This thesis presents experimental results of shape’s influence on user’s performance in terms of time and accuracy in shape replication task. The shapes are drawn with mouse, pen and touch input devices. For this purpose, two non-meaningful, semi- randomly generated shapes have been used. The first shape has a combination of straight lines and curves whereas the second shape has curves only. Each of these shapes is presented in four versions namely contour, polygon, narrow tunnel and wide tunnel. A method to compare versions of these shapes with the corresponding versions of user drawn shapes is presented. In general, the results showed that the replication of second shape takes less time and the replicated shape is more accurate when compared to the first shape. In addition, performance of the input devices was found to be dependent upon the shapes and their versions they were used to draw.

With the huge rise in popularity for Virtual Reality headsets, the market has become a bit of a wild-west situation where the technology is being explored for strengths, weaknesses and possible uses. Though, VR headsets have also opened up the possibility to explore and use alternate input and output devices to give a more realistic feeling. The boom has also opened up the doors for the use of Virtual Reality within education. The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether there is a difference between people that play video games and people who don’t when using Virtual Reality. This thesis was tested in a five minute experience using Unreal Engine 4. As hardware, the HTC Vive and Leap Motion were used. / Med den stora ökningen i popularitet för Virtual Reality headsets har marknaden blivit lite av en vilda västern situation där teknologin utforskas för att hitta styrkor, svagheter och användningsområden. VR headsets har också öppnat upp för möjligheten att utforska och använda alternativa gränssnitt för att ge en mer realistisk känsla. Ökningen har också öppnat dörrar för att använda Virtual Reality inom utbildning. Målet med denna uppsats är att utreda om det finns en skillnad mellan folk som spelar datorspel och folk som inte gör det när Virtual Reality används. Denna undersökning gjordes i en fem minuters lång upplevelse skapad med hjälp av Unreal Engine 4. Som hårdvara användes HTC Vive och Leap Motion.

In this study we examined the differences of performance of various input devices on a steering task. Two paths were created, one easy and one hard, with the harder path having more turning points to navigate with one of three different input devices: mouse and keyboard, Xbox 360 controller, and a joystick. Participants were also exposed to low or high stress conditions. High stress was caused by playing loud short bursts of music over headphones worn by participants during testing. Results indicated the mouse and keyboard performed better in all cases. There was no significant difference between the Xbox controller and joystick. No differences were found in the low and high stress conditions. Differences in sex were found, even when controlling for video game experience. These findings indicate that the mouse and keyboard is the best device to use on a steering task.

We present an approach to designing input devices that focuses on the structure of materials. We explore and visualize how a material reacts under manipulation, and harness the material’s properties to design new movement sensors. Two benefits spring out of this approach. One, simpler sensing emerges from making use of existing structure in the material. Two, by working with the natural structure of the material, we create input devices with readily recognizable affordances. We present six projects using this approach. We use the natural structure (coordination) of the human body to enable a mapping from five clothing-mounted accelerometers to high-quality motion capture data, creating a low-cost performance animation system. We design silicone input devices with embedded texture allowing single-camera tracking. We study squishable, conformable materials such as foam and silicone, and create a vocabulary of unit structures (shaped cuts in the material) for harnessing patterns of compression/tension to capture particular manipulations. We use this vocabulary to build soft sensing skeletons for stuffed animals, making foam cores with e-textile versions of our unit structures. We also use this vocabulary to design a tongue input device for a collaboration with Disney Imagineering. Finally, we rethink this vocabulary and apply it to capturing, using air pressure sensors, manipulations of hollow 3D-printed rubber shapes, and 3D-print several interactive robots incorporating the new vocabulary.

Desktop-based Windows, Icons, Menus and Pointers (WIMP) interfaces have changed very little in the last 30 years, and are still limited by a lack of powerful and expressive input devices and interactions. In order to make desktop interactions more expressive and controllable, expressive input mechanisms like pressure input must be made available to desktop users. One way to provide pressure input to these users is through a pressure-augmented computer mouse; however, before pressure-augmented mice can be developed, design information must be provided to mouse developers. The problem we address in this thesis is that there is a lack of ergonomics and performance information for the design of pressure-augmented mice. Our solution was to provide empirical performance and ergonomics information for pressure-augmented mice by performing five experiments. With the results of our experiments we were able to identify the optimal design parameters for pressure-augmented mice and provide a set of recommendations for future pressure-augmented mouse designs.

