Graphics and Human Computer Interfaces Commons^™

Accessibility: The Whys And The Hows, Devorah Kletenik

Open Educational Resources

This presentation introduces Computer Science students to the notion of accessibility: developing software for people with disabilities. This lesson provides a discussion of why accessibility is important (including the legal, societal and ethical benefits) as well as an overview of different types of impairments (visual, auditory, motor, neurological/cognitive) and how developers can make their software accessible to users with those disabilities. This lesson includes videos and links to readings and tutorials for students.

Coding For The Public Good: Front-End Website Design And Development, Devorah Kletenik

Open Educational Resources

This activity helps student design and develop a front-end of a website, from wireframes through HTML/CSS/Javascript. It includes design questions for students, including the invocation of Ben Schneiderman's eight golden rules for interface design.

Note: this activity assumes prior knowledge of web development. Since this activity is designed for an HCI course, with a focus on interface design, students are not expected to create a back-end for it. This activity can obviously be modified for a full-stack experience.

Accessibility Evaluation, Devorah Kletenik

Open Educational Resources

This activity guides students through the evaluation of a website that they have created to see if it is accessible for users with disabilities. Students will simulate a number of different disabilities (e.g. visual impairments, color blindness, auditory impairments, motor impairments) to see if their website is accessible; they will also use automated W3 and WAVE tools to evaluate their sites. Students will consider the needs of users with disabilities by creating a persona and scenario of a user with disabilities interacting with their site. Finally, students will write up recommendations to change their site and implement the changes.

V-Slam And Sensor Fusion For Ground Robots, Ejup Hoxha

Dissertations and Theses

In underground, underwater and indoor environments, a robot has to rely solely on its on-board sensors to sense and understand its surroundings. This is the main reason why SLAM gained the popularity it has today. In recent years, we have seen excellent improvement on accuracy of localization using cameras and combinations of different sensors, especially camera-IMU (VIO) fusion. Incorporating more sensors leads to improvement of accuracy,but also robustness of SLAM. However, while testing SLAM in our ground robots, we have seen a decrease in performance quality when using the same algorithms on flying vehicles.We have an additional sensor for ground …

Experimental Applications Of Virtual Reality In Design Education, Amber Bartosh, Phillip Anzalone

Publications and Research

By introducing rapid reproduction, algorithms, and complex formal configurations, the digital era of architecture began a revolution. Architects incorporated the computational capacity of the computer into the design process both as a tool and as a critical component of the theories and practice of architecture as a whole. As we move into what has been coined “the second digital turn,” a period in which digital integration is considered ubiquitous, how can we consider, prepare, and propel towards the next technological innovation to significantly inform design thinking, representation, and manifestation? What tools are available to investigate this speculative design future and …

Open Source Foundations For Spatial Decision Support Systems, Jochen Albrecht

Publications and Research

Spatial Decision Support Systems (SDSS) were a hot topic in the 1990s, when researchers tried to imbue GIS with additional decision support features. Successful practical developments such as HAZUS or CommunityViz have since been built, based on commercial desktop software and without much heed for theory other than what underlies their process models. Others, like UrbanSim, have been completely overhauled twice but without much external scrutiny. Both the practical and the theoretical foundations of decision support systems have developed considerably over the past 20 years. This article presents an overview of these developments and then looks at what corresponding tools …

Historical Effects Of Electronic Interfaces, G James Mitchell

Publications and Research

Electronic interfaces are a primary tool for most professional and personal communication currently happening. Electronics, like the human mind, are limited by the understanding of executing will, or commands. This can be characterized as “interface limitations” of digital technology. Identifying this bottleneck in technological development has been critical in historical changes to both hardware and software technology. Recent medical research examines a novel user interface to reduce task load. I hypothesize, interface developments that take cues from nonverbal human communication enhance and sustain the significance of those technologies in society. By examining pivotal moments of historical technology we can identify …

Designing Smart Applications Using Ar (Augmented Reality), Kimberly A. De La Santa

Publications and Research

Augmented Reality is rapidly developing in popularity because it brings elements of the virtual world, into our real world. Augmented Reality (AR) is a variation of Virtual Reality (VR). VR technologies immerses a user inside an imaginary environment. While immersed, the user cannot see the real world around them. In contrast, AR allows the user to see the real world, with virtual objects and information intertwined. Therefore, AR supplements reality and enhances the things we see, hear, and feel. This research project will implement a Web page that gives the user the opportunity to experiment with AR.

