The paperless office is a concept that has been around for decades. The concept concerns digital technology replacing paper as a medium within the office, but so far a completely paperless office has yet to be achieved. In this study, we have reviewed previous research in order to understand potential reasons for this. We interviewed local offices, to find out how they used paper around the office, and information about what properties a replacement might need. The research questions that guided us through our study were: In what way do local offices store and index data? What themes can we find in their practices that help us further the paperless office? Can we use our findings to create a concept design? Using the information we gathered we designed a conceptual prototype styled after a common binder, to associate the mental models used when working with paper, and imbuing it with digital technology.

Användargränssnitt är en viktig del av kommunikationen mellan människor och maskin. Tidigare så kallat människa-datorinteraktion var baserad på användning av hålkort vid kommunikation med datorer, detta ändrades under andra halvan av 1900-talet. Där användningen av det grafiska användargränssnittet och kommandoradsgränssnitt började ta över. I dag finns det flera olika sorters användargränssnitt till flera olika maskiner och enheter, bland annat touch-gränssnittet som används till alla våra smarttelefon. Touch-gränssnittet ansågs som något lättanvänt och gav möjligheter till andra gränssnitt i detta fält. Ett av dem är det haptiska gränssnittet som ger användaren möjligheten att ändra data direkt i verkligheten, inte digitalt.I denna studie presenterar vi ett påtagligt gränssnitt (tangible interface) i form av ett interaktivt blixtlås. Syftet med denna studie är att använda en teknisk uppfinning med ett så kallat Tangible interface för att samla in data i form av en skala och sedan jämföra den med en numerisk skala representerad på papper. Ett experiment användes vid insamlingen av data, den var baserad på två sorters enkäter, det ena var pappersbaserad, medan den andra var baserad på det interaktiva blixtlåset. Hela experimentet avslutades med en utvärdering. Resultatet från experimentet visade att skillnaderna mellan en numerisk skala i form av papper inte skilde sig åt så mycket från det interaktiva blixtlåset. / User Interfaces are necessary for us when communicating with the machines. Early human-computer interactions were based upon the usage of puncture card to communicate with the computer, that later transformed into Graphical User Interfaces and Command Line Interfaces during the latter half of the 20th century. Today there are a lot of different kinds of interfaces for various types of devices, such as the touch interface for our smartphones. Due to the ease and possibilities of using the touch, further development in this area has been desired. An interface that gives the user the possibility to manipulate data in real life, is called a haptic interface. In this paper an interactive zipper is presented as a tangible interface that is part of the haptic interface. The study focuses on how a technological invention with a tangible interface can be used to gather feedbacks in the form of a numeric scale and how it compares to a numeric scale presented on paper. An experiment based on two questionnaires was used to gather the feedbacks, one was paper-based and the other based upon the interactive zipper, and it ended with an evaluation of the interactive zipper. The results showed that there are not any big differences between the numeric scale presented on paper compared to the interactive zipper.

The area of healthcare has a lot of challenges and restrictions when it comes to design. There is no access to one of the users. A research on this topic resulted in the creation of Robbi – an interactive toy that supports communication between a child and psychologist during their therapy sessions.Children (patients) as stakeholders are a very vulnerable party of this project and as they were not involved in the process directly; there was no opportunity for intervention, observation or action research. When the therapeutic session is happening, the setting of the environment has to be as comfortable for the client as possible and the presence of a third person at the session would disturb the result in a severe way.I would argue here that the therapists can act as proxies in the projects related to design for MHC clients. Psychology therapists are skilled and experienced observers and area experts. In many cases we actually have to think: who is the real end user of our design? What relationships are there between the stakeholders and the solution are? As the project involves therapists as participatory design actors it is fair to say that the therapists are primary users of the design concept that is to be created. It has to fit all the needs of the doctor, enable them to make the therapy sessions more efficient, engaging and profound. At the same time the concept has to be developed in the framework of interaction for children in terms of visuals, tangibility, emotional content and usability.

