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A Peripheral Display Toolkit
Tara Matthews[1] , Tye Rattenbury[1] , Scott Carter[1] , Anind K. Dey[2] , Jennifer Mankoff[1]
[1] EECS Department UC Berkeley[2] Intel-Berkeley Research LabUIST 2003
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OUTLINE
• INTRODUCTION
• SURVEY OF PERIPHERAL DISPLAYS AND ATTENTION
• ARCHITECTURE
• SUPPORT FOR THREE KEY CHARACTERISTICS
• EXAMPLE APPLICATIONS
• CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE WORK
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INTRODUCTION (1/4)
• Traditionally, computer interfaces have been confined to task-focused, desktop computing activities.
• Ubiquitous computing devices are meant to integrate seamlessly into the world and almost disappear.
• Toolkit : Peripheral displays
→ Ubiquitous computing devices that give information to a user without demanding their full attention.
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INTRODUCTION (2/4)
What does a typical peripheral display look
like? ● Physical
● Audible
● Simply displayed on a monitor
● Direct interaction occurs rarely
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INTRODUCTION (3/4)
• It is difficult to build such a display for several reasons.
→ First, they are often physically-based and distributed.
→ Second, the key characteristics of peripheral displays
must be dealt with in an ad-hoc manner.
• We believe there is a need for tools supporting the creation of peripheral displays.
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INTRODUCTION (4/4)
• They have designed and implemented the Peripheral Displays Toolkit (PTK).
→ Providing architectural support for key features of peripheral displays.
→ Allowing designers to more easily prototype them and supporting reuse of code.
• Architecture adds support for three key characteristics of peripheral displays:
1) Abstraction
2) Notification
3) Transitions
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SURVEY OF PERIPHERAL DISPLAYS AND ATTENTION (1/5)
1) Categorize attention into four main zones: preattention, inattention, divided attention, and focused attention.
A. What is attention? (1/2)
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SURVEY OF PERIPHERAL DISPLAYS AND ATTENTION (2/5)
2) Peripheral displays are displays that show information that a person is aware of, but not focused on.
→This includes inattention and divided attention, but not
pre-attention or focused attention.
3) Ambient displays rely on divided attention.
4) Alerting displays, such as our bus arrival display, also rely on divided attention.
A. What is attention? (2/2)
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SURVEY OF PERIPHERAL DISPLAYS AND ATTENTION (3/5)
• Notification levels:
1) NotificationIgnore
Change blind
Make Aware
Interrupt
Demand action
Inattention Divided attention
Focused attention No attention
B. Characteristics of Peripheral Displays (1/3)
Demand action Interrupt Make aware Change blind Ignore
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SURVEY OF PERIPHERAL DISPLAYS AND ATTENTION (4/5)
• Transitions are based upon the notification level of the data, and the modality of the display.
• Alerting displays typically utilize abrupt transitions for important information.
• Several applications have shown that significant changes in the interface will draw a user’s attention.
2) Transitions
B. Characteristics of Peripheral Displays (2/3)
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SURVEY OF PERIPHERAL DISPLAYS AND ATTENTION (5/5)
• Abstraction is the process of removing or extracting data so that the result includes fewer or different details than the original.
• Types of abstraction:
1. Degradation
2. Feature extraction
3) Abstraction
B. Characteristics of Peripheral Displays (2/3)
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ARCHITECTURE
12 3 4
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SUPPORT FOR THREE KEY CHARACTERISTICS (1/3)
• We currently provide default abstractors that convert from input data to numbers, switches, audio, images, light, and motors.
• Application-specific feature abstraction is specified by overriding a Translate class and passing that in to the appropriate abstractor.
A) Abstraction
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SUPPORT FOR THREE KEY CHARACTERISTICS (2/3)
• Notification levels are commonly chosen based on :
B) Notification
Thresholds
Exact match
Degree of change
Pattern matching
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SUPPORT FOR THREE KEY CHARACTERISTICS (3/3)
• A transition’s primary role is to create a series of display events for the output object that provide a desired change of awareness for the user.
• Our default transition class supports the major types of transitions found in our survey:
C) Transitions
Smooth transitions
Abrupt transitions
Attention grabbing transitions
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EXAMPLE APPLICATIONS (1/5)
• Giving users a sense of how much time is left until popular buses reach their chosen bus stops.
• It rises one inch every minute until it disappears under the skirt when the bus has left the bus stop.
• Problem: The Bus Mobile did not properly use notification.
A) Bus Mobile
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EXAMPLE APPLICATIONS (2/5)
• The display consists of six columns of LED lights, labeled below with the corresponding bus number.
• When the bus is six minutes away, the LED lights flash on and off a few times to catch the user’s attention.
• Using a different abstractor to translate minutes to number of LED lights and changes to the parameters for the notification setters.
B) Bus LED
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EXAMPLE APPLICATIONS (3/5)
• Our stock and news ticker supports arbitrary notification levels and transitions.
• Change-blind transitions were implemented as fade-out/fade-in transitions.
• Make-aware transitions were implemented as a single flash.
• Interrupt transitions were implemented as multiple flashes.
C) Stock-News Displays
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EXAMPLE APPLICATIONS (4/5)
• The Ring Ticker is designed for those who cannot easily hear important audio events.
• When the phone rings, the word “ring!” slowly fades into view as it scrolls across the ticker.
• This display demonstrates feature abstraction.
• Notification level is always set to either “make aware” or “ignore”.
D) Remote audio awareness — Ring Ticker
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EXAMPLE APPLICATIONS (5/5)
• The Guitar, provides awareness of audio events occurring in a remote space by plucking a string.
• It used an abstractor to convert remote audio volumes to servomotor positions.
• Notification levels were set to change blind, make aware, or interrupt, using a threshold setter, based on volume.
D) Remote audio awareness — Guitar
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CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE WORK (1/2)
• Three key characteristics of peripheral displays: abstraction, notification, and transitions.
• We developed a tool to support the building of peripheral displays, based on these characteristics.
• In the future, we plan to conduct studies that can help us to determine how best to populate our library.
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CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE WORK (2/2)
• We will expand the range of animations supported by our transition implementation, and include more sophisticated support for animation in our transition class.
• We are also interested in expanding the interpretation of local context currently available to transition classes in the toolkit.