While sometimes the task that motivates searching, browsing, and collecting information resources... more While sometimes the task that motivates searching, browsing, and collecting information resources is finding a particular fact, humans often engage in intellectual and creative tasks, such as comparison, understanding, and discovery. Information discovery tasks involve not only finding relevant information, but also seeing relationships among collected information resources, and developing new ideas. Prior studies of search have focused on time and accuracy, metrics of limited value for measuring creativity. We develop new experimental methods to evaluate the efficacy of representational systems for information discovery by measuring the emergence of new ideas. We also measure the variety of web sites that participants visit when engaging in a creative task, and gather experience report data. We compare the efficacy of the typical format for collections, the textual list with a new format, the composition of image and text surrogates. We conduct an experiment that establishes that representing collections with composition of image and text surrogates promotes emergence in information discovery.
Navigational surrogates are representations that stand for information resources within search en... more Navigational surrogates are representations that stand for information resources within search engine result sets, e-commerce sites, and digital libraries. They also form the basis of personal collections of media, such as web pages. Our hypothesis is that the formats of individual surrogates and collections play an important role in how people use collections. We are particularly interested in processes of information discovery, in which ideas are iteratively reformulated in the context of working with information. To investigate how the representation of navigational surrogates affects how people work with information, we have created a collection of undergraduate psychology curriculum resources in 3 alternative formats: a linear list of textual elements, a spatialized set of textual elements, and a spatialized set of labeled images that have been composited. To evaluate navigation with these surrogate formats during information discovery, we designed divergent browsing tasks, that is, tasks that require assembling information from multiple diverse sources. A within-subjects evaluation indicates that users prefer the spatial labeled images format, and navigate more effectively with it.
People need to find, work with, and put together information. Diverse activities, such as scholar... more People need to find, work with, and put together information. Diverse activities, such as scholarly research, comparison shopping, and entertainment involve collecting and connecting information resources. We need to represent collections in ways that promote understanding of individual information resources and also their relationships. Representing individual resources with images as well as text makes good use of human cognitive facilities. Composition, an alternative to lists, means putting representations of elements in a collection together using design principles to form a connected whole. We develop combinFormation, a mixed-initiative system for representing collections as compositions of image and text surrogates. The system provides a set of direct manipulation facilities for forming, editing, organizing, and distributing collections as compositions. Additionally, to assist users in sifting through the vast expanse of potentially relevant information resources, the system also includes a generative agent that can proactively engage in processes of collecting information resources and forming image and text surrogates. A generative temporal visual composition agent develops the collection and its visual representation over time, enabling users to see more possibilities. To keep the user in control, we develop interactive techniques that enable the user to direct the agent. For evaluation, we conducted a field study in an undergraduate general education course offered in the architecture department. Alternating groups of students used combinFormation as an aid in preparing one of two major assignments involving information discovery to support processes of invention. The students that used combinFormation were found to perform better.
Our objective is to explore distributed forms of creativity that arise in play to help guide and ... more Our objective is to explore distributed forms of creativity that arise in play to help guide and foster supportive research, game design, and technology. This workshop seeks to bring together researchers, game designers, and others to examine theories of creativity and play, game design practices, methods for studying creativity in play, and creative play experiences. Participants will present work, video prototype, discuss topics, and contribute to outcomes. CCS Concepts •Human-centered computing → Collaborative and social computing; HCI design and evaluation methods;
International Journal of Human-computer Interaction, Jun 24, 2008
Although sometimes the task that motivates searching, browsing, and collecting information resour... more Although sometimes the task that motivates searching, browsing, and collecting information resources is finding a particular fact, humans often use information resources in intellectual and creative tasks that can include comparison, understanding, and discovery. Information discovery tasks involve not only finding relevant information but also seeing relationships among collected information resources and developing new ideas. The hypothesis presented here is that how information is represented impacts the magnitude of human creativity in information discovery tasks. How can we measure this creative cognition? Studies of search have focused on time and accuracy, metrics of limited value for measuring creative discovery. A new experimental method is developed, which measures the emergence of new ideas in information discovery, to evaluate the efficacy of representations. The efficacy of the typical textual list representation for information collections is compared with an alternative representation, combinFormation's composition of image and text surrogates. Representing collections with such compositions increases emergence in information discovery.
