For more details please consult the upcoming paper:
J. D. Hincapie-Ramos, M. Esbensen, and M. Kogutowska, “Rapid Prototyping of Tangibles with a Capacitive Mouse,” in The 11th Danish HCI Research Symposium – DHRS2011, November 2011. To Appear. – [pdf (6.6MB)]

The problem was “do something cool with the new Microsoft Touch Mouse”. Our proposal was to build a little casing for the mouse, so that it’s multitouch surface could handle multiple inputs (touches) guided to it through wires. This capability together with the wireless communication of the different touches by the mouse and the batteries makes it perfect for rapid prototyping of tangibles.

You can find the guide, the API, and other material here: http://itu.dk/people/mortenq/loki/index.html

The results: we won the first place on the best implementation category.

Enjoy!

Just as it’s used for human-computer interaction (HCI), a design space can be built for other disciplines/areas. Today I found a great example of a design space and analysis for the characters of a comic strip I follow, Niels, according to some of their most salient characteristics: criminal tendency, sexuality, fighting skills, and transparency. See below.

In a few lines, if you want to define your design space you have to identify the relevant characteristics of what you’re designing, define them, define their possible values, match your design objects within such categories, and then analyse the whole set (don’t miss the analysis graph at the bottom of Niels’ cartoon). Good examples in my own work are the design space analysis for InterruptMe (UIST 2011 [2]) and The Rabbit (Ubicomp 2011 [3]).

/JDHR

[1] – Allan Maclean, Richard Young, Victoria Bellotti, and Thomas Moran. Design space analysis: Bridging from theory to practice via design rationale. Esprit, pages 720–730, 1991. URL: citeseer.ifi.unizh.ch/article/maclean91design.html.
[2] – J. D. Hincapié-Ramos, S. Voida, and G. Mark, “A Design Space Analysis of Interrupter–Interruptee Trade-Offs in Availability-Sharing Systems,” in UIST 2011, Oct 16-19, 2011, Santa Barbara, CA, USA. To Appear.
[3] – J. D. Hincapié-Ramos, A. Tabard, and J.E. Bardram, “Mediated Tabletop Interaction in the Biology Lab — Exploring the Design Space of The Rabbit,” in Ubicomp 2011, Sep 17-21, 2011, Beijing, China. To Appear.

I have been thinking about this for a few days, and it strikes me as a great idea. I am a vicious Google user, I have everything from Google Home, to Gmail, to Google Reader, etc. That means that the Google bar is on my window most of the time. Having the Google+ notifications up there provide this “awareness” about the important things I have to look at in Google+.

Then I got to think about Dourish’s embodied interaction [2], his point is that awareness systems (a.k.a social computing) and tangible computing are very natural to use not only because they are “familiar” or have a familiarity to the way we interact in real life. Dourish says there is a deeper connection between them, and in a few words, it’s because they are “accessible in the background”. That is, you can move from an overview or background awareness to a detailed exploration or analysis of things very easily. Then I thought of Google+’s widget as a mechanism that allows precisely that, moving very easily from an overview to a detailed interface, making it an embodied interaction (or natural if you will).

However, attending the notifications is not the only relevant thing we like to do on a social networking platform. Plenty of times I find myself opening facebook or Google+ just to check out what’s going on. Or in case of the hangouts, I open the website just to check out who’s around and try to start a hangout session. The sad thing is that these nice interactions with Google+ are not embodied; you have to go all the way to your stream to realize that there is some action going on, or that people are available to chat or hangout.

But if the Google+ widget can make some of the interactions embodied, how can it support these other two. So, I sat down and sketched some ideas, and I came up with this little add on.

The little flower has two dimensions. The color on its center communicate the activity level in your aggregated stream: a light gray color tells you that nothing has really changed in the last –say– 30 minutes (or form the last time you checked); a bright red color tells you there had been plenty of activity and you should go and check it out. The second dimension is the color of the petals. For each online contact in your friends, or in any circle (configurable), one of the petals will turn blue. That way, when you see a lot of light up petals, you can think of perhaps starting a hangout, and going for a chat!

Having this two pieces of information in the almost pervasive Google bar have the potential to make the Google+ experience more embodied, more natural.

