This morning I presented my paper on audible beacons at CHI in Denver. The paper is available here. The slides from my presentation, with notes available in the presenter view, are available here. If you want find out more about the project this research comes from, please visit the ABBI project website.
Tag: ABBI
CHI 2017 Paper + Videos
I’m happy to note that I’ve had a full paper [1] accepted to CHI 2017. The paper describes research from the ABBI project, about how sound from wearable and fixed sources can be used to help visually impaired children at school (for more, please see here). The videos in this post include a short description of the paper as well as a longer description of the research and our findings.
[1] Audible Beacons and Wearables in Schools: Helping Young Visually Impaired Children Play and Move Independently
E. Freeman, G. Wilson, S. Brewster, G. Baud-Bovy, C. Magnusson, and H. Caltenco.
In Proceedings of the 35th Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems – CHI ’17, 4146-4157. 2017.
PDF DOI Website Video [Bibtex]
@inproceedings{CHI2017,
author = {Freeman, Euan and Wilson, Graham and Brewster, Stephen and Baud-Bovy, Gabriel and Magnusson, Charlotte and Caltenco, Hector},
booktitle = {{Proceedings of the 35th Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - CHI '17}},
title = {{Audible Beacons and Wearables in Schools: Helping Young Visually Impaired Children Play and Move Independently}},
year = {2017},
publisher = {ACM},
pages = {4146--4157},
doi = {10.1145/3025453.3025518},
url = {http://euanfreeman.co.uk/research/#abbi},
video = {{https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGQmt1NeAGQ}},
pdf = {http://research.euanfreeman.co.uk/papers/CHI_2017.pdf},
}ABBI Demo at ICMI ’16
Earlier this month I was in Tokyo for the International Conference on Multimodal Interaction (ICMI). I was there to demo research from the ABBI project. We had two ABBI demos from the Multimodal Interaction Group at the conference: mine demonstrated how ABBI could be used to adapt the lighting at home for visually impaired children, and Graham’s was about using non-visual stimulus (e.g., thermal, vibration) to present affective cues in a more accessible way for visually impaired smartphone users.
The conference was good and it was held in an amazing city – Tokyo. Next year, ICMI visits another amazing city – Glasgow! Julie and Alessandro from the Glasgow Interactive Systems Group will be hosting the conference here at Glasgow Uni.
CHI 2016, ABBI, and other things
My CHI 2016 submission, “Do That There: An Interaction Technique for Addressing In-Air Gesture Systems“, has been conditionally accepted! The paper covers the final three studies in my PhD, where I developed and evaluated a technique for addressing in-air gesture systems.
To address a gesture system is to direct input towards it; this involves finding where to perform gestures and how to specify the system you intend to interact with (so that other systems do not act upon your gestures). Do That There (a play on one of HCI’s most famous gesture papers, Put That There) allows both of these things: it shows you where to perform gestures, using multimodal feedback (there) and it shows you how to identify the system you want to gesture at (do that).
Three months ago I started working on the ABBI (Audio Bracelet for Blind Interaction) project as a post-doctoral researcher. The ABBI project is developing wearable technology for blind and visually impaired children. Our role at Glasgow is to investigate sound design and novel interactions which use the technology, focusing on helping visually impaired kids. Recently, we’ve presented our research and ideas to the RNIB TechShare conference and to members of SAVIE, an association focusing on the education of visually impaired children.
Finally, I submitted my PhD thesis in September although I’m still waiting for my final examination. Unfortunately it’s not going to be happening in 2015 but I’m looking forward to getting that wrapped up soon.