Access to devices that integrate Global Positioning data with image and sound acquisition becomes... more Access to devices that integrate Global Positioning data with image and sound acquisition becomes more common, enabling people to build large collections of locative multimedia. As the size and number of these locative media collections grow, so too does the importance of systems that support collection sensemaking. Media semantics, which include automatically acquired location data, as well as user-supplied annotations, play a key role in these user-centered processes of collection utilization. This demo presents a Zoomable Map Image Collection Sensemaking System that enables the collection, organization, browsing, and annotation of locative images. The Zoomable Map Perspective is supplemented by event-based clustering. Dynamic views are generated automatically from captured media. The system is currently being used to document the location and condition of homes and neighborhoods in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
Describes a socially-interactive location-based gaming system that will be used to explore team d... more Describes a socially-interactive location-based gaming system that will be used to explore team dynamics, use of technology for collaborative problem solving, and facilitate suspension of disbelief by humanizing the interface with the virtual world. “They’ll get me soon, ” Sarah thought as she walked rapidly across the courtyard of the university, glancing over her shoulder. “They’re probably closing in on me right now…” “You’re doing fine, Sarah, ” came Jeff’s voice over her radio, “the predators haven’t noticed you yet, the object should be near you somewhere.” She took one more step forward before she saw it: a posting board in the middle of the concourse. “Naturally, ” she
We used human movement as the basis for designing a collaborative aesthetic design environment. O... more We used human movement as the basis for designing a collaborative aesthetic design environment. Our intention was to promote social interaction and creative expression. We employed off-the-shelf computer vision technology. Movement became the basis for the choreography of gestures, the development of gesture recognition, and the development of imagery and visualization. We discovered that the design of clear affordances is no less important in movement-based than in mouse-based systems. Through an integrated and iterative design process, we developed a new type of affordance, the choreographic button, which integrates choreography, gesture recognition, and visual feedback. Jumping, a quick movement, and crouching, a sustained gesture, were choreographed to form a vocabulary that is personally expressive, and which also facilitates automatic recognition. How can we evaluate socially motivated interactive systems? To create a context for evaluation, we held an integrated exhibition, party, and user study event. This mixing of events produced an engaging environment in which participants could choose to interact with each other, as well as with the design environment. We prepared a mouse-based version of the design environment, and compared how people experienced it with the movementbased system. Our study demonstrates that movement-based affordances promote social interaction.
... INTRODUCTION Life should be fun, exciting, and social. We are building a location-aware game ... more ... INTRODUCTION Life should be fun, exciting, and social. We are building a location-aware game that brings people together by combining the fun of a scavenger hunt and tag in the real world with the excitement of an action-based computer Page 2. 2 game. ...
Rogue Signals is a location-aware team-based augmented reality game. It is a platform for experim... more Rogue Signals is a location-aware team-based augmented reality game. It is a platform for experimentation on team dynamics in situations where critical information is scarce and distributed among participants who must communicate through restricted channels. A human team, consisting of a coordinator and a group of harvesters competes against a group of autonomous agents. The game design intentionally constrains the level of information made available to the harvesters, which makes the success of the team dependent on human-to-human communication between the coordinator and the harvesters. The goal is to promote and explore processes of team communication and cognition. Applications include emergency response, as well as social networking and entertainment.
