On invitation of Prof. Rukzio Prof. Dr. Antonio Krüger, Saarland University, presents research results about body worn user interfaces.
Abstract: User Interfaces move towards our bodies. They have already started to leave the desktops, are occupying our pockets and are attached to our wrist, head and skin. Designing appropriate User Interfaces for these new device classes come with particular challenges associated with the restrictions and novel possibilities of this development. An important aspect is that of perceptual equivalence, meaning that these UI need to be aware of the human’s attention, their ergonomic restrictions and the cognitive costs associated to the interaction itself. At the same time they need to be able to support and induce novel types of perceptions as well. Since body-worn User Interfaces can be used in a plentitude of different situations there are several interesting technical design challenges that need to be addressed. This includes Augmented (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) set-ups where these UI have the potential to improve the user experience. In this talk, I will present examples of our own endeavor to better understand the design challenges grounded to the cognitive and technical requirements of body-worn interfaces. I will describe an interaction-framework for wrist-worn devices that we have developed, present a novel calibration-free eye-tracker that has the potential to inform a perceptual model of the user’s current attention, and discuss a novel VR controller aiming to improve weight perception of virtual objects. Finally, I will discuss an in-situ body-worn training device for runners, that uses electric muscle stimulation to actuate correct foot postures.
Further information about the colloquium.