References:
[1] – Compete.com – May 2011 Search Market Share Report
[2] – Paul Dourish – Where the action is: The foundations of embodied interaction – Link

Nonetheless, one of the problems I run into, and from my Internet searches I could see many people did too, was the antenna. While the ID-12 comes with an internal antenna, the ID-2 doesn’t. Having an internal antenna is perfect for prototypical because you just need to wire the reader to the Arduino and off you go. You are reading RFID tags in minutes. However if you start playing with the physical design of your device then you would like to move the antenna to a different place than the reader is, and then the ID-12 is not the piece you need anymore. You could, of course, buy your own reader IC, design a PCB for it and place the antennas and the respective resonance capacitors wherever you want, but… ain’t that quite some work for simply prototyping? I don’t even have an easy access to a PCB printer.

(I came across all this while working on a beefed-up 4×4 super version of the Rabbit)

Then I bought the ID-2 (which despite not having an internal antenna it does have a resonance capacitor) and set to find a matching antenna for it. Man, that’s hard! The point is that you either have to wind it yourself (which off course kills the passion of quick prototyping) or buy it from the market. There are thousand antenna providers out there, but it happens that no-one sells then small <2cm and with the needed 1.08mH inductance.

Well, almost no one, and this is the good news. I was looking into the catalogues of antenna providers until I found CoilCraft, these guys had one that almost matched what I needed (1.08mH capacitance but double axis, I needed it single axis), the 4308RV series at 1.08mH. I bought some of those antennas and they work as magic. However, I realized the antenna shape would make it difficult to build a really slim reader, so I started looking again for a Z-axis antenna. I wrote CoilCraft about it, but they didn’t saw any value in custom making those for me (I said I would buy 50 ).

Until I found the Spanish Grupo Premo (http://www.grupopremo.com/). These guys had some Z-axis antennas but not at the require inductance for the ID-2. I went ahead and asked them to custom make the one I needed, and send me samples for free (quite a move) and to my surprise the guys said YES, and I have now received samples from two of their antennas (3 samples of each model) and they work as a dream.

(ZC1003 – SMD Z AXIS COIL LOW PROFILE)

(ZAC1203 – SMD Z AXIS AIR COIL LOW PROFILE)

So, if you are prototyping with the ID-2 and need a small and reliable Z-index antenna go to the Premo group. And don’t ask them for samples, they will be happy to sell you any amount starting from 1.

/JDHR

(iPhone picture of the samples I received)

First of all, I got very happy when I saw that Google+ has the circles because it validates the approach we proposed for InterruptMe, which is that people has assymetric relationships, and assymetric not only because A can follow B, without B having to reciprocate by following A, but also because A and B can assign each other to different social circles without them knowing. This is very important not only because it reflects the way we humans deal with relationships (at different levels of closeness), but also because the information we share is defined by that closeness. This phenomenon was studied sometime ago by Judy Olson while at n research stay at Microsoft Research. They made this huge survey with loads of questions where they basically asked people how likely would it be tha tthey share information X with person Y. Information X was almost everything that can be shared: status updates, pictures, location, etc. Person Y was one of a set of 30+ different persons. The results showed that everything boils down to 5 very distinguishable groups: spouse, family, boss and trusted colleagues, friends, and public. We used these groups to design InterruptMe’s privacy policy.

When you get Google+ you have 4 default circles plus 3 more groups. The default circles, surprisingly, are friends, family, acquaintances and following. The other 3 groups are “all circles”, “extended circles” and public. Trying to match all those categories between the two works we find something like:

spouse = Google+ family
family = Google+ family
boss and trusted colleagues
friends = Google+ friends, all circles, and extended circles,
public = Google+ acquaintances, public

The extra circle “following” emerges of a different phenomenon where I am following someones that I probably don’t know, and I expect that person not to follow me. Thus it’s more of a filter for the Stream that a category to classify the data that gets shared. OK, so far, so good. This is a great step forward and other social networking sites should follow closely.