This paper presents a prototype digital game that integrates team communication and psychophysiol... more This paper presents a prototype digital game that integrates team communication and psychophysiological measures as components of play. Our game, PhysiRogue, adds an affective dimension to the location-aware augmented reality game, Rogue Signals. We are using this experimental platform to explore the complementary roles of human-to-human and computer-to-human communication in team cognition. Physiological signals are acquired and processed to form psychophysiological measures. These measures affect game play both through team understanding and altered game mechanics. We are investigating the role of physiological state in immersion and implicit coordination in distributed teams. In PhysiRogue, a human team is split into two parts, each with access to different aspects of the game's information. PhysiRogue's implementation is a simulation of our location-aware game, Rouge Signals with the addition of psychophysiological measures. As components of the simulation, seekers, who form most of the human team, move in the "real world" and are "tracked" in an overlaid virtual world. The seekers, who must gather treasures in the "real world", are chased in the virtual world by predators, which they cannot see. The coordinator is another human player who acts as the team leader and is not co-located with the seekers. The coordinator can only see the "virtual world" and thus can see the predators, but is limited to the perceptions of the network. Since the information contained on each side of the team is different, the two sides need to coordinate and communicate in order to succeed. This ability is limited due to cognitive bandwidth and the need for turn taking in meaningful verbal communication. Combined, the components of the system mimic the dynamic coordination requirements of real-life teams deployed in high-stress situations. With PhysiRogue we are integrating psychophysiological measures into digital game play. Electrodermal and electromyographic activity are simultaneously captured from players during game play. Such activity is indicative of increased attention, effort, and stress. The equipment used to measure this activity is portable and non-invasive. The physiological signals are processed to produce a real time "activation" level. Predators are able to track players based upon their "activation" levels, meaning that the computer opponents "sense" activation in the live players. They pursue seekers with higher "activation" levels. We hypothesize that this will lead to new game play strategies, a greater level of immersion, and new forms of focused involvement. In addition, visualizations of the seekers' activation level provide the coordinator with additional team status information, affording the coordinator the ability to modify strategy more effectively. We are investigating designs for the visualization and the game mechanics, and how these factors affect team cognition and immersion.
Although sometimes the task that motivates searching, browsing, and collecting information resour... more Although sometimes the task that motivates searching, browsing, and collecting information resources is finding a particular fact, humans often use information resources in intellectual and creative tasks that can include comparison, understanding, and discovery. Information discovery tasks involve not only finding relevant information but also seeing relationships among collected information resources and developing new ideas. The hypothesis presented here is that how information is represented impacts the magnitude of human creativity in information discovery tasks. How can we measure this creative cognition? Studies of search have focused on time and accuracy, metrics of limited value for measuring creative discovery. A new experimental method is developed, which measures the emergence of new ideas in information discovery, to evaluate the efficacy of representations. The efficacy of the typical textual list representation for information collections is compared with an alternati...
A Transitory Interface Component for the In-Context Visualization and Adjustment of a Value. (Aug... more A Transitory Interface Component for the In-Context Visualization and Adjustment of a Value. (August 2007) Andrew Webb, B.S., Texas A&M University Chair of Advisory Committee: Dr. Andruid Kerne Some agent-based systems depend on eliciting ratings from the user. However, the user’s willingness to provide ratings is limited due to requisite demands of attention and effort. From a human-centered view, we redefine providing ratings as expressing interest. We develop a new interface component for parameter setting, the In-Context Slider, which reduces physical effort and demand on attention by using fluid mouse gestures and in-context interaction. We hypothesize that such an interface should make interest expression easier for the user. We evaluated the In-Context Slider as an interest expression component compared with a more typical interface. Participants performed faster with the In-Context Slider. They found it easier to use and more natural for expressing interest. We then integrat...
Our objective is to explore distributed forms of creativity that arise in play to help guide and ... more Our objective is to explore distributed forms of creativity that arise in play to help guide and foster supportive research, game design, and technology. This workshop seeks to bring together researchers, game designers, and others to examine theories of creativity and play, game design practices, methods for studying creativity in play, and creative play experiences. Participants will present work, video prototype, discuss topics, and contribute to outcomes.