Desktop-based Windows, Icons, Menus and Pointers (WIMP) interfaces have changed very little in the last 30 years, and are still limited by a lack of powerful and expressive input devices and interactions. In order to make desktop interactions more expressive and controllable, expressive input mechanisms like pressure input must be made available to desktop users. One way to provide pressure input to these users is through a pressure-augmented computer mouse; however, before pressure-augmented mice can be developed, design information must be provided to mouse developers. The problem we address in this thesis is that there is a lack of ergonomics and performance information for the design of pressure-augmented mice. Our solution was to provide empirical performance and ergonomics information for pressure-augmented mice by performing five experiments. With the results of our experiments we were able to identify the optimal design parameters for pressure-augmented mice and provide a set of recommendations for future pressure-augmented mouse designs.

Fourteen volunteers were asked to participate in an experiment, along with answering a survey, toevaluate the performance of three peripherals: the Xbox 360 Wired Controller, a keyboard, and theRock Band Fender Stratocaster Wired Guitar Controller. The participants played a prototype madein Unity, and their accuracy scores were analyzed in R using ANOVA. However, no significantquantifiable difference was found based on which peripheral was being used. The scores were alsoanalyzed using Pearson's Product-Moment correlation, and we were able to determine that thevariation in accuracy scores was directly linked to the participant's specific test run in theexperiment. Taking this into consideration along with results of our observational data andparticipant feedback, we found that there were more factors at play, in regards to playability andaccuracy, than just the input device itself. The learning effect of repetitive play of the prototype andinput devices, the control input scheme, and the participant's chosen peripheral manipulationmethod all had an impact. / I syfte att utvärdera prestandan av de tre kringutrustningarna handkontroll till Xbox 360, ett vanligttangentbord samt Rock Bands gitarrkontroll Fender Stratocaster deltog fjorton frivilliga personer i ettexperiment samt svarade på en enkät. Deltagarna spelade en prototyp gjord i spelmotorn Unity somsamlade in deras precisionspoäng som senare kunde analyseras i programmet R med metoden ANOVA.Dock hittades ingen signifikant mätbar skillnad mellan de olika kringutrustningarnas prestanda.Precisionspoängen analyserades även med hjälp av Pearsons produkt-moment korrelation där vi kundekonstatera att variationen i precisionspoängen var direkt kopplade till deltagarens specifika testrunda iexperimentet. Med hänsyn till detta tillsammans med resultaten från våra observationer samt feedbackfrån deltagarna fann vi att det fanns fler faktorer än inmatningsenheten som påverkade spelbarheten ochprecisionen: deltagarnas val vid hanteringen av kringutrustningen, de olika kontrollschemana samtinlärningseffekten som uppstod vid upprepat spelande av prototypens testbana och användandet avkringutrustningen.

Since the introduction of graphical user interfaces (GUI), input control devices have become an integral part of desktop computing. When interfacing with GUIs, these input control devices have become the human's primary means of communicating with the computer. Although there have been a number of experiments conducted on pointing devices for desktop machine, there is little research on pointing devices for wearable computer technology. This is surprising because pointing devices are a major component of a wearable computer system, allowing the wearer to select and manipulate objects on the screen. The design of these pointing devices will have a major impact on the ease with which the operator can interact with information being displayed (Card, English, and Burr, 1978). As a result, this research is the first in a series to investigate design considerations for pointing devices and visual displays that will support wearable computer users. Twenty soldiers participated in an experiment using target acquisition software with five pointing devices and two visual displays. The findings of the research strongly support the use of a relative mode-pointing device with rotational characteristics (i.e. trackball or thumbwheel) over other designs. Furthermore, the results also suggest that there is little difference between pointing devices operated with the thumb and index finger for target acquisition tasks. This study has also showed that there were little differences in pointing and homing time for pointing devices across the two visual displays. Finally, the study demonstrated that the Fitts' law model could be applied to hand-operated pointing devices for wearable computers. This is important because it allows the future development of pointing devices to be compared with the devices tested in this research using the Fitts' Law Index of Performance calculations. / Master of Science