However this is not all. There is another set of features that need to be implemented in order make social media websites better systems. And it’s the fact that social media should not only be assymetric (as real relations are) but should also be accountable. That is, one should be able to know what others know about me. Facebook has a –very hidden– feature (privacy settings -> connecting on facebook -> preview my profile) where you can see how a particular person sees your profile. This capability is what I called traceability in InterruptMe, or what other have called accountability of social translucent systems. A traceable system allows you to know how another person see you, or rather what they know about you. Enabling something we humans do everyday which is to keep certain image, or change it, or adjust our behaviors to what other people know about us. This is called plausible deniability and it’s a much needed feature (like to “unavailable” or “invisible” status on IM services).

OK, that’s it. You can find more details here:

http://blog.jhincapie.com/projects/interruptme/

/Juan David

UPDATE:
I just saw that Google+ also has the possibility to review how another person sees your profile (the text box on the right of the image below), which is very good. However, it’s missing the glance-ability that we embedded in InterruptMe’s display, that is, the capacity to see “at a glance” how all of your contacts are seeing you. Moreover, I would add the possibility to see how any member of a particular circle sees my profile.

The second paper was submitted to UIST and it’s about the design space for availability sharing systems. These are a particular kind of awareness systems focused on sharing availability information of a user. The paper also proposes a system called InterruptMe that, based on the design space, proposes new ways to build such systems that is unique from previous attempts. In this paper I collaborated with Steven Voida and Gloria Mark, and we are working very hard to get other pieces of this research completed (surveys, evaluation, etc).

The two papers received very good reviews, and we are trying to bring the demos to the conferences. I will be making them available once I have the camera-ready version of both.

The other good part of having the papers accepted is that I will get to go to China and Santa Barbara, both of which I have never visited. And to top it all I will be an SV, at least for Ubicomp! These is loads of good news!

/JDHR

“Design a good user interface for using the new grid technology and displaying the large amount of data in a simple manner. In addition, the platform should help users collaborate and hence help each other in the analysis of RNA sequences by allowing them to submit jobs to run on different machines and to divide the work among them.”

That was the description of what was going to be my next 3 years as a PhD student. On my first day of research I was asked to prepare a plan for my fieldwork studies. Fieldwork? What’s that???

Now, almost 3 years later, I am writing my dissertation about things that I never knew existed. This has been a fantastic experience!

The PhoneVortex is a little project that came to me during a coffee break and I couldn’t help but implement it. The basic idea is that by using a tabletop you can have a much bigger UI for your phone. Of course this is not a full-fledged implementation but it’s good enough to illustrate the concept. The long term objective is for tabletops, and many other platforms, not to be yet another thing we have to learn to program, but rather useful (situated?) extensions to our everyday objects (laptop, phone)

The PhoneVortex, if very rocky, is an step in that direction. I will probably not be working on it in the coming months as I am in the process of wrapping up my PhD thesis, but if I was this is a list of the things I would be focusing on:

- Efficient UI transfer implementation
- Scalable UI — that the tabletop user could increase the size of the client component
- Attach/Unattach
- Touch Integration (as you can see in the video I didn’t do this yet)
- iPhone and Android support
- Config-less (IP discovery UDP, registry server)
- Password support (single input password, dual input password, shared
input password)
- Sample application supporting multiple modes (phone mode – tabletop mode)

That’s it for now!

Other people act consciously: they are aware of their capacities and
the long term consequences of their decisions. This people are the
ones generally refereed to as egocentric: their ego is the centre of
their existence, and not because they considered the opinions of the
others but because it’s their own selves their ultimate judge. The
others don’t matter, neither for their realization nor for defining
their future endeavours. In this group of people, however, there is a
continuum that stretches between two ends. At one end are the people
that actually stick to their own ego (their own judgement), exercising
real freedom, and take all the responsibility that it implies. At the
other and are people that for any reason don’t follow what their ego
demands of themselves. In an act of intellectual treason they blame
their situation on the other (from the other end or from the first group).

This last condition is a form of self-flagellation more painful that the deception
in the first group. Whereas people in the first group are unconscious of their
decisions and realize of their mistakes towards the end of their lives, people at
the second end of the second group see their mistakes everyday and suffer
the deception in a more dramatic way.

Yes, my answers and advices to you, my friend, are always and will always
be along the same lines as long as you, who are aware of your capacities,
don’t release the ballast and take your rightful place in life.