Mobile devices are frequently used to view rich content while on the go. However, they have a tradeoff between increased screen size and portability; mobile devices, by definition, are constrained to a fraction of a desktop computer’s display area. This constraint means a user has to frequently navigate to content that lies outside the display. We present FlexView, a prototype system and set of interaction techniques, which allows users to navigate through depth-arranged large information spaces using display curvature as an additional input channel. FlexView augments the planar (X-Y) navigation currently performed by touch input with two forms of bend input to navigate through depth (Z). With leafing, the user holds one side of display and bends the opposite side. Squeezing involves gripping the display in one hand and applying pressure on both sides to create concave or convex curvatures, and supports concurrent interaction with touch input. We performed two evaluations to investigate the performance of FlexView’s interaction techniques. In Experiment 1, we measured the efficiency of participants when searching through pages of a document, and compared touch input to squeezing and leafing used in isolation. Experiment 2 introduced X-Y navigation in a pan-and-zoom pointing task where multi-touch pinch gestures were compared against squeezing and leafing for zoom operations. Panning, across all conditions, was performed with touch input using the index finger. Our experiments demonstrated that touch and bend interactions are comparable for navigation through depth-arranged content, and squeezing to zoom recorded the fastest times in the pan-and-zoom pointing task. Overall, FlexView allows users to easily browse depth-arranged information spaces without sacrificing traditional touch interactions. / Thesis (Master, Computing) -- Queen's University, 2012-09-10 13:28:18.984

The thesis explores the materiality of communication environment in Cyberspace illustrating both the problem of disembodied rationalism and the benefits of emphasizing the phenomenological sense of presence in virtual spaces. Interactive realism is offered as an approach to explain how our sense of embodied existence is supported and threatened in a technologically mediated situation. Language and other artifacts are tools with which we build social reality. In particular, metaphors are the rink between language and other, non-linguistic skills that shape our sense of self and reality. / The metaphors of the computer as an electronic brain and of the networked computer as an electronic frontier serve as unconscious, cognitive models that guide our interactions with the world. Objects also work as models to embody ways of thinking about the world. It will be argued that social construction involves a sedimentation of language and a naturalization of the constructed environment. I argue that perception, as the bodily foundation of experience, involves a somatagnosis or body-knowledge, and that this knowledge is influenced by the particular devices we use to represent images of the world. The affective communities of Cyberspace are rule-governed communicative assemblies. Cyber-communities provide examples of the ways the body threatens and supports group formation and maintenance on the Internet . / Cyberspace highlights the process of construction and sedimentation through which we construct the social world. In the construction of symbolic embodiments Cyberspace presents the paradox of places that encourage emplacement and disembodiment. Disembodied spaces are utopian in nature. Such Digkopian places abstract us from the world. Heterotopian spaces illustrate playful experiments. Such materializations of metaphors and ideas dramatize the ways we model the world and build it. My interest is with the creative element my aim is to make clear the significance of constructed, digital reality and its tensions with bodily experience.

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This research aims to understand the role images currently play within the design process, in order to develop a classification of image types and reference keywords to construct an electronic image database for professional use in product design. Images play an important role in the design process, both in defining the context for designs and in informing the creation of individual design. They are also used to communicate with clients, to understand consumers, to assist in expressing the themes of the project, to understand the related environments, or to search for inspiration or functional solutions. Designers usually have their own collections of images, however for each project they still spend a significant amount of time searching images, either looking within their own collection or searching for new images. This study is based on the assumption that there is a structure that can show the relationship between the image itself and the information it conveys and can be used to develop the database. A product-image database will enable designers to consult images more easily and this will also facilitate communication of visual ideas among designers or between designers and their clients, thus augmenting its potential value in the professional design process. Also, the value of an image may be enhanced by applying its linguistic associations through descriptions and keywords which identify and interpret its content. Through a series of interviews, workshops, and understanding relevant issues, such as design method, linguistic theory, perception psychology and so on, a prototype database system was developed. It was developed based on three information divisions: SPECIFICATION, CHARACTERISTIC, and EMOTION. The three divisions construct a model of the information which an image conveys. The database prototype was tested and evaluated by groups of students and professional designers. The results showed that users understand the concept and working of the database and appreciated its value. They also indicated that the CHARACTERISTIC division was most valuable as it allows users to record images through their recollection of feelings.

In the past 20 years humans have mostly used a mouse to interact with computers. However, with the rapidly growing use of computers, a need for alternative means of interaction has emerged. With the advent of Kinect, a brand-new way of human- computer interaction has been introduced. It allows the use of gestures - the most natural body-language - to communicate with computers, helping us get rid of traditional constraints and providing an intuitive method for executing operations. This thesis presents how to design and implement a program to help people interact with computers, without the traditional mouse, and with the support and help of a Kinect device (an XNA Game framework with Microsoft Kinect SDK v1.7). For dynamic gesture recognition, the Hidden Markov Model (HMM) and Dynamic Time Warping (DTW), are suggested. The use of DTW is being motivated by experimental analysis. A dynamic-gesture-recognition program is developed, based on DTW, to help computers recognize customized gestures by users. The experiment also shows that DTW can have rather good performance. As for further development, the use of the XNA Game 4.0 framework, which integrates the Kinect body tracking into DTW gesture recognition technologies, is introduced. Finally, a functional test is conducted on the interaction system. In addition to summarizing the results, the thesis also discusses what can be improved in the future.

Machine-readable privacy policies have been developed to help reduce user effort in understanding how websites will use personally identifiable information (PII). The goal of these policies is to enable the user to make informed decisions about the disclosure of personal information in web-based transactions. However, these privacy policies are complex, requiring that a user agent evaluate conformance between the user’s privacy preferences and the site’s privacy policy, and indicate this conformance information to the user. The problem addressed in this thesis is that even with machine-readable policies and current user agents, it is still difficult for users to determine the cause and origin of a conflict between privacy preferences and privacy policies. The problem arises partly because current standards operate at the page level: they do not allow a fine-grained treatment of conformance down to the level of a specific field in a web form. In this thesis the Platform for Privacy Preferences (P3P) is extended to enable field-level comparisons, field-specific conformance displays, and faster access to additional field-specific conformance information. An evaluation of a prototype agent based on these extensions showed that they allow users to more easily understand how the website privacy policy relates to the user’s privacy preferences, and where conformance conflicts occur.

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