Sile O'Modhrain

University of Michigan | U-M · School of Information,; School of Music, Theatre and Dance

The allocation of authority between a human driver and an automation system designed to share control with the driver must be managed carefully to ensure safety and driver satisfaction. A driver can tighten grip on a steering wheel, co-contract arm muscles, and change posture to increase authority relative to an automation system that has a finite...

Music is an evolutionarily deep-rooted, abstract, real-time, complex, non-verbal, social activity. Consequently, interaction design in music can be a valuable source of challenges and new ideas for HCI. This workshop will reflect on the latest research in Music and HCI (Music Interaction for short), with the aim of strengthening the dialogue betwee...

Fluidic circuits made up of tiny chambers, conduits, and membranes can be fabricated in soft substrates to realize pressure-based sequential logic functions. Additional chambers in the same substrate covered with thin membranes can function as bubble-like tactile features. Sequential addressing of bubbles with fluidic logic enables just two externa...

This paper discusses issues of importance to designers of media for visually impaired users. The paper considers the influence of human factors on effectiveness of presentation as well as the strengths and weaknesses of tactile, vibrotactile, static pins, haptic, force feedback, and multimodal methods of rendering maps, graphs and models. The autho...

The increased access to books afforded to blind people via e-publishing has given them long-sought independence for both recreational and educational reading. In most cases, blind readers access materials using speech output. For some content such as highly technical texts, music, and graphics, speech is not an appropriate access modality as it doe...

Learning storytelling is beneficial for children's development. Various tools have been proposed to expand the set of materials children can use to compose their stories. However, most previous research focuses on enhancing the visual aspect of storytelling and underexplores the acoustic elements needed for children's stories. In this paper, Olegor...

The effective navigation, mining, and analysis of large time series data sets presents a recurring challenge throughout heliophysics. Audification, a specific form of auditory analysis commonly used in other fields of research (such as geo-seismology), provides a promising technique for the evaluation of spectral features in long heliospheric time...

form only given. In 1987 Alan Kay pointed out that the development of interfaces to computers is going backwards. Whereas children begin building their understanding of the world through embodied exploration, then “advance” to learning through images and finally reach the “sophisticated” state of symbolic understanding, our interaction with compute...

The ancillary (non-sounding) body movements made by expert musicians during performance have been shown to indicate expressive, emotional, and structural features of the music to observers, even if the sound of the performance is absent. If such ancillary body movements are a component of skilled musical performance, then it should follow that acqu...

Music is a rich form of nonverbal communication, in which the movements that expert musicians make during performance can influence the perception of expressive and structural features of the music. Whether the actual skill of a musician is perceivable from vision of movement was examined. In Experiment 1, musicians and non-musicians rated performa...

Haptic technologies are often used to improve access to the structural content of graphical user interfaces, thereby augmenting the interaction process for blind users. While haptic design guidelines offer valuable assistance when developing non-visual interfaces, the recommendations presented are often tailored to the feedback produced via one par...

Gestural interfaces are now a familiar mode of user interaction and gestural input is an important part of the way that users can interact with such interfaces. However, entering gestures accurately and efficiently can be challenging. In this paper we present two styles of visual gesture autocompletion for 2D predictive gesture entry. Both styles e...

In cognitive science and philosophy, the conception of cognition has evolved rapidly in recent years. It is no longer strictly a process that happens inside the head, intervening between perception and action. Instead, cognition is considered something that subsumes both perception and action, engages the body, and even incorporates the response of...

As levels of awareness surrounding accessibility increase, designers often look towards using nonvisual technologies to make existing graphical interfaces (e.g. Web pages) more inclusive. As existing haptic design guidance is not targeted to the specific needs of blind Web users, inappropriate touchable representations of graphical objects may be d...

The evaluation plays a significant role in the process of designing digital musical instruments (DMI). Models are representations of systems or artifacts that provide a means of reflecting upon the design or behavior of a system. Taxonomies are often used in human-computer interaction (HCI) as a means of categorizing methods of design or evaluation...

