus on a variety of concepts that measure socioeconomic metabolism. All the discussed approaches relate socioeconomic energy and material flows to the bioproductive area needed to support them, above all, the ecological footprint and the human appropriation of net primary production. In addition, this special issue also analyses the consequences of land use intensity on the diversity, naturalness and patterns of landscapes.

In this paper, a novel AR interface is proposed that provides generic solutions to the tasks involved in augmenting simultaneously different types of virtual information and processing of tracking data for natural interaction. Participants within the system can experience a real-time mixture of 3D objects, static video, images, textual information and 3D sound with the real environment. The userfriendly AR interface can achieve maximum interaction using simple but effective forms of collaboration based on the combinations of human computer interaction techniques. To prove the feasibility of the interface, the use of indoor AR techniques are employed to construct innovative applications and demonstrate examples from heritage to learning systems. Finally, an initial evaluation of the AR interface including some initial results is presented.

The current study investigated differences in the language learning environments of singletons and twins, with special reference to pragmatic factors that might be expected to differ in dyadic and triadic interactive situations. Six twin pairs and 12 singleton children (all firstborn) were observed in natural interactions with their mothers, once at 15 months of age and again at 21 months of age. Twins were lower than singletons on all measures of language development. The language learning environments of the two groups differed as well. Although twin mothers spoke and interacted with their children as much as singleton mothers when twins were analyzed together, when analyzed from the point of view of the individual twin child, twin children received less speech directed specifically to them, participated in fewer and shorter episodes of joint attentional focus, and had fewer and shorter conversations with their mothers. In addition, twin mothers were more directive in their interactional styles. Correlational analyses indicated that variation of these language learning environment factors for the sample as a whole, as well as variation for some of these factors within the twin group itself, was related to early language growth. It is proposed that both the quantitative and qualitative differences observed in the language learning environments of singletons and twins derive from the nature of the triadic situation and that these differences have important effects on the child's early language development.

The current study examined the pattern of prosodic phrasing and the distribution of post-lexical pitch accent types in a Spanish-English bilingual child. We collected utterances from natural interactions between parents and the child at the age of 2;6 and 3;0, and analyzed them using MAE_ToBI and SP_ToBI. Then we compared prosodic development across ages within each language, and compared the child's speech production with monolingual English and Spanish parents' productions. Results revealed that both the child and parents divide their short utterances into smaller prosodic phrases and that most content words bear post-lexical pitch accent. The result suggests that there are abundant acoustic correlates of prosodic phrases and prominence in the language input, and it can make the word segmentation task easy for children.

The natural interaction aspects of the user interface are more significant in the devices of impaired users than the devices of healthy users. This work investigates three controls as the wheelchair controllers according to the design and physicality principles; conventional joystick, isometric joystick, and quad-directional button. Our aim is to provide further ease of use to the impaired whilst strengthening link between embedded software engineering and human-computer interaction. We conclude that an improved multi-function interface design by using Nintendo‘s Wiimote quad-directional button is more intuitive, flexible and natural to use.

Digital device ubiquity increased the need for HCI’s analysis, but academic research is frequently supported in week frameworks. The establishment of a structured body of knowledge is essential for the development of more efficient interfaces and interaction experiences.

The Flexible Action and Articulated Skeleton Toolkit (FAAST) is middleware to facilitate integration of full-body control with virtual reality applications and video games using OpenNI-compliant depth sensors (currently the PrimeSensor and the Microsoft Kinect). FAAST incorporates a VRPN server for streaming the user's skeleton joints over a network, which provides a convenient interface for custom virtual reality applications and games. This body pose information can be used for goals such as realistically puppeting a virtual avatar or controlling an on-screen mouse cursor. Additionally, the toolkit also provides a configurable input emulator that detects human actions and binds them to virtual mouse and keyboard commands, which are sent to the actively selected window. Thus, FAAST can enable natural interaction for existing off-the-shelf video games that were not explicitly developed to support input from motion sensors. The actions and input bindings are configurable at run-time, allowing the user to customize the controls and sensitivity to adjust for individual body types and preferences. In the future, we plan to substantially expand FAAST's action lexicon, provide support for recording and training custom gestures, and incorporate real-time head tracking using computer vision techniques.

Measuring safety as an outcome variable within the ultra-safe civil aviation industry during periods of deliberate organizational change is a difficult, and often fruitless, task. Anticipating eroding safety processes, based on measuring nothing happening over time, does not adequately capture the true state of an evolving safe system, and this is particularly relevant for leaders and managers in a civil aviation industry responsible for maintaining and improving ultra-safe performance while simultaneously managing demanding strategic business goals.