CHI '05 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2005
Navigational surrogates are representations that stand for information resources within search en... more Navigational surrogates are representations that stand for information resources within search engine result sets, e-commerce sites, and digital libraries. They also form the basis of personal collections of media, such as web pages. Our hypothesis is that the formats of individual surrogates and collections play an important role in how people use collections. We are particularly interested in processes of information discovery, in which ideas are iteratively reformulated in the context of working with information. To investigate how the representation of navigational surrogates affects how people work with information, we have created a collection of undergraduate psychology curriculum resources in 3 alternative formats: a linear list of textual elements, a spatialized set of textual elements, and a spatialized set of labeled images that have been composited. To evaluate navigation with these surrogate formats during information discovery, we designed divergent browsing tasks, that is, tasks that require assembling information from multiple diverse sources. A within-subjects evaluation indicates that users prefer the spatial labeled images format, and navigate more effectively with it.
Proceedings of the 6th ACM SIGCHI conference on Creativity & cognition - C&C '07, 2007
While sometimes the task that motivates searching, browsing, and collecting information resources... more While sometimes the task that motivates searching, browsing, and collecting information resources is finding a particular fact, humans often engage in intellectual and creative tasks, such as comparison, understanding, and discovery. Information discovery tasks involve not only finding relevant information, but also seeing relationships among collected information resources, and developing new ideas. Prior studies of search have focused on time and accuracy, metrics of limited value for measuring creativity. We develop new experimental methods to evaluate the efficacy of representational systems for information discovery by measuring the emergence of new ideas. We also measure the variety of web sites that participants visit when engaging in a creative task, and gather experience report data. We compare the efficacy of the typical format for collections, the textual list with a new format, the composition of image and text surrogates. We conduct an experiment that establishes that representing collections with composition of image and text surrogates promotes emergence in information discovery.
Proceedings of the 14th annual ACM international conference on Multimedia - MULTIMEDIA '06, 2006
Access to devices that integrate Global Positioning data with image and sound acquisition becomes... more Access to devices that integrate Global Positioning data with image and sound acquisition becomes more common, enabling people to build large collections of locative multimedia. As the size and number of these locative media collections grow, so too does the importance of systems that support collection sensemaking. Media semantics, which include automatically acquired location data, as well as user-supplied annotations, play a key role in these user-centered processes of collection utilization. This demo presents a Zoomable Map Image Collection Sensemaking System that enables the collection, organization, browsing, and annotation of locative images. The Zoomable Map Perspective is supplemented by event-based clustering. Dynamic views are generated automatically from captured media. The system is currently being used to document the location and condition of homes and neighborhoods in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
Proceedings of the 14th annual ACM international conference on Multimedia - MULTIMEDIA '06, 2006
We used human movement as the basis for designing a collaborative aesthetic design environment. O... more We used human movement as the basis for designing a collaborative aesthetic design environment. Our intention was to promote social interaction and creative expression. We employed off-the-shelf computer vision technology. Movement became the basis for the choreography of gestures, the development of gesture recognition, and the development of imagery and visualization. We discovered that the design of clear affordances is no less important in movement-based than in mouse-based systems. Through an integrated and iterative design process, we developed a new type of affordance, the choreographic button, which integrates choreography, gesture recognition, and visual feedback. Jumping, a quick movement, and crouching, a sustained gesture, were choreographed to form a vocabulary that is personally expressive, and which also facilitates automatic recognition. How can we evaluate socially motivated interactive systems? To create a context for evaluation, we held an integrated exhibition, party, and user study event. This mixing of events produced an engaging environment in which participants could choose to interact with each other, as well as with the design environment. We prepared a mouse-based version of the design environment, and compared how people experienced it with the movementbased system. Our study demonstrates that movement-based affordances promote social interaction.
Proceedings of the 13th annual ACM international conference on Multimedia - MULTIMEDIA '05, 2005
In this paper, we describe Censor Chair, an art installation that creates a shared experience add... more In this paper, we describe Censor Chair, an art installation that creates a shared experience addressing forms of censorship including self-censorship, censorship of a group upon an individual, visual and auditory censorship in digital media, and censorship in society. We are taking a playful position in considering relationships between censorship and sensors that monitor physiology. Censor Chair makes use of a galvanic skin response (GSR) sensor, live video feeds, and a barcode reader to drive the presentation of a digital media library.