Made available in DSpace on 2016-06-02T19:06:00Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 4702.pdf: 26018415 bytes, checksum: 9c97e5ddef6d5a00a930406e3383b476 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2012-09-19 / Financiadora de Estudos e Projetos / In the scenario of computational interfaces development, researches efforts aim to offer new ways of interaction that are closer to the natural way which humans interact with the real world. Amongst the diversity of interface modalities, the tabletop tangible interfaces make the link between physical objects and virtual objects, making possible to "grasp" the interface and interact with it physically, also counting on multitouch interactions. However, in the development process of this kind of interface, there is a lack of specification s model that supports, not only the physical objects interaction, but multitouch interactions as well, and that organizes and classifies the specification in a more agile manner, easier to document and implement. Thus, this work presents a new tabletop tangible user interface specification model, TTUI-SM, that classifies and organizes the interface element specification within many components. A diagramatic tool, TTUI-SMT, was developed based on this model, aiming to make the interface specification and development faster, easier and automatized. To validate the model and tool, two studycases were introduced and specified. An experiment was conducted to evaluate both model and tool, resulting in the comprovation, through questionnaires analysis, of the proposed benefits. / No cenário de desenvolvimento de interfaces computacionais, os avanços nas pesquisas buscam oferecer novas formas de interação que se aproximam da forma natural com que o homem interage com o mundo real. Dentre as diversas interfaces avançadas, as interfaces tangíveis de mesa (tabletop), promovem a ligação entre objetos físicos e objetos virtuais, possibilitando ao usuário interagir com objetos digitais por meio do ambiente físico, e também por meio de interações multitoques. Entretanto, o processo de desenvolvimento deste tipo de interface carece de um modelo de especificação que contemple, além das interações por meio de objetos, interações multitoques e que organize e classifique a especificação de uma maneira mais ágil e mais fácil de documentar e implementar. Assim, este trabalho apresenta um novo modelo de especificação de elementos de interface tangível de mesa, denominado TTUI-SM, que organiza a especificação de elementos de interface em diversos componentes. Uma ferramenta diagramática, o TTUI-SMT, baseada neste modelo de especificação, também foi desenvolvida visando agilizar, facilitar e automatizar o processo de especificação da interface e do seu desenvolvimento. Para validar o modelo e a ferramenta, dois estudos de caso foram introduzidos e especificados. Um experimento foi conduzido para avaliar o modelo e a ferramenta e, por meio de questionários, os benefícios propostos foram validados.

Les modèles physiques moléculaires sont depuis longtemps utilisés dans le domaine de la biologie structurale et de la chimie. Malgré l’apparition de représentations numériques qui offrent une grande variété de visualisations moléculaires dynamiques et permettent notamment d’analyser visuellement les résultats de simulations, les modèles physiques moléculaires sont encore fréquemment utilisés. En effet, la manipulation directe et la construction manuelle de modèles physiques moléculaires facilitent l’élaboration et la mémorisation d’une représentation mentale des structures moléculaires 3D. Les techniques d’interaction avec des objets 3D n’atteignent pas encore la finesse et la richesse de perception et de manipulation des modèles physiques. Par ailleurs, l’interaction avec des représentations moléculaires virtuelles est rendue particulièrement difficile car les structures moléculaires sont très complexes du fait de leur taille, de leur caractère tridimensionnel et de leur flexibilité, auquel s'ajoutent la quantité et la variété des informations qui les caractérisent. Pour aborder la problématique de l'interaction avec ces structures moléculaires, nous proposons dans cette thèse de concevoir une interface tangible moléculaire combinant les avantages des représentations physiques et virtuelles. Pour réaliser une interface tangible flexible et modulaire, à l’image des biomolécules à manipuler, ce travail de thèse a dû relever plusieurs défis scientifiques avec pour contrainte majeure le fait de proposer une approche se passant de marqueurs et dispositif de capture 3D complexe. La première étape fut de choisir, concevoir et fabriquer un modèle physique permettant la manipulation de molécules avec de nombreux degrés de libertés. La seconde étape consistait à créer un modèle numérique permettant de reproduire le comportement mécanique du modèle physique. Enfin, il a fallu concevoir des méthodes de recalage utilisant des techniques de traitement d'image en temps réel pour que le modèle physique puisse contrôler, par couplage, son avatar virtuel. En terme de traitement d’image, de nouvelles méthodes ont été conçues implémentées et évaluées afin d'une part, d’identifier et de suivre les atomes dans l’espace image et d'autre part, d'alimenter la méthode de reconstruction 3D avec un faible nombre de points. L'une de nos contributions a été d'adapter la méthode de Structure from Motion en incluant des connaissances biochimiques pour guider la reconstruction. Par ailleurs, la visualisation conjointe de modèles physiques de molécules et de leur avatar virtuel dynamique, parfois co-localisé dans un contexte de réalité augmentée, a été abordée. Pour cela, des méthodes de visualisation haute performance adaptées à ce contexte ont été conçues afin d’améliorer la perception des formes et cavités, caractéristiques importantes des molécules biologiques. Par exemple, l’occultation ambiante ou le raycasting de sphères avec des