Recent developments in tactile technologies have made them an attractive choice to improve access to non-visual interfaces. This paper describes the design and evaluation of an extension to an existing browser, which enables blind individuals to explore web pages using tactile feedback. Pins are presented via a tactile mouse to communicate the pres...

An overview of emerging topics, theories, methods, and practices in sonic interactive design, with a focus on the multisensory aspects of sonic experience. Sound is an integral part of every user experience but a neglected medium in design disciplines. Design of an artifact's sonic qualities is often limited to the shaping of functional, representa...

In this paper we explore, by means of three pilot observational studies using virtual objects, how direct perception through action of multi-sensory audio-visual and haptic object properties support the creation of new categories of believable and plausible objects than can be perceived as being different from those that were presented The three ex...

The paper gives insights into the development of new types of electronic percussion instruments, both in terms of the design of underlying hardware and identification of hardware implementation parameters, but also the development of novel interfaces; this allows the performer to control these parameters in the context of extended expressive perfor...

We describe the BodySpace system, which uses inertial sensing and pattern recognition to allow the gestural control of a music player by placing the device at different parts of the body. We demonstrate a new approach to the segmentation and recognition of gestures for this kind of application and show how simulated physical model-based techniques...

In this paper, we propose a theoretical framework for the design of tangible interfaces for musical expression. The main insight for the proposed approach is the importance and utility of familiar sensorimotor experiences for the creation of engaging and playable new musical instruments. In particular, we suggest exploiting the commonalities betwee...

This work investigates the feasibility of a personal verification system using gestures as biometric signatures. Gestures are captured by low-power, low-cost tri-axial accelerometers integrated into an expansion pack for palmtop computers. The objective of our study is to understand whether the mobile system can recognize its owner by how she/he pe...

The increasing complexity and pervasiveness of handheld devices is demanding the development of interaction techniques explicitly tailored for mobile scenarios. This paper examines one such technique: the use of device orientation to navigate through one dimensional lists or menus. We describe a novel input mapping, directly relating list position...

The Scrubber is a general controller for friction-induced sound. Allowing the user to engage in familiar gestures and feel- ing actual friction, the synthesized sound gains an evocative nature for the performer and a meaningful relationship be- tween gesture and sound for the audience. It can control a variety of sound synthesis algorithms of which...

We combine the functionality of a mobile Global Positioning System (GPS) with that of an MP3 player, implemented on a PocketPC, to produce a handheld system capable of guiding a user to their desired target location via continuously adapted music feedback. We illustrate how the approach to presentation of the audio display can benefit from insights...

Increasingly, our mobile devices are acquiring the ability to be aware of their surroundings. These devices are also acquiring the ability to sense what is happening to them — how they are being held and moved. The coincidence of connectedness, awareness and richly multimodal input and output capabilities brings into the hand a device capable of su...

In a series of experiments, we investigated the matching of objects across visual and haptic modalities across different time delays and spatial dimensions. In all of the experiments, we used simple L-shaped figures as stimuli that varied in either the x or the y dimension or in both dimensions. In Experiment 1, we found that cross-modal matching p...

Despite continual consumer demand for richer broadcast media, there have been few examinations of senses other than vision and hearing in this domain. This demonstration paper considers the role that touch may be able to play in future broadcast systems. We have begun to explore the addition of haptic cues to children's cartoons, and through this p...

In this paper we describe object design considerations for the reacTable* project, a novel tangible musical instrument, developed at the Audiovisual Institute at the Universiat Pompeu Fabra. The work presented in this paper is the result of a collaboration with the Palpable Machines Group at Media Lab Europe, which focussed on haptic design aspects...

In this paper we describe object design considerations for the reacTable* project, a novel tangible musical instrument, developed at the Audiovisual Institute at the Universiat Pompeu Fabra. The work presented in this paper is the result of a collaboration with the Palpable Machines Group at Media Lab Europe, which focussed on haptic design aspects...

The Epipe is a novel electronic woodwind controller with continuous tonehole coverage sensing, an initial design for which was introduced at NIME '03. Since then, we have successfully completed two fully operational prototypes. This short paper describes some of the issues encountered during the design and construction of this controller. It also d...