While sometimes the task that motivates searching, browsing, and collecting information resources... more While sometimes the task that motivates searching, browsing, and collecting information resources is finding a particular fact, humans often engage in intellectual and creative tasks, such as comparison, understanding, and discovery. Information discovery tasks involve not only finding relevant information, but also seeing relationships among collected information resources, and developing new ideas. Prior studies of search have focused on time and accuracy, metrics of limited value for measuring creativity. We develop new experimental methods to evaluate the efficacy of representational systems for information discovery by measuring the emergence of new ideas. We also measure the variety of web sites that participants visit when engaging in a creative task, and gather experience report data. We compare the efficacy of the typical format for collections, the textual list with a new format, the composition of image and text surrogates. We conduct an experiment that establishes that representing collections with composition of image and text surrogates promotes emergence in information discovery.
Navigational surrogates are representations that stand for information resources within search en... more Navigational surrogates are representations that stand for information resources within search engine result sets, e-commerce sites, and digital libraries. They also form the basis of personal collections of media, such as web pages. Our hypothesis is that the formats of individual surrogates and collections play an important role in how people use collections. We are particularly interested in processes of information discovery, in which ideas are iteratively reformulated in the context of working with information. To investigate how the representation of navigational surrogates affects how people work with information, we have created a collection of undergraduate psychology curriculum resources in 3 alternative formats: a linear list of textual elements, a spatialized set of textual elements, and a spatialized set of labeled images that have been composited. To evaluate navigation with these surrogate formats during information discovery, we designed divergent browsing tasks, that is, tasks that require assembling information from multiple diverse sources. A within-subjects evaluation indicates that users prefer the spatial labeled images format, and navigate more effectively with it.
People need to find, work with, and put together information. Diverse activities, such as scholar... more People need to find, work with, and put together information. Diverse activities, such as scholarly research, comparison shopping, and entertainment involve collecting and connecting information resources. We need to represent collections in ways that promote understanding of individual information resources and also their relationships. Representing individual resources with images as well as text makes good use of human cognitive facilities. Composition, an alternative to lists, means putting representations of elements in a collection together using design principles to form a connected whole. We develop combinFormation, a mixed-initiative system for representing collections as compositions of image and text surrogates. The system provides a set of direct manipulation facilities for forming, editing, organizing, and distributing collections as compositions. Additionally, to assist users in sifting through the vast expanse of potentially relevant information resources, the system also includes a generative agent that can proactively engage in processes of collecting information resources and forming image and text surrogates. A generative temporal visual composition agent develops the collection and its visual representation over time, enabling users to see more possibilities. To keep the user in control, we develop interactive techniques that enable the user to direct the agent. For evaluation, we conducted a field study in an undergraduate general education course offered in the architecture department. Alternating groups of students used combinFormation as an aid in preparing one of two major assignments involving information discovery to support processes of invention. The students that used combinFormation were found to perform better.
Our objective is to explore distributed forms of creativity that arise in play to help guide and ... more Our objective is to explore distributed forms of creativity that arise in play to help guide and foster supportive research, game design, and technology. This workshop seeks to bring together researchers, game designers, and others to examine theories of creativity and play, game design practices, methods for studying creativity in play, and creative play experiences. Participants will present work, video prototype, discuss topics, and contribute to outcomes. CCS Concepts •Human-centered computing → Collaborative and social computing; HCI design and evaluation methods;
International Journal of Human-computer Interaction, Jun 24, 2008
Although sometimes the task that motivates searching, browsing, and collecting information resour... more Although sometimes the task that motivates searching, browsing, and collecting information resources is finding a particular fact, humans often use information resources in intellectual and creative tasks that can include comparison, understanding, and discovery. Information discovery tasks involve not only finding relevant information but also seeing relationships among collected information resources and developing new ideas. The hypothesis presented here is that how information is represented impacts the magnitude of human creativity in information discovery tasks. How can we measure this creative cognition? Studies of search have focused on time and accuracy, metrics of limited value for measuring creative discovery. A new experimental method is developed, which measures the emergence of new ideas in information discovery, to evaluate the efficacy of representations. The efficacy of the typical textual list representation for information collections is compared with an alternative representation, combinFormation's composition of image and text surrogates. Representing collections with such compositions increases emergence in information discovery.