ombres portées dynamiques permettent d’augmenter un modèle physique en tenant compte de l’illumination réelle pour une meilleure intégration en réalité augmentée. Les retombées de ce travail en terme d’usage sont nombreuses dans le domaine de la recherche et de la pédagogie en biologie moléculaire, comme dans le domaine de la conception de médicaments et plus particulièrement du Rational Drug Design. L'expert doit être au centre de la tâche de conception de médicament pour la rendre plus efficace et rationnelle, à l’image du succès du jeu sérieux Fold’It, auquel s’ajoute le bénéfice de l’utilisation d’interface tangible capable de manipuler les nombreux degrés de liberté intrinsèques des biomolécules. / Physical molecular models have long been used in the structural biology and chemistry fields. Despite the emergence of numerical representations offering various and dynamic molecular visualizations to analyze the simulation results, molecular physical models are still being used. Direct manipulation and assembly of physical models ease to create and memorize a mental representation of 3D molecular structures. Interaction techniques to manipulate virtual 3D objects are not reaching the fineness and the benefits of the perceptual cues and manipulation skills of physical models. Moreover, interacting with virtual molecular representations remains a hard task because of the complexity of molecular structures, their size, their flexibility and the various data that define them. In this thesis, we address this issue by designing a molecular tangible interface combining the perks of physical and virtual representations. To match the flexibility and modularity of biomolecules to manipulate, this work met challenges in different scientific fields with the constraint to not use a tracker based system. The first step was to choose, conceive and build a physical model to handle the manifold degrees of freedom of molecules. The second step consisted in creating a numerical representation of mechanical properties of the physical model. Lastly, we needed to develop tracking methods using real-time image processing algorithms in order to control the virtual representation by coupling it to the physical one. New image processing methods have been implemented and evaluated to identify and track atoms in the image space. A Structure from Motion method was designed and adapted to reconstruct in 3D the atom positions by using a small amount of points and by including biochemical knowledge to guide the reconstruction. At last, we address the visualization of physical and dynamic virtual representations, sometimes co-localized in an Augmented Reality context. High performance visualization methods adapted to this context have been developed to enhance shape and cavity perception, two major specifics of biological molecules. For instance, ambient occlusion or sphere raycasting with dynamic shadows can augment a physical object taking the real illumination of the scene for a better insertion in an Augmented Reality context. The impact of this work targets both the education in molecular biology and the research field: the rational drug design field could benefit from the expertise of the user to optimize the design of drugs by manipulating biomolecule's numerous degrees of freedom using a tangible interface. Just like Fold'It is contributing to solve the folding problem, a similar approach could be used to solve the molecular docking problem using advanced manipulation interfaces.

This paper presents MusiCushions, a set of interactive sofa cushions used as an interface to music. Built on physical affordances of sofa cushions and e-textile technology, the artefact is used to explore how an e-textile interface can be used for music interaction at home. Challenges in prototyping e-textile interfaces would also be identified. Three cushions are prototyped with off-the-shelf e-textile and electronic components: in one cushion, its case is explored as an interactive surface; another cushion explores the softness and how it can be easily pressed; and the last cushion explores its portability. The set is then mapped to music interaction in two scenarios: as a remote control to a music player and as a musical instrument to control a synthesizer. Evaluation is conducted in two focus group discussions involving students in Media Technology. It is concluded that MusiCushions could be received as a new way to control media such as music player at home, with broader possible use to interact with other services and objects. As a musical instrument, however, it might not be accepted due to the lack of precision control. / Den här studien handlar om MusiCushions, ett set med interaktiva soffkuddar som används som ett gränssnitt för interaktion med musik. De är utvecklade baserat på soffkuddars fysiska affordances och teknologier för e-textil och används för att undersöka hur ett e-textilt gränssnitt kan användas för att interagera med musik i hemmet. Utmaningar som kan komma att uppstå när man utvecklar ett gränssnitt av e-textil är också identifierade. Tre soffkuddar utvecklades med off-the-shelf elektronik och komponenter för e-textil: en kudde undersöker möjligheten att använda dess fodral som en interaktiv yta; en annan undersöker kuddens fysiska egenskaper, att den är mjuk och enkelt kan pressas ihop, medan den tredje är baserad på att den är enkel att flytta runt. Kuddarna är sedan mappade till två olika scenarier där man interagerar med musik: som en kontroll att styra musik med och som ett musikaliskt instrument. Kuddarna är sedan testade i två olika fokusgrupper där studenter från medieteknik deltar. Av denna studie kan slutsatsen dras att MusiCushions kan användas som ett nytt sätt att kontrollera musik på och det finns även möjlighet att integrera dem med andra tjänster och objekt. Däremot är de inte uppskattade som ett musikaliskt instrument, då interaktionen med det textila gränssnittet saknar precision.