Email has become a central communication channel for private and professional exchange. Its format remains equally neutral regardless of the relation to the recipient. While writing remains an excellent vehicle to communicate tone and emotion, this can sometimes be a painstaking and tedious process, and requires considerable skill.EmoteMail is an e...

Despite continual consumer demand for richer broadcast media, there have been few examinations of senses other than vision and hearing in this domain. This paper considers the role that touch may be able to play in future broadcast systems. We have begun to explore the addition of haptic cues to children's cartoons, and through this process unearth...

What if the traditional relationship between touch and music was essentially turned upside down, making the tactile sensation the aesthetic end? This paper presents a novel coupling of haptics technology and music, introducing the notion of tactile composition or aesthetic composition for the sense of touch. A system that facilitates the compositio...

We describe the design of ComTouch, a device that augments remote voice communication with touch, by converting hand pressure into vibrational intensity between users in real-time. The goal of this work is to enrich inter-personal communication by complementing voice with a tactile channel. We present preliminary user studies performed on 24 people...

Inaccessibility of instructional materials, media, and technologies used in science, engineering, and mathematics education severely restricts the ability of students with little or no sight to excel in these disciplines. Curricular barriers deny the world access to this pool of potential talent, and limit individuals' freedom to pursue technical c...

In this paper, we present the results of a pilot study that examines whether restricting how people can explore objects haptically effects the object attributes they notice and the efficiency with which they can perform a simple sorting task. 25 observers were each randomly assigned to one of five exploration conditions: two hands (the control), on...

In this paper, we test the hypothesis proposed in a companion paper submitted to this conference (see [SS00]), namely that the playability of a bow stroke can be fully described by three parameters -bow velocity, bow position and bow force. Moreover, the envelope of these parameters influences the quality of the attack. In this paper, we present a...

Email has become a central communication channel for private and professional exchange. Its format remains equally neutral regard- less of the relation to the recipient. While writing remains an ex- cellent vehicle to communicate tone and emotion, this can some- times be a painstaking and tedious process, and requires consider- able skill. EmoteMai...

This paper compares the disciplines of Enactive In- terfaces and Tangible User Interface design with the aim of showing that by considering the design knowledge of Tangible User Interfaces with the cognitive depth of the theories of enaction, a new type of "enactive tangible- user-interface" can be designed. Introductions to both disciplines are gi...

As mobile computers become more sophisticated, highly graphical stylus driven interaction techniques are becoming overloaded. The combination of movement based input and vibrotactile haptic output offers a promising alternative. To this end we have developed a hardware platform with these sensing and affecting capabilities and have begun to conside...

Body Mnemonics is an interface design concept for portable devices that uses the body space of the user as an interface. In this system information can be stored and subsequently accessed by moving a device to different locations around one's body. The system is designed to ease cognitive load by relying on our proprioceptive sense, vibrotactile fe...

Handheld devices possess limited input and output functionality when compared with desktop computers. However, many mobile interfaces are simply adaptations of desktop GUIs, and not designed specifically with this reduced capacity for communication in mind. Multi-modal interfaces may serve to redress this discrepancy. In particular we suggest that...

In this paper, we discuss the potential role haptic, or touch, feedback might play in supporting a greater sense of immersion in broadcast content and describe some preliminary scenarios we have developed to explore how haptic content might be created and delivered within the context of a broadcast programme. In particular, this work has looked at...

This paper hopes to further our understanding of cross-modal processing of simple stimuli. Cross-modal matching tasks were conducted where the two objects to be matched were presented to vision and touch at different times. The stimuli used were 'L-shaped' objects with varying lengths in the X and Y dimensions. Participants were shown a visual and...

This paper explores the design space afforded by haptic communication. It differs from previous explorations of this topic in that it considers situations in which the communication is not tightly synchronized. Specifically, this paper is concerned with the idea of a haptic instant message. It discusses the motivations that inspired the development...

The remote control of vehicles, typically useful in hazardous situations, is a difficult and skilled task. Users experience great difficulty in performing relatively simple operations, such as avoiding obstacles and maintaining control of the device. This contrasts strongly with high user performance when controlling a local vehicle. We suggest tha...