Access to devices that integrate Global Positioning data with image and sound acquisition becomes... more Access to devices that integrate Global Positioning data with image and sound acquisition becomes more common, enabling people to build large collections of locative multimedia. As the size and number of these locative media collections grow, so too does the importance of systems that support collection sensemaking. Media semantics, which include automatically acquired location data, as well as user-supplied annotations, play a key role in these user-centered processes of collection utilization. This demo presents a Zoomable Map Image Collection Sensemaking System that enables the collection, organization, browsing, and annotation of locative images. The Zoomable Map Perspective is supplemented by event-based clustering. Dynamic views are generated automatically from captured media. The system is currently being used to document the location and condition of homes and neighborhoods in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
Describes a socially-interactive location-based gaming system that will be used to explore team d... more Describes a socially-interactive location-based gaming system that will be used to explore team dynamics, use of technology for collaborative problem solving, and facilitate suspension of disbelief by humanizing the interface with the virtual world. “They’ll get me soon, ” Sarah thought as she walked rapidly across the courtyard of the university, glancing over her shoulder. “They’re probably closing in on me right now…” “You’re doing fine, Sarah, ” came Jeff’s voice over her radio, “the predators haven’t noticed you yet, the object should be near you somewhere.” She took one more step forward before she saw it: a posting board in the middle of the concourse. “Naturally, ” she
We used human movement as the basis for designing a collaborative aesthetic design environment. O... more We used human movement as the basis for designing a collaborative aesthetic design environment. Our intention was to promote social interaction and creative expression. We employed off-the-shelf computer vision technology. Movement became the basis for the choreography of gestures, the development of gesture recognition, and the development of imagery and visualization. We discovered that the design of clear affordances is no less important in movement-based than in mouse-based systems. Through an integrated and iterative design process, we developed a new type of affordance, the choreographic button, which integrates choreography, gesture recognition, and visual feedback. Jumping, a quick movement, and crouching, a sustained gesture, were choreographed to form a vocabulary that is personally expressive, and which also facilitates automatic recognition. How can we evaluate socially motivated interactive systems? To create a context for evaluation, we held an integrated exhibition, party, and user study event. This mixing of events produced an engaging environment in which participants could choose to interact with each other, as well as with the design environment. We prepared a mouse-based version of the design environment, and compared how people experienced it with the movementbased system. Our study demonstrates that movement-based affordances promote social interaction.
... INTRODUCTION Life should be fun, exciting, and social. We are building a location-aware game ... more ... INTRODUCTION Life should be fun, exciting, and social. We are building a location-aware game that brings people together by combining the fun of a scavenger hunt and tag in the real world with the excitement of an action-based computer Page 2. 2 game. ...
Rogue Signals is a location-aware team-based augmented reality game. It is a platform for experim... more Rogue Signals is a location-aware team-based augmented reality game. It is a platform for experimentation on team dynamics in situations where critical information is scarce and distributed among participants who must communicate through restricted channels. A human team, consisting of a coordinator and a group of harvesters competes against a group of autonomous agents. The game design intentionally constrains the level of information made available to the harvesters, which makes the success of the team dependent on human-to-human communication between the coordinator and the harvesters. The goal is to promote and explore processes of team communication and cognition. Applications include emergency response, as well as social networking and entertainment.
