Hao Liu, one of the PhD students I supervised, defended his thesis “Biosignal Controlled Recommendation in Entertainment Systems”, on Monday, December 13, 2010.
[DOWNLOAD | PDF, 2M | Biosignal Controlled Recommendation in Entertainment Systems ]
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Sometimes the first year students surperize you with what they can do in their very first year. Pim Vellenga, Hessel Sieswerda and Niels Timessen challenged themselves with “one huge problem: how do you get the interactive onscreen user interface out of instant messaging experience.” They designed a tea box that is integrated with messaging abilities for the elderly to communicate with their grandchildren. Read the report [PDF, 2M] for more.
By Matthijs Kwak
Interesting work done by one of the master students. [Project Report, PDF, 700K]
Abstract: Technology is moving to the background and interoperability between devices increases. The handles for users to explore, make and break connections between devices seem to disappear inoverly complex menu structures displayed on small screens. Two prototypes have been developed that introduce a tangible approach towards exploring, making and breaking connections between devices in the living room. One provides a centralized approach (SCD1), the other a decentralized approach (SCD2). Industrial Design students and graduates(N=12) have performed tasks and were asked to explain and grade one out of three methods: SCD1 (image 1), SCD2 (image 2) and bluetooth pairing.Findings suggest that users are better able to project their mental model of how the system works on SCD2 and that atangible solution is not necessarily a better one.
B22 Project by Jaap Norbruis. [PDF Report, 1.5M]
“Within this project I explored how context is experienced and in what ways it can be captured and communicated. The design goal of this project is to design a system that communicates contextual information seamless across realities, the context of a remote user should be communicated to a receiving person is such a way that he or she is able to experience it.”
Hugo Christiaans, one of my students, has done an excellent project, namely Share Your Context, about contextual information exchange.
[PDF, 2M] Share your context
Summary of the report:
Non face‐to‐face communication of social and emotional experiences between people happens nowadays through phone or other media like email, IM (Instant Message), webcam and other virtual communities such as Second Life. Share experiences, express creativity and maintain easily contacts have made these virtual worlds very popular for millions of Internet users. To support the communication in these worlds emoticons are often used. This form of context is a combination of different states (physical, information, social and emotional), which help the receivers too understand the received information right.
M12 Research Project by Niels Molenaar. Report: [PDF, 400K]
In public spaces to improve the public perception of cleanliness different lighting conditions can be utilized to dim or to light the littered areas. One would suggest to dim the light for the littered area, or the other way around, to improve the perceived cleanliness. It is however not clear how the lighting condition in the littered area would influence the perceived cleanliness. In this paper we report the result from an experiment in which a metro environment is set up to observe how people react to darkened and lightened litter. The result is somewhat supersizing. People perceive an environment as cleaner when attention is drawn to litter by focusing light on it. The causes of this observation are discussed.
For the EU project SOFIA (Smart Objects For Intelligent Applications), Bram van der Vlist and Gerrit Niezen created a demonstrator for one of the use cases: semantic connections. “The demonstrator consists of a set of devices; surround sound-set, mobile mp3 players, an ambient lighting system and interaction device(s). The interaction device is a tile-like interactive object that allows for both exploration of the Smart Space in terms of connections and manipulation of these connections and information/data streams. Coloured LED lighting and light dynamics visualize the connections and connection possibilities between the various devices. By means of putting devices close to one of the four sides of the tile, a user can check if there is a connection and if not if a connection is possible. By simply picking up the tile, and shaking it a user can make or break the connection between the devices present at the interaction tile.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vdZcjqfq8RQ
Nice research done by our Master student Niels Molenaar: Would highlighting the clean seats and darkening the litter in a train let people feel the train is cleaner? The answer is No. To know more about this research, read his report:
LightAndThePerceptionOfCleanliness (PDF, 379KB)
As a result of the Master class “LEGO beyond toys”, Sjef Franse, one of our master students, created a lego brick “WifiBlock” that connects the NXT to the Internet. The complete hardware and software design is described in his report:
by Sophie van der Weerd, [PDF | 2M]
In her B22 project report, Sophie writes: “…I will offer the ‘WeTouch Pillow’; the pillow that communicates your families’ presence in a subtle way without an obliged effort. If one uses his pillow, the pillow of the other becomes warmer and vice versa. I will focus upon the communication tools market. The market will have a need for my product, since it communicates family presence without an obligation and current communication tools require an obligation and effort, which people do not like when communicating with their family like having to call, as to my user research. I want to express to the market the importance of family presence and contact, but that there is no obliged effort needed. The internet will be a good medium to use to contact the target group of relatives living apart, since the younger generations uses it a lot. And I try to reach people who live apart from each other, so an internet service which sends one pillow to each of the relatives is a good way to sell the WeTouch Pillow. Also because an internet connection is needed for the pillows to connect…”