Real-Time Indoor Assistive Localization With Mobile Omnidirectional Vision And Cloud Gpu Acceleration, Feng Hu, Zhigang Zhu, Jeury Mejia, Hao Tang

Publications and Research

In this paper we propose a real-time assistive localization approach to help blind and visually impaired people in navigating an indoor environment. The system consists of a mobile vision front end with a portable panoramic lens mounted on a smart phone, and a remote image feature-based database of the scene on a GPU-enabled server. Compact and elective omnidirectional image features are extracted and represented in the smart phone front end, and then transmitted to the server in the cloud. These features of a short video clip are used to search the database of the indoor environment via image-based indexing to …

On Improvised Music, Computational Creativity And Human-Becoming, Arto Artinian, Adam James Wilson

Publications and Research

Music improvisation is an act of human-becoming: of self-expression—an articulation of histories and memories that have molded its participants—and of exploration—a search for unimagined structures that break with the stale norms of majoritarian culture. Given that the former objective may inhibit the latter, we propose an integration of human musical improvisers and deliberately flawed creative software agents that are designed to catalyze the development of human-ratified minoritarian musical structures.

Give-Me: Gamification In Virtual Environments For Multimodal Evaluation - A Framework, Wai L. Khoo

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In the last few decades, a variety of assistive technologies (AT) have been developed to improve the quality of life of visually impaired people. These include providing an independent means of travel and thus better access to education and places of work. There is, however, no metric for comparing and benchmarking these technologies, especially multimodal systems. In this dissertation, we propose GIVE-ME: Gamification In Virtual Environments for Multimodal Evaluation, a framework which allows for developers and consumers to assess their technologies in a functional and objective manner. This framework is based on three foundations: multimodality, gamification, and virtual reality. It …

Data-Driven Synthesis And Evaluation Of Syntactic Facial Expressions In American Sign Language Animation, Hernisa Kacorri

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Technology to automatically synthesize linguistically accurate and natural-looking animations of American Sign Language (ASL) would make it easier to add ASL content to websites and media, thereby increasing information accessibility for many people who are deaf and have low English literacy skills. State-of-art sign language animation tools focus mostly on accuracy of manual signs rather than on the facial expressions. We are investigating the synthesis of syntactic ASL facial expressions, which are grammatically required and essential to the meaning of sentences. In this thesis, we propose to: (1) explore the methodological aspects of evaluating sign language animations with facial expressions, …

Factororacle: An Extensible Max External For Investigating Applications Of The Factor Oracle Automaton In Real-Time Music Improvisation, Adam James Wilson

Publications and Research

There are several extant software systems designed to generate music in real-time using a factor oracle automaton constructed from the musical input of a human improvisor. The impetus for the design of the factorOracle external is neither a desire to supersede these systems nor introduce novel algorithms for traversing the oracle, but rather to provide a fast, canonical interface for the automaton in Cycling74’s Max and, in future iterations, the Pure Data programming environment. Technical features of the factorOracle software are introduced here.

Cross-Talk: A Shared Parameter Space For Gesturally Extended Human/Machine Improvisation, William Brent, Adam James Wilson

Publications and Research

This paper describes Cross-talk, a piece of music and performance system for two instruments augmented with infrared motion-tracking capability, and an artificial software improviser. Cross-talk was commissioned by the Ammerman Center for Arts and Technology at Connecticut College, for the 13th Biennial Symposium on Arts and Technology. The work is part of an ongoing collaboration focused on developing integrated hardware and software performance systems to extend the timbral and expressive capabilities of traditional musical instruments and to generate musical structure in response to information retrieved from human performers in real-time. Artistic motivations and prior related work are presented here, along …

Arabic For Designers By Mourad Boutros, Saad D. Abulhab

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Anatomy Of An Arabetic Type Design, Saad D. Abulhab

Publications and Research

Arabetic type design, like type design in general, should not be limited by rigid rules, other than those advocating open choice and user options. But as with all design fields, highlighting certain principles and guidelines is crucial to realizing a successful project. In an Arabetic font design environment, such guidelines and principles should reveal deeper understanding of various scripts visual and behavioral defining characteristics rather than mere traditional calligraphic and handwriting norms. A main goal of this study is to emphasize that designing Arabetic fonts is much easier than it is portrayed, and designers of all backgrounds should be more …

Typography Behind The Arabetic Calligraphy Veil, Saad D. Abulhab

Publications and Research

In the change from scriptural writing systems to textual mechanical systems and most recently to digital, computer generated text, some languages and their typographic representations have suffered. One such language, along with its visible language representation, that has not made a smooth transition is Arabic. The author argues that misinterpreting language tradition prevents what he calls Arabetic typography from embracing an appropriate technological adaptation. Putting forth an evolutionary argument, he critiques the notion that calligraphic styles must prevail and that legibility and readability of Arabic characters is objective. He further states that the resulting typefaces when abandoning the so called …

The Mutamathil Type Style: Towards Free, Technology-Friendly, Arabetic Types, Saad D. Abulhab

Publications and Research

Efforts to adapt various Arabetic scripts to the machine are as old as the field of typography. But most of these efforts concentrated primarily on forcing the machine to duplicate the Arabetic handwritten forms. Others have practically advocated divorce from the calligraphic tradition rather than enrichment and reform. One reason why the few modern attempts to typographically solve the technology-induced Arabetic script problems had failed is that many typeforms (or many times just theoretical calligraphy style) was presented as replacement for the traditional ones rather than as optional working types. New “controversial” types should be made widely available for users …