This paper presents a prototype digital game that integrates team communication and psychophysiol... more This paper presents a prototype digital game that integrates team communication and psychophysiological measures as components of play. Our game, PhysiRogue, adds an affective dimension to the location-aware augmented reality game, Rogue Signals. We are using this experimental platform to explore the complementary roles of human-to-human and computer-to-human communication in team cognition. Physiological signals are acquired and processed to form psychophysiological measures. These measures affect game play both through team understanding and altered game mechanics. We are investigating the role of physiological state in immersion and implicit coordination in distributed teams. In PhysiRogue, a human team is split into two parts, each with access to different aspects of the game's information. PhysiRogue's implementation is a simulation of our location-aware game, Rouge Signals with the addition of psychophysiological measures. As components of the simulation, seekers, who form most of the human team, move in the "real world" and are "tracked" in an overlaid virtual world. The seekers, who must gather treasures in the "real world", are chased in the virtual world by predators, which they cannot see. The coordinator is another human player who acts as the team leader and is not co-located with the seekers. The coordinator can only see the "virtual world" and thus can see the predators, but is limited to the perceptions of the network. Since the information contained on each side of the team is different, the two sides need to coordinate and communicate in order to succeed. This ability is limited due to cognitive bandwidth and the need for turn taking in meaningful verbal communication. Combined, the components of the system mimic the dynamic coordination requirements of real-life teams deployed in high-stress situations. With PhysiRogue we are integrating psychophysiological measures into digital game play. Electrodermal and electromyographic activity are simultaneously captured from players during game play. Such activity is indicative of increased attention, effort, and stress. The equipment used to measure this activity is portable and non-invasive. The physiological signals are processed to produce a real time "activation" level. Predators are able to track players based upon their "activation" levels, meaning that the computer opponents "sense" activation in the live players. They pursue seekers with higher "activation" levels. We hypothesize that this will lead to new game play strategies, a greater level of immersion, and new forms of focused involvement. In addition, visualizations of the seekers' activation level provide the coordinator with additional team status information, affording the coordinator the ability to modify strategy more effectively. We are investigating designs for the visualization and the game mechanics, and how these factors affect team cognition and immersion.
Although sometimes the task that motivates searching, browsing, and collecting information resour... more Although sometimes the task that motivates searching, browsing, and collecting information resources is finding a particular fact, humans often use information resources in intellectual and creative tasks that can include comparison, understanding, and discovery. Information discovery tasks involve not only finding relevant information but also seeing relationships among collected information resources and developing new ideas. The hypothesis presented here is that how information is represented impacts the magnitude of human creativity in information discovery tasks. How can we measure this creative cognition? Studies of search have focused on time and accuracy, metrics of limited value for measuring creative discovery. A new experimental method is developed, which measures the emergence of new ideas in information discovery, to evaluate the efficacy of representations. The efficacy of the typical textual list representation for information collections is compared with an alternati...
A Transitory Interface Component for the In-Context Visualization and Adjustment of a Value. (Aug... more A Transitory Interface Component for the In-Context Visualization and Adjustment of a Value. (August 2007) Andrew Webb, B.S., Texas A&M University Chair of Advisory Committee: Dr. Andruid Kerne Some agent-based systems depend on eliciting ratings from the user. However, the user’s willingness to provide ratings is limited due to requisite demands of attention and effort. From a human-centered view, we redefine providing ratings as expressing interest. We develop a new interface component for parameter setting, the In-Context Slider, which reduces physical effort and demand on attention by using fluid mouse gestures and in-context interaction. We hypothesize that such an interface should make interest expression easier for the user. We evaluated the In-Context Slider as an interest expression component compared with a more typical interface. Participants performed faster with the In-Context Slider. They found it easier to use and more natural for expressing interest. We then integrat...
Our objective is to explore distributed forms of creativity that arise in play to help guide and ... more Our objective is to explore distributed forms of creativity that arise in play to help guide and foster supportive research, game design, and technology. This workshop seeks to bring together researchers, game designers, and others to examine theories of creativity and play, game design practices, methods for studying creativity in play, and creative play experiences. Participants will present work, video prototype, discuss topics, and contribute to outcomes.
