GVU Technical Report Series

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GVU Technical Report Series

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Now showing 1 - 8 of 8

Technology Trends Favor Thick Clients for User-Carried Wireless Devices

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2002) Starner, Thad

A thin client approach to mobile computing pushes as many services as possible on a remote server. However, as will be shown, technology trends indicate that an easy route to improving thin client functionality is to ``thicken'' the client through addition of disk storage, CPU, and RAM. Thus, thin clients will rapidly become multi-purpose thick clients. With time, users may come to consider their mobile system as their primary general-purpose computing device, with their most used files maintained on the mobile system and with desktop systems used primarily for larger displays, keyboards, and other non-mobile interfaces.
Speech and Gesture Multimodal Control of a Whole Earth 3D Visualization Environment

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2002) Krum, David Michael ; Omoteso, Olugbenga ; Ribarsky, William ; Starner, Thad ; Hodges, Larry F.

A growing body of research shows several advantages to multimodal interfaces including increased expressiveness, exibility, and user freedom. This paper investigates the design of such an interface that integrates speech and hand gestures. The interface has the additional property of operating relative to the user and can be used while the user is in motion or stands at a distance from the computer display. The paper then describes an implementation of the multimodal interface for a whole earth 3D visualization environment which presents navigation interface challenges due to the large magnitude of scale and extended spaces that is available. The characteristics of the multimodal interface are examined, such as speed, recognizability of gestures, ease and accuracy of use, and learnability under likely conditions of use. This implementation shows that such a multimodal interface can be effective in a real environment and sets some parameters for the design and use of such interfaces.
Towards Conversational Speech Recognition for a Wearable Computer Based Appointment Scheduling Agent

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2002) Wong, Benjamin A. ; Starner, Thad ; McGuire, R. Martin

We present an original study of current mobile appointment scheduling devices. Our intention is to create a conversational wearable computing interface for the task of appointment scheduling. We employ both survey questionnaires and timing tests of mock scheduling tasks. The study includes over 150 participants and times each person using his or her own scheduling device (e.g., a paper planner or personal digital assistant). Our tests show that current scheduling devices take a surprisingly long time to access and that our subjects often do not use the primary scheduling device claimed on the questionnaire. Slower devices (e.g., PDAs) are disproportionately abandoned in favor of devices with faster access times (e.g., scrap paper). Many subjects indicate that they use a faster device when mobile as a buffer until they can reconcile the data with their primary scheduling device. The findings of this study motivated the design of two conversational speech systems for everyday--use wearable computers. The Calendar Navigator Agent provides extremely fast access to the user's calendar through a wearable computer with a head-up display. The user's verbal negotiation for a meeting time is monitored by the wearable which provides an appropriate calendar display based on the current conversation. The second system, now under development, attempts to minimize cognitive load by buffering and indexing appointment conversations for later processing by the user. Both systems use extreme restrictions to decrease speech recognition error rates, yet are designed to be socially graceful.
Evaluation of a Multimodal Interface for 3D Terrain Visualization

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2002) Krum, David Michael ; Omoteso, Olugbenga ; Ribarsky, William ; Starner, Thad ; Hodges, Larry F.

This paper describes an evaluation of various interfaces for visual navigation of a whole Earth 3D terrain model. A mouse driven interface, a speech interface, a gesture interface, and a multimodal speech and gesture interface were used to navigate to targets placed at various points on the Earth. Novel speech and/or gesture interfaces are candidates for use in future mobile or ubiquitous applications. This study measured each participant's recall of target identity, order, and location as a measure of cognitive load. Timing information as well as a variety of subjective measures including discomfort and user preferences were taken. While the familiar and mature mouse interface scored best by most measures, the speech interface also performed well. The gesture and multimodal interface suffered from weaknesses in the gesture modality. Weaknesses in the speech and multimodal modalities are identifed and areas for improvement are discussed.
KeyMenu: A Keyboard Based Hierarchical Menu

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2002) Lyons, Kenton Michael ; Patel, Nirmal J. ; Starner, Thad

KeyMenu is a keyboard based hierarchical menu system originally designed for use on a wearable computer. The menu uses a one to one mapping between buttons on the keyboard and menu items. The KeyMenu leverages off of the advantages of other pointer based menus such as Marking Menus. It provides support for both novice and expert user interaction through the use of a delay in popping up the menu. Finally, by using a consistent physical action we support the transition from novice to expert.
Learning Significant Locations and Predicting User Movement with GPS

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2002) Ashbrook, Daniel ; Starner, Thad

Wearable computers have the potential to act as intelligent agents in everyday life and assist the user in a variety of tasks depending on the context. Location is the most common form of context used by these agents to determine the user's task. However, another potential use is the creation of a predictive model of the user's future movements. We present a system that automatically clusters GPS data taken over an extended period of time into meaningful locations at multiple scales. These locations are then incorporated into a Markov model that can be consulted for use with a variety of applications in both single-user and collaborative scenarios.
Widespread Easy and Subtle Tracking with Wireless Identification Networkless Devices -- WEST WIND: an Environmental Tracking System

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2000) Lyons, Kenton Michael ; Kidd, Cory D. ; Starner, Thad

In this paper we introduce and describe a radio frequency-based system for location identification and tracking. The basic design of the system consists of transmitters in the environment, transceivers on the person or object for which location information is desired, and a receiver in the environment. Each of these three pieces of hardware and their associated software are discussed in this paper. We also talk about system design considerations, privacy concerns, and current and future applications of the system.
The Beware Home: A Contextually Aware Haunted House

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2000) Kidd, Cory D. ; Starner, Thad ; Gandy, Maribeth ; Quay, A. M. (Andrew M.)

In the Broadband Institute Residential Laboratory, we are exploring interaction techniques for a contextually aware home [1]. Here we describe several recent projects that were adapted to create a haunted house for demonstration to the International Symposium for Wearable Computers conference during the month of October. These projects included three augmented realities, a location system, and five methods of interacting with the home environment.