We are investigating the potential of 3D telepresence technology to support collaboration among geographically separated medical personnel in trauma emergency care situations. 3D telepresence technology has the potential to provide richer visual information than current 2D video conferencing techniques. This may be of benefit in diagnosing and treating patients in emergency situations where specialized medical expertise is not locally available. We conducted an experimental evaluation, simulating an emergency medical situation and examining the interaction between the attending paramedic and remote, consulting physician. Post-questionnaire data illustrate that the information provided by the consulting physician was perceived to be more useful by the paramedic in the 3D condition than the 2D condition. However, the data pertaining to the quality of interaction and trust between the consulting physician and paramedic showed mixed results. The implications of these results are discussed.

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Team coordination is vital to the success of team missions. On the battlefield and in other hazardous environments, mission outcomes are often very unpredictable because of unforeseen circumstances and complications encountered that adversely affect team coordination. In addition, the battlefield is constantly evolving as new technology, such as context-aware systems and unmanned drones, becomes available to assist teams in coordinating team efforts. As a result, we must re-evaluate the dynamics of teams that operate in high-stress, hazardous environments in order to learn how to use technology to enhance team coordination within this new context. In dangerous environments where multi-tasking is critical for the safety and success of the team operation, it is important to know what forms of interaction are most conducive to team tasks. We have explored interaction methods, including various types of user input and data feedback mediums that can assist teams in performing unified tasks on the battlefield. We’ve conducted an ethnographic analysis of Soldiers and researched technologies such as sketch recognition, physiological data classification, augmented reality, and haptics to come up with a set of core principles to be used when de- signing technological tools for these teams. This dissertation provides support for these principles and addresses outstanding problems of team connectivity, mobility, cognitive load, team awareness, and hands-free interaction in mobile military applications. This research has resulted in the development of a multimodal solution that enhances team coordination by allowing users to synchronize their tasks while keeping an overall awareness of team status and their environment. The set of solutions we’ve developed utilizes optimal interaction techniques implemented and evaluated in related projects; the ultimate goal of this research is to learn how to use technology to provide total situational awareness and team connectivity on the battlefield. This information can be used to aid the research and development of technological solutions for teams that operate in hazardous environments as more advanced resources become available.

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

This thesis investigates the possibility of exploiting haptic force-feedback technology for interacting with virtual musical instruments. A survey of current software solutions for creating haptic virtual environments is provided, with a discussion on the need to integrate such a platform with currently accepted solutions for audio research. / A system was developed to combine a haptic programming library with a physical dynamics engine and to expose its functionality through the Open Sound Control (OSC) protocol, an increasingly accepted standard for communication within the audio software and hardware domain. Using OSC messaging, simple 3D objects can be instantiated and constraints on their movement can be specified, allowing the description of physically dynamic mechanisms. Collision events as well as properties of the objects can be transmitted to the audio system continually to be used for modulating audio synthesis parameters. Some examples of simple virtual musical instruments created with the aid of this system are provided.

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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