Mobile devices gain increasing computational power and storage capabilities, and there are already mobile phones that can show movies, act as digital music players and offer full-scale web browsing. The bottleneck for information flow is however limited by the inefficient communication channel between the user and the small device. The small mobile phone form factor has proven to be surprisingly difficult to overcome and limited text entry capabilities are in effect crippling mobile devices’ use experience. The desktop keyboard is too large for mobile phones, and the keypad too limited. In recent years, advanced mobile phones have come equipped with touch-screens that enable new text entry solutions. This dissertation explores how software keyboards on touch-screens can be improved to provide an efficient and practical text and command entry experience on mobile devices. The central hypothesis is that it is possible to combine three elements: software keyboard, language redundancy and pattern recognition, and create new effective interfaces for text entry and control. These are collectively called “shape writing” interfaces. Words form shapes on the software keyboard layout. Users write words by articulating the shapes for words on the software keyboard. Two classes of shape writing interfaces are developed and analyzed: discrete and continuous shape writing. The former recognizes users’ pen or finger tapping motion as discrete patterns on the touch-screen. The latter recognizes users’ continuous motion patterns. Experimental results show that novice users can write text with an average entry rate of 25 wpm and an error rate of 1% after 35 minutes of practice. An accelerated novice learning experiment shows that users can exactly copy a single well-practiced phrase with an average entry rate of 46.5 wpm, with individual phrase entry rate measurements up to 99 wpm. When used as a control interface, users can send commands to applications 1.6 times faster than using de-facto standard linear pull-down menus. Visual command preview leads to significantly less errors and shorter gestures for unpracticed commands. Taken together, the quantitative results show that shape writing is among the fastest mobile interfaces for text entry and control, both initially and after practice, that are currently known.

[pt] A necessidade de executar manipulações espaciais (como seleção, deslocamento, rotação, e escalamento) de objetos virtuais 3D é comum a muitos tipos de aplicações do software, inclusive aplicações de computer-aided design (CAD), computer-aided modeling (CAM) e aplicações de visualização científica e de engenharia. Neste trabalho é apresentado um protótipo de aplicação para manipulação de objetos virtuais 3D utilizando movimentos livres de mãos e sem o uso de marcadores, podendo-se fazer gestos com uma ou duas mãos. O usuário move as mãos no volume de trabalho situado imediatamente acima da mesa, e o sistema integra ambas as mãos (seus centróides) no ambiente virtual que corresponde a este volume de trabalho. As mãos são detectadas e seus gestos reconhecidos usando o método de detecção de Viola-Jones. Tal reconhecimento de gestos é assim usado para ligar e desligar modalidades da manipulação. O rastreamento 3D de até duas mãos é então obtido por uma combinação de rastreamento 2D chamado flocks- of-KLT-features e reconstrução 3D baseada em triangulação estéreo. / [en] The need to perform spatial manipulations (like selection, translation, rotation, and scaling) of virtual 3D objects is common to many types of software applications, including computer-aided design (CAD), computer-aided modeling (CAM) and scientific and engineering visualization applications. In this work, a prototype application for manipulation of 3D virtual objects using free-hand 3D movements of bare (that is, unmarked, uninstrumented) hands, as well as using one-handed and two-handed manipulation gestures, is demonstrated. The user moves his hands in the work volume situated immediately above the desktop, and the system effectively integrates both hands (their centroids) into the virtual environment corresponding to this work volume. The hands are being detected and their posture recognized using the Viola-Jones detection method, and the hand posture recognition thus obtained is then used for switching between manipulation modes. Full 3D tracking of up to two hands is obtained by a combination of 2D flocksof-KLT-features tracking and 3D reconstruction based on stereo riangulation.