Submitted by Luciana Ferreira (lucgeral@gmail.com) on 2017-11-13T14:25:31Z No. of bitstreams: 2 Dissertação - Victor Martin de Oliveira - 2017.pdf: 4224923 bytes, checksum: df22172ea97d67bc99001b28fa5e6c8a (MD5) license_rdf: 0 bytes, checksum: d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Luciana Ferreira (lucgeral@gmail.com) on 2017-11-13T14:26:03Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 2 Dissertação - Victor Martin de Oliveira - 2017.pdf: 4224923 bytes, checksum: df22172ea97d67bc99001b28fa5e6c8a (MD5) license_rdf: 0 bytes, checksum: d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2017-11-13T14:26:03Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 2 Dissertação - Victor Martin de Oliveira - 2017.pdf: 4224923 bytes, checksum: df22172ea97d67bc99001b28fa5e6c8a (MD5) license_rdf: 0 bytes, checksum: d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e (MD5) Previous issue date: 2017-10-18 / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior - CAPES / In the context of interactive art, which the spectators become interactors as well, technological development promotes new types of interaction and relations between the art and the human. The project “C³ – Cubos Interativos” (C³ project) rises in this context, created by Media Lab -- UFG with the philosophy of interpersonal and interactive relations, using art and technology. The project consists of three real cubes, which can be handled by users and produce feedback through light and sound effects. The users may communicate with one another and interact with the cubes in order to discover their behaviors and the possible reactions to the interactive activities. However, the cubes behaviors are created manually through the codification of a state machine, being a complex and time consuming task. On the other hand, the Interactive Evolutionary Computation (IEC) is an area of research that can be applied to the composition of artistic elements by using evolutionary algorithms and human interaction. One down point of the IEC is the human fatigue, what makes prohibitive the processing of many evolutionary cycles. Some techniques can be applied to avoid this problem, for example, the use of surrogate functions. This work aims to unite aspects of interactive art and interactive evolutionary computation, with the objective of providing a new way of creating behaviors that represents interesting and pleasant compositions to the C³ cubes. To achieve this goal, we propose the evolution of the C³ cubes state machines using IEC assisted by a surrogate function. A simulation environment for the C³ project was developed, in which the users can interact with virtual cubes and evaluate their behaviors, guiding the evolutionary approach. An experiment with the approach involving a group of users from UFG resulted in more complex and interesting C³ projects. / No contexto de arte interativa, em que o espectador se torna também um interator, avanços tecnológicos proporcionam novos tipos de interações e relações entre a arte e o ser humano. O projeto “C³ – Cubos Interativos” (projeto C³) surge neste contexto, criado no Media Lab -- UFG com a filosofia de relação interpessoal e interativa utilizando-se da arte e da tecnologia. Ele consiste de três cubos reais, os quais podem ser manipulados por usuários e que produzem um feedback através de efeitos luminosos e sonoros. Os usuários interagem entre si e com os cubos, a fim de descobrir seus comportamentos e as possíveis reações às atividades interativas. No entanto, a programação de comportamentos para os cubos é realizada manualmente através da codificação de uma máquina de estados, o que requer tempo e é uma tarefa complexa. Por outro lado, a computação evolutiva interativa (CEI) é uma área de pesquisa que pode ser empregada para composição de elementos artísticos pela utilização de algoritmos evolutivos e da interação humana. Uma desvantagem desta abordagem é a fadiga humana, impossibilitando assim a evolução de muitas gerações. Algumas técnicas podem ser utilizadas para contornar tal problema, como o uso de funções surrogate. Este trabalho tem por objetivo unir aspectos de arte interativa e computação evolutiva interativa, com o intuito de proporcionar uma nova forma de criação de comportamentos que caracterizem composições interessantes e agradáveis de forma automática, para os cubos do projeto C³. Para tanto, a abordagem proposta utiliza da CEI assistida por uma função surrogate, para a evolução das máquinas de estados presentes nos cubos C³. Também, é empregado um ambiente de simulação para o projeto C³, no qual usuários podem interagir com cubos virtuais e avaliar seus comportamentos, guiando o processo evolutivo. Um experimento foi realizado com um grupo de usuários da UFG, resultando em projetos C³ mais complexos e interessantes.