Oct: Report on MobileHCI 2014 and UIST 2014

MobileHCI 2014 

 

MobileHCI 2014 was a single track conference so I saw all the papers presented. I’ve selected a few to highlight which are of interest to me or those I work with. There were many impressive talks and papers which I’ve not noted here as they simply aren’t relevant in my day to day work. As I was the general chair for this conference I hope you aren’t offended if I don’t list your paper here!

You can see some of the videos or images I took (or others gave me) from the various talks and sessions of note here from Flickr.

All the papers are here and can be downloaded by anyone (for a year), after this you will need an ACM DL account. Please note, I’m providing two links for each paper. One is the permanent link to the ACM DL (which you need personal or institutional access to read) and the second is the link to the page for the Open TOC the ACM provides for the next year. If you click on the Open TOC link you then need to search for the paper yourself to click on again! I cannot link to the Open TOC links from this blog. 

Papers

1. Was it worth the hassle?: ten years of mobile HCI research discussions on lab and field evaluations
Refers back to their “lasting impact paper” from 2004 which was awarded this year. As we said their 2004 paper was called “childish and perverse” at the time. This paper discusses the less controversial point of when and how to go into the field (not if). [Permanent Link] [Open TOC Link

2. Toffee: enabling ad hoc, around-device interaction with acoustic time-of-arrival correlation
I suggest this paper as there were a set of around-device sensing (eg. GSM SideSwipe at UIST or cameras by Song et al at UIST) this year and I found this one nicely written and well presented.  [Permanent Link] [Open TOC Link]

3. Around-body interaction: sensing & interaction techniques for proprioception-enhanced input with mobile devices.
This will be a highly cited paper I expect. A nicely put together set of methods in the paper, well described and shown in a convincing manner at MobileHCI.  [Permanent Link] [Open TOC Link]

4. Contextual experience sampling of mobile application micro-usage.
I would read this if you are thinking of using ESM. A well written paper and I was convinced to read it in detail by the conference presentation. [Permanent Link] [Open TOC Link]

5. Portallax: bringing 3D displays capabilities to handhelds
A nice hardware/software system to make a mobile device into a stereoscopic 3D enabled device from our friends in Bristol [Permanent Link] [Open TOC Link]

6. An in-situ study of mobile phone notifications
Best paper by one of our former SACHI speakers with nice insights and a well put together paper.   [Permanent Link] [Open TOC Linkhttp://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2628364]

7. Texting while walking: an evaluation of mini-qwerty text input while on-the-go
A very nice presentation and detailed paper   [Permanent Link] [Open TOC Link]

UIST 2014

This was a multi-track conference so I only saw 50% of the papers. You can see some of the videos or images I took from the various talks and sessions of note here from Flickr.

All the papers are here and can be downloaded by anyone (for a year), after this you will need an ACM DL account. Please note, I’m providing two
links for each paper. One is the permanent link to the ACM DL (which
you need personal or institutional access to read) and the second is the
link to the page for the Open TOC provided for the next year.
If you click on the Open TOC link you then need to search for the paper
yourself to click on again! I cannot link to the Open TOC links from
this blog.

1. FlexSense: A Transparent Self-Sensing Deformable Surface
This was a really nice piece of work from industry and academia. The paper is great to read and should give you ideas for follow on work. [Permanent Link] [Open TOC Link]

2. Graffiti Fur: Turning Your Carpet into a Computer Display
This was a little crazy but a fun concept. Some simple and basic research which results in interesting sensing and actuation at a distance. This is a good example of why the UIST demo program is so important and popular to bring the ideas trapped on paper into an interactive space for discussion with the authors. Will probably be a product soon enough! [Permanent Link] [Open TOC Link]

3. Deconstructing and Restyling D3 Visualizations
After Miguel‘s transmogrify work in 2013 it’s nice to see others taking visulisations apart in novel ways. [Permanent Link] [Open TOC Link]

4. InterState: A Language and Environment for Expressing Interface Behavior
State machines brought to life in a visual programming language to express the behaiour of interfaces. [Permanent Link] [Open TOC Link]

5. ParaFrustum: Visualization Techniques for Guiding a User to a Constrained Set of Viewing Positions and Orientations
I enjoyed this talk and paper as it reminded me of Richard Webber’s work on graph layout viewpoints.  [Permanent Link] [Open TOC Link]

6. InterTwine: Creating Interapplication Information Scent to Support Coordinated Use of Software
This was a nice paper showing how context awareness can come up into the application level to create coordinated support. [Permanent Link] [Open TOC Link]

7. Sensing Techniques for Tablet+Stylus Interaction (best paper)
A fantastic paper (basically 2.5 papers in one).  [Permanent Link] [Open TOC Link]

8. RoomAlive and the Dyadic projected spatial augmented reality papers will be of interest to those looking at digital-physical interaction, uses of the Kinect or those interested in whole room interaction. I visited the Microsoft test home on campus a number of years ago so painting the walls with projectors wasn’t that surprising to me. The innovation in the setup, configuration and interaction is very impressive in both RoomAlive and Dyadic. It will be interesting to watch how anyone takes such a multi-projector system from the lab to the home or workplace given the power, space, lighting, cost etc. constraints. RoomAlive [Permanent Link] and Dyadic [Permanent Link]. [Open TOC Link]

The best talk I saw was this as the entire talk was given as a demo with the presentation material inside the tool. Kitty: Sketching Dynamic and Interactive Illustrations