Author Archives: Ciril Bohak

HCI course on Coursera

Posted on by

Online courses have became very popular recently. One of the most popular platforms that offers online education, Coursera, that offers numerous classes from variety of fields, will reboot their course on HCI.

The course starts on Monday 7th October. This course was already conducted three times.

From the course organisers:

“We’re again offering the apprentice track for those that keep up with lectures and do well on the quizzes, and a studio track for those that also do well on the design assignments. If you received an apprentice or studio certificate in a previous run of the course, you have the option of a studio practicum track that enables you to continue to practice your design skills by completing the design assignments and receiving peer feedback, without needing to retake the quizzes.”

You can find the course at http://hci-class.org/.

HCI-IS schedule

Posted on by

The schedule for conference HCI-IS is now public. The conference will be held on 9th October 2013 in “Orange room” at Josef Stefan Institute. There will be two sessions in the conference.

Session A (9.30 – 11.00)

Chair: Franc Novak

  • Opening and Keynote (Franc Novak, Ciril Bohak)
  • Ciril Bohak, Matija Marolt – Kinect Kiosk user experience evaluation
  • Yin Ling – 3D navigation natural interaction with movement sensor technology
  • Daniel Joerg, Martina Lucht, Tobias Schwandt – Connecting physical objects with software. Technology enhanced playing with blocks to foster learning
  • Bojan Blažica – Implicit photowork based on eye-gaze data

Session B (11.30 – 12.45)

Chair: Ciril Bohak

  • Franc Novak, Denis Špelič, Borut Žalik – A website usability testing tool
  • Marko Pavlin – Wireless medical device audio alarm
  • Barbara Koroušić Seljak – How to provide health-related information by mobile computing?
  • Miha Ristič, Franc Novak – Toward improved emergency call service: a usability test case study

HDCMD: a Clustering Algorithm to Support Hand Detection on Multitouch Displays

Posted on by

Bojan Blažica, Daniel Vladušič & Dunja Mladenić

Abstract

This paper describes our approach to hand detection on a multitouch surface i.e. detecting how many hands are currently on the surface and associating each touch point to its corresponding hand. Our goal was to find a general software-based solution to this problem applicable to all multitouch surfaces regardless of their construction. We therefore approached hand detection with a limited amount of information: the position of each touch point. We propose HDCMD (Hand Detection with Clustering on Multitouch Displays), a simple clustering algorithm based on heuristics that exploit the knowledge of the anatomy of the human hand. The proposed hand detection algorithm’s accuracy evaluated on synthetic data (97%) significantly outperformed XMeans (21%) and DBScan (67%).

[Link – Springer]

Enhancement of Web Application Design of the Open Platform for Clinical Nutrition

Posted on by

Peter Novak, Franc Novak & Barbara Koroušić Seljak

Abstract

In this paper, an enhancement of a web application design is presented. The aim was to modify the visual quality of the application in order to make it simple and visually more easy to understand, which consequently leads to improved user experience. The process of enhancement of user interface of the web application home page and subsequent web pages is based on different methods for establishing clear visual hierarchy of presented information, among them the methods of reduction, regularization and leverage. The web application to which the above principles were applied is Open Platform for Clinical Nutrition, which offers to users effective means for identifying their nutritional state and adjusting diet plans to their way of life and clinical state. Currently, the application has about 3000 active users.

[Link – Springer]

Kinect Web Kiosk Framework

Posted on by

Ciril Bohak & Matija Marolt

Abstract

In this paper we present a web kiosk framework based on Kinect sensor. The main idea is to use the framework for creation of simple interactive presentations for informing, advertising and presenting knowledge to the public. The use of such a framework simplifies adaptation of existing web materials for presentation with the kiosk. We can also make use of touchless interaction for browsing through the interactive content, to animate the user and encourage her to spend more time browsing the presented content. We present the structure of the framework and a simple case study on using the framework as an interactive presentation platform and as an education resource. The developed framework has been used for presenting information on educational programs at Faculty of Computer and Information Science, University of Ljubljana.

[Link – Springer]

HCI-SEE

Posted on by

The first event organised by hci.si was successfuly concluded as a workshop at the SouthCHI conference in Maribor. The whole conference took place at hotel Habakuk from the 1st to the 3rd of July 2013. The conference had broad international participation from the HCI community.

Three approaches from community members were presented at the workshop:

pictures_program_1_2006_Habakuk_MB_zunanjost_86512

FingerScape: Multi-touch User Interface Framework

Posted on by

Intuitive human computer interaction (HCI) is becoming an increasingly popular topic in computer science. The need for intuitive HCI is fueled by the need for intuitive mastering and interaction with increasing complexity of software, amounts of data. Devices, where one or more users intuitively (e.g. with fingers) and simultaneously manage content are currently very rare, expensive (e.g. Microsoft Surface) and usually only provided as technology show-case.

An important advantage of such devices is the possibility of multi-user experience that enables additional ways of inter-user interaction. This makes this kind of systems suited for applications such as multimedia content viewing and browsing (e.g. in museums, galleries, exhibitions, …) and visualization of large quantities of information.

The goal of the project is creation of an open source platform that will ease the development of multi-touch multi-user (MTMU) enabled applications. No such freely available complete solution exists at this time. We believe that such a platform will increase the popularity and production of multi-touch systems as well as enable more rapid development of MTMU enabled applications.

Hardware

As a first step towards our goal we have set up a FTIR-based multitouch table to provide a hardware basis for the development of the platform.

Figure_1 Figure_21The video below displays the existing demo software (developed by the NUI group) running on our table table as a demonstration of the concept.

(old test video)

Bootstrapping HCI-SI

Posted on by

With this blog we are starting a bootstrapping procedure of Slovenian HCI community. Our goal is to connect researchers from academic and industrial backgrounds and form a community.

First step is setting-up this blog as meaning of exchange and publication of activities in community.

Second step is organisation of HCI-SEE Workshop as part of SouthCHI conference which takes place in Maribor in mid 2013.