The technology for the automatic shape reconstruction evolved rapidly in recent years, and huge mass of data can be easily produced. Due to the supported accuracy, works of art are one of the ideal fields of use of these devices. Given this particular application domain (Cultural Heritage), two issues arise: how to manage these complex data on commodity computers, and how to improve the ease of use of the visualization tools (as potential users are often not expert at all with interactive graphics). We present a new visualization system that allows naive users to inspect a large complex 3D model at interactive frame rates on off-the-shelf PC's. A main goal in the design of the system has been to provide the user with a very easy and natural interaction approach, based on a straightforward "point and click" metaphor. Visualization efficiency is obtained by adopting a LOD representation and on-line automatic selection of the best-fit level of detail (according to the current view frustum). The system has been used by restores and art curators for the inspection of some high resolution models of statues, and its evaluation was successful.

A more natural interaction between humans and mobile robots can be achieved by bridging the gap between the format of spatial knowledge used by robots and the format of languages used by humans. This enables both sides to communicate by using shared knowledge. Spatial knowledge can be (re)presented in various ways to increase the interaction between humans and mobile robots. One effective way is to describe the route verbally to the robot. This method can permit computer language-naive users to instruct mobile robots, which understand spatial descriptions, to naturally perform complex tasks using succinct and intuitive commands. We present a spatial language to describe route-based navigation tasks for a mobile robot. The instructions of this spatial language are implemented to provide an intuitive interface with which novice users can easily and naturally describe a navigation task to a mobile robot in a miniature city or in any other indoor environment. In our system, the instructions of the processed route are analyzed to generate a symbolic representation via the instruction interpreter. The resulting symbolic representation is supplied to the robot motion planning stage as an initial path estimation of route description and it is also used to generate a topological map of the route’s environment.

The field of robotics has made steady progress in the pursuit of bringing autonomous machines into real-life settings. Over the last 3 years, we have seen omnidirectional humanoid platforms that now bring compliance, robustness and adaptiveness to handle the unconstrained situations of the real world. However, today' s contributions mostly address only a portion of the physical, cognitive or evaluative dimensions, which are all interdependent. This paper presents an overview of our attempt to integrate as a whole all three dimensions into a robot named Johnny-0. We present Johnny-0' s distinct contributions in simultaneously exploiting compliance at the locomotion level, in grounding reasoning and actions through behaviors, and in considering all possible factors experimenting in the wildness of the real world.

Bioproductive land is one of the most significant natural resources. People use the land for receiving ecological services. This leads to humans using and favouring certain species, while competing with all other species. Land use can create diverse cultural landscapes of outstanding aesthetic, economic and ecological value, but it may as well result in land degradation, soil loss and impoverished ecosystems. Hence land use is shaped by processes of society-nature interaction. These processes can detract from sustainability -in other words, society-nature interaction may deplete the natural capital upon which the provision of ecosystem services for humans depends. Sustainability indicators aim at monitoring key aspects of society-nature interaction in order to generate information needed to document the current state and the history leading up to it. Moreover, they are useful to communicate complex sustainability problems within the scientific community, to policy-makers and the broad public. This paper introduces a special issue that seeks to contribute to the development of sustainability indicators that track society-nature interaction. We focus on a variety of concepts that measure socio-economic metabolism. All the discussed approaches relate socioeconomic energy and material flows to the bioproductive area needed to support them, above all, the ecological footprint and the human appropriation of net primary production. Moreover, this special issue also analyses the consequences of land use intensity on the diversity, naturalness and patterns of landscapes.

Advances in digital design and fabrication technologies are leading toward single fabrication systems capable of producing almost any complete functional object. We are proposing a new paradigm for manufacturing, which we call Universal Desktop Fabrication (UDF), and a framework for its development. UDF will be a coherent system of volumetric digital design software able to handle infinite complexity at any spatial resolution and compact, automated, multi-material digital fabrication hardware. This system aims to be inexpensive, simple, safe and intuitive to operate, open to user modification and experimentation, and capable of rapidly manufacturing almost any arbitrary, complete, high-quality, functional object. Through the broad accessibility and generality of digital technology, UDF will enable vastly more individuals to become innovators of technology, and will catalyze a shift from specialized mass production and global transportation of products to personal customization and point-of-use manufacturing. Likewise, the inherent accuracy and speed of digital computation will allow processes that significantly surpass the practical complexity of the current design and manufacturing systems. This transformation of manufacturing will allow for entirely new classes of human-made, peer-produced, micro-engineered objects, resulting in more dynamic and natural interactions with the world. We describe and illustrate our current results in UDF hardware and software, and describe future development directions.

