Digital immersion is moving into public space. Interactive screens and public displays are deployed in urban environments, malls, and shop windows. Inner city areas, airports, train stations and stadiums are experiencing a transformation from traditional to digital displays enabling new forms of multimedia presentation and new user experiences. Imagine a walkway with digital displays that allows a user to immerse herself in her favorite content while moving through public space. In this paper we discuss the fundamentals for creating exciting public displays and multimedia experiences enabling new forms of engagement with digital content. Interaction in public space and with public displays can be categorized in phases, each having specific requirements. Attracting, engaging and motivating the user are central design issues that are addressed in this paper. We provide a comprehensive analysis of the design space explaining mental models and interaction modalities and we conclude a taxonomy for interactive public display from this analysis. Our analysis and the taxonomy are grounded in a large number of research projects, art installations and experience. With our contribution we aim at providing a comprehensive guide for designers and developers of interactive multimedia on public displays.

http://www.medien.ifi.lmu.de/pubdb/publications/pub/mueller2010mm/mueller2010mm.pdf

Requirements and design space for interactive public displays

In this paper we present our findings from a lab and a field study investigating how passers-by notice the interactivity of public displays. We designed an interactive installation that uses visual feedback to the incidental movements of passers-by to communicate its interactivity. The lab study reveals: (1) Mirrored user silhouettes and images are more effective than avatar-like representations. (2) It takes time to notice the interactivity (approx. 1.2s). In the field study, three displays were installed during three weeks in shop windows, and data about 502 interaction sessions were collected. Our observations show: (1) Significantly more passers-by interact when immediately showing the mirrored user image (+90%) or silhouette (+47%) compared to a traditional attract sequence with call-to-action. (2) Passers-by often notice interactivity late and have to walk back to interact (the landing effect). (3) If somebody is already interacting, others begin interaction behind the ones already interacting, forming multiple rows (the honeypot effect). Our findings can be used to design public display applications and shop windows that more effectively communicate interactivity to passers-by.

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Looking glass: a field study on noticing interactivity of a shop window

Although gaze is an attractive modality for pervasive interactions, the real-world implementation of eye-based interfaces poses significant challenges, such as calibration. We present Pursuits, an innovative interaction technique that enables truly spontaneous interaction with eye-based interfaces. A user can simply walk up to the screen and readily interact with moving targets. Instead of being based on gaze location, Pursuits correlates eye pursuit movements with objects dynamically moving on the interface. We evaluate the influence of target speed, number and trajectory and develop guidelines for designing Pursuits-based interfaces. We then describe six realistic usage scenarios and implement three of them to evaluate the method in a usability study and a field study. Our results show that Pursuits is a versatile and robust technique and that users can interact with Pursuits-based interfaces without prior knowledge or preparation phase.

Pursuits: spontaneous interaction with displays based on smooth pursuit eye movement and moving targets

Most tabletop research presents findings from lab-based user studies, focusing on specific interaction techniques. This means we still know little about how these new interfaces perform in real life settings and how users appropriate them. This paper presents findings from a field study of an existing interactive table in a museum of natural history. Visitors were found to employ a wide variety of gestures for interacting; different interface elements invited different types of gesture. The analysis highlights challenges and design conflicts in the design of tabletop interfaces for public settings, such as latency times and side-effects of dasiaframe-lesspsila content, which had some users struggling to learn how to interact. While the majority of visitors engaged at least briefly with the table, which enabled browsing question-answer text about animal species, talk amongst visitors dealt mainly with how to interact and evoked few comments, indicating shallow engagement with content.

/pdf/i-don-t-understand-it-either-but-it-is-cool-visitor-4alwdvtcia.pdf

“I don’t understand it either, but it is cool” - visitor interactions with a multi-touch table in a museum

In this paper we describe our findings from a field study that was conducted at the Vancouver Aquarium to investigate how visitors interact with a large interactive table exhibit using multi-touch gestures. Our findings show that the choice and use of multi-touch gestures are influenced not only by general preferences for certain gestures but also by the interaction context and social context they occur in. We found that gestures are not executed in isolation but linked into sequences where previous gestures influence the formation of subsequent gestures. Furthermore, gestures were used beyond the manipulation of media items to support social encounters around the tabletop exhibit. Our findings indicate the importance of versatile many-to-one mappings between gestures and their actions that, other than one-to-one mappings, can support fluid transitions between gestures as part of sequences and facilitate social information exploration.

/pdf/gestures-in-the-wild-studying-multi-touch-gesture-sequences-2qzxc5ny8k.pdf

Gestures in the wild: studying multi-touch gesture sequences on interactive tabletop exhibits

We present data from detailed observations of CityWall, a large multi-touch display installed in a central location in Helsinki, Finland. During eight days of installation, 1199 persons interacted with the system in various social configurations. Videos of these encounters were examined qualitatively as well as quantitatively based on human coding of events. The data convey phenomena that arise uniquely in public use: crowding, massively parallel interaction, teamwork, games, negotiations of transitions and handovers, conflict management, gestures and overt remarks to co-present people, and "marking" the display for others. We analyze how public availability is achieved through social learning and negotiation, why interaction becomes performative and, finally, how the display restructures the public space. The multi-touch feature, gesture-based interaction, and the physical display size contributed differentially to these uses. Our findings on the social organization of the use of public displays can be useful for designing such systems for urban environments.

/pdf/it-s-mine-don-t-touch-interactions-at-a-large-multi-touch-3pqhar40jh.pdf

It's Mine, Don't Touch!: interactions at a large multi-touch display in a city centre

A method and an apparatus comprising operating a processor of an apparatus as a first processor and/or as a second processor. The method at a first processor comprises recognizing the proximity of a second apparatus; recognizing a first user input and in response to the user input, sending an application share invitation to the second apparatus. The method at a second processor comprises recognizing the proximity of a first apparatus and in response to receiving an application share invitation from the first apparatus, displaying a security prompt for the user on the display.

Tommi Ilmonen

Papers

It's Mine, Don't Touch!: interactions at a large multi-touch display in a city centre

Application sharing between devices in proximity to each other