CHI '05 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2005
Navigational surrogates are representations that stand for information resources within search en... more Navigational surrogates are representations that stand for information resources within search engine result sets, e-commerce sites, and digital libraries. They also form the basis of personal collections of media, such as web pages. Our hypothesis is that the formats of individual surrogates and collections play an important role in how people use collections. We are particularly interested in processes of information discovery, in which ideas are iteratively reformulated in the context of working with information. To investigate how the representation of navigational surrogates affects how people work with information, we have created a collection of undergraduate psychology curriculum resources in 3 alternative formats: a linear list of textual elements, a spatialized set of textual elements, and a spatialized set of labeled images that have been composited. To evaluate navigation with these surrogate formats during information discovery, we designed divergent browsing tasks, that is, tasks that require assembling information from multiple diverse sources. A within-subjects evaluation indicates that users prefer the spatial labeled images format, and navigate more effectively with it.
Proceedings of the 6th ACM SIGCHI conference on Creativity & cognition - C&C '07, 2007
While sometimes the task that motivates searching, browsing, and collecting information resources... more While sometimes the task that motivates searching, browsing, and collecting information resources is finding a particular fact, humans often engage in intellectual and creative tasks, such as comparison, understanding, and discovery. Information discovery tasks involve not only finding relevant information, but also seeing relationships among collected information resources, and developing new ideas. Prior studies of search have focused on time and accuracy, metrics of limited value for measuring creativity. We develop new experimental methods to evaluate the efficacy of representational systems for information discovery by measuring the emergence of new ideas. We also measure the variety of web sites that participants visit when engaging in a creative task, and gather experience report data. We compare the efficacy of the typical format for collections, the textual list with a new format, the composition of image and text surrogates. We conduct an experiment that establishes that representing collections with composition of image and text surrogates promotes emergence in information discovery.
Proceedings of the 14th annual ACM international conference on Multimedia - MULTIMEDIA '06, 2006
Access to devices that integrate Global Positioning data with image and sound acquisition becomes... more Access to devices that integrate Global Positioning data with image and sound acquisition becomes more common, enabling people to build large collections of locative multimedia. As the size and number of these locative media collections grow, so too does the importance of systems that support collection sensemaking. Media semantics, which include automatically acquired location data, as well as user-supplied annotations, play a key role in these user-centered processes of collection utilization. This demo presents a Zoomable Map Image Collection Sensemaking System that enables the collection, organization, browsing, and annotation of locative images. The Zoomable Map Perspective is supplemented by event-based clustering. Dynamic views are generated automatically from captured media. The system is currently being used to document the location and condition of homes and neighborhoods in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
Proceedings of the 14th annual ACM international conference on Multimedia - MULTIMEDIA '06, 2006
We used human movement as the basis for designing a collaborative aesthetic design environment. O... more We used human movement as the basis for designing a collaborative aesthetic design environment. Our intention was to promote social interaction and creative expression. We employed off-the-shelf computer vision technology. Movement became the basis for the choreography of gestures, the development of gesture recognition, and the development of imagery and visualization. We discovered that the design of clear affordances is no less important in movement-based than in mouse-based systems. Through an integrated and iterative design process, we developed a new type of affordance, the choreographic button, which integrates choreography, gesture recognition, and visual feedback. Jumping, a quick movement, and crouching, a sustained gesture, were choreographed to form a vocabulary that is personally expressive, and which also facilitates automatic recognition. How can we evaluate socially motivated interactive systems? To create a context for evaluation, we held an integrated exhibition, party, and user study event. This mixing of events produced an engaging environment in which participants could choose to interact with each other, as well as with the design environment. We prepared a mouse-based version of the design environment, and compared how people experienced it with the movementbased system. Our study demonstrates that movement-based affordances promote social interaction.
Proceedings of the 13th annual ACM international conference on Multimedia - MULTIMEDIA '05, 2005
In this paper, we describe Censor Chair, an art installation that creates a shared experience add... more In this paper, we describe Censor Chair, an art installation that creates a shared experience addressing forms of censorship including self-censorship, censorship of a group upon an individual, visual and auditory censorship in digital media, and censorship in society. We are taking a playful position in considering relationships between censorship and sensors that monitor physiology. Censor Chair makes use of a galvanic skin response (GSR) sensor, live video feeds, and a barcode reader to drive the presentation of a digital media library.
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Papers by Ross Graeber