From: IEEE Catalog Number: CFP1308W-USB
ISBN: 978-1-4799-3169-9

Gesture-based interaction constitutes a new paradigm in human-machine interaction. The possibility to control a technical system with gestures on surfaces or in mid air makes it possible to design user interfaces that go beyond the WIMP paradigm (Windows Icons Menus and Pointers), the dominating interaction paradigm since the 1970's. After mainly having been of interest in the human-computer interaction and VR research communities, gesture-based interaction is now quickly becoming part of main-stream applications, thanks to low cost solutions such as Microsoft Kinect and Leap Motion Controller. Gesture-based interaction has proved useful for cultural heritage applications in, for example, a museum or a heritage site since this type of interaction removes the need for physical input devices that might be complicated to use or difficult to maintain. However, the application of gesture-based interaction in the heritage domain is still in an experimental phase. When asking a visitor to interact using gestures, we need to take into consideration what are natural gestures for him/her based on, for example nationality, and culture. Some VR projects using gesture-based interaction (Etruscanning, Giotto's "Rule Approval", Livia's Villa) and also some experiments for objects manipulation have been made by XXXXX in the last three years. The team became aware about the potentialities and the limits of the actual technologies, the cognitive and perceptive reactions of the users, the need to organize cultural contents in a different way because cultural transmission is strongly influenced by this new paradigm of interaction. The good reaction of the public of museums shows how promising this perspective is and encourages us to go further, starting an extensive mapping of "natural" communication gestures to interact within VR applications. The paper investigates what is perceived as “natural” gestures in different countries and cultures for controlling a computer application. It presents the ideas behind and preliminary data from an ongoing study that aims at exploring what is considered proper gestures for cultural heritage applications in three different countries: Sweden, Italy and Egypt.

This paper presents a new interaction technique-scan and tilt-aiming to enable a more natural interaction with mobile museum guides. Our work combines multiple modalitiesgestures, physical selection, location, graphical and voice. In particular, physical selection is obtained by scanning RFID tags associated with the artworks, and tilt gestures are used to control and navigate the user interface and multimedia information. We report on how it has been applied to a mobile museum guide in order to enhance the user experience, providing details on a first user test carried out on our prototype.

This paper reports on the development of a domestic user-interface robot that is able to have a natural human interaction by speech and emotional feedback and is able to navigate in a home environment. The natural interaction with the user is achieved by means of a mechanical head able to express emotions. The robot is aware of the position and identities of the users, both from visual and auditory information. The robot estimates its location in the environment with an appearance-based localization method using a stereo camera system. The navigation to the goal is achieved with a hybrid method, combining planning with reactive control. The robot is designed to operate in an intelligent environment, such that external information can be used to localize users and their intentions (context awareness), and that additional information can be retrieved from various databases in the environment. The result is a service robot that can have a simple dialogue with the user, provide information in a natural way (speech and expressions) and can be instructed to navigate to any specific goal in the environment.

This article presents the development of a group facilitation technique (PROMOD -Procedural Moderation). The author points toward the importance of integrating theoretical assumptions, theory testing and basic empirical research with practical application. The results are based on the observation of various three-member task groups faced with a complex nonheureka problem. These comprise naturally interacting groups, simple arithmetic assembled groups of individuals without any interaction (synthetic groups), and groups in which a group technique of reduced interaction which focuses on individual contribution through facilitated knowledge elicitation is applied.The task involves decisions on what to do after a plane crash and ranking objects with regard to their importance for survival in an alarming situation . The group decision quality is determined by relating to conclusions reached by an independent expert. Results indicate that the observed teams performed best when the PROMOD procedure was applied.

Abstract The objective of this work is to describe the design and implementation of a framework for building multi-disciplinary finite element programs. The main goals are generality, reusability, extendibility, good performance and memory efficiency. Another ...

In this paper we focuses on the virtual reconstruction of the Regolini Galassi tomb in Cerveteri, one of the most famous of the Orientalising period. In the framework of the Etruscanning project a VR application has been realized for permanent use in museums, based on new, low cost and mark-less natural interaction interfaces. The choice of natural interaction is not a purely technical solution for input. It strongly influences the perceptive impact of the real time exploration, the embodiment, the objects' selection and manipulation metaphors, the combination of media, the narrative contents length and the user experience. The evaluation of the public feedback conducted in occasion of some exhibitions allowed us to verify the gesture grammar we were developing and to improve the interfaces step by step.

