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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.