Degradation of short sisal fibres/Mater Bi-YÔ biocomposites during indoor burial experiments was analysed. Within the first month, water sorption was the main event followed by weight loss. Water sorption results demonstrated that composites absorbed less water than the matrix. The lower sorption capacity of composites was related to the presence of fibreefibre and fibreematrix (both of carbohydrate nature) interactions which delay the water intake and enhances the material stability. In soil burial, all materials followed the same degradation pattern. The amorphous nature of the matrix favoured the preferential removal of starch, which was the most bio-susceptible material, as observed by thermogravimetric analysis (TGA) and scanning electron microscopy (SEM). Fibres seemed to play a secondary role in this process, as confirmed by the slight difference in weight loss between the matrix and composites (40 and 33 wt.%, respectively). The drop in mechanical properties as a function of the exposure time was associated with the preferential loss of matrix and fibre components and the detriment of the fibre/matrix interface.

Purpose – This paper aims to examine interaction patterns in two activities at home and one activity at school when a seven-year-old boy with autism and learning disabilities was supplied with a speech-generating device (SGD). Design/methodology/approach – Activity-based communication analysis (ACA) was used as the basis for analysing and discussing of communicative behaviours in video recordings made before and during

Gesture-based interaction models can be efficient and simpler to understand if designed to correspond to common user interactions with the physical world. This paper presents a 3D interface and its implementation to quickly perform navigation and manipulation tasks in multi-scale and multi-resolution 3D scenes using a low-cost consumer sensor: the Leap Motion controller. The developed system has the goal of exploring the potential of accurate hands and fingers tracking alongside mid-air 3D gestures, to investigate specific design advantages and issues they present in such complex environments.

This paper describes the first in a series of studies which seek to explore the correlation of eye movements with interpretation of geometric shapes. These studies are intended to inform the development of an eye tracking interface for computational tools to support and enhance the fluid interaction required in creative design.

Recent technological advances have enabled human users to interact with computers in ways previously unimaginable. Beyond the confines of the keyboard and mouse, new modalities for human-computer interaction such as voice, gesture, and force-feedback are emerging. However, one necessary ingredient for natural interaction is still missing -emotions. This paper describes the problem of bimodal emotion recognition and advocates the use of probabilistic graphical models when fusing the different modalities. We test our audio-visual emotion recognition approach on 38 subjects with 11 HCI-related affect states. The experimental results show that the average person-dependent emotion recognition accuracy is greatly improved when both visual and audio information are used in classification.

The ability of artificial characters to express emotions is essential for the natural interaction with humans. Their absence could be interpreted as coldness towards the user. Artificial characters can have different embodiments. Screen characters and robotic characters are currently among the most widely used. This study investigates the influence of the character's embodiment on how users perceive the character's emotional expressions. The results show that there is no significant difference in the perceived intensity and recognition accuracy between a robotic character and a screen character.

A novel mobile interface under the form of an emotional compass: a navigation tool for the city from an unexpected point of view. The interface has been created using the possibility to access large number of geo-located user generated contents across multiple social networks, which have then been processed using Natural Language Analysis techniques, to understand the emotions expressed by Internet users in urban environments. This possibility gives rise to the innovative interface for urban navigation presented, and opens up the opportunity to conceptualise and implement novel forms of perception in the city.

This paper presents a powerful animation engine, called Maxine, to develop applications with embodied animated agents. The engine, based on open source tools, allows the management of scenes and virtual characters, and allows multimodal and emotional interaction with the users. The virtual actors are provided with facial expressions, lyp-synch, emotional voice, and can vary their answers depending on their emotional state and on the relationship with the user along the conversation. Maxine virtual agents have been used as virtual presenters in several applications: MaxinePPT is an specific application, developed to allow non-programmers to create 3D presentations easily from classical PowerPoint presentations; a virtual character was used as an interactive interface to communicate and control a domotic environment; and finally, an interactive pedagogical agent was used to simplify and improve teaching and practice of Computer Graphics subjects.

Purpose -The paper aims to explore future and emerging information and communication technologies. It gives a general overview of the social consequences and ethical issues arising from technologies that can currently be reasonably expected. This overview is used to present recommendations and integrate these in a framework of responsible innovation. Design/methodology/approach -The identification of emerging ICTs and their ethical consequences is based on the review and analysis if several different bodies of literature. The individual features of the ICTs and the ethical issues identified this way are then aggregated and analysed. Findings -The paper outlines the 11 ICTs identified. Some of the shared features that are likely to have social relevance include an increase in natural interaction, the invisibility of technology, direct links between humans and technology, detailed models and data of humans and an increasing autonomy of technology that may lead to power over the user. Ethical issues include several current topics such as privacy, data protection, intellectual property and digital divides. New problems may include changes to the way humans are perceived and the role of humans and technology in society. This includes changing power structures and different ways of treating humans.