Body-based interfaces

Abstract

This research explores different ways to use features of one's own body for interacting with computers. Such "body-based" interfaces may find good uses in wearable computing or virtual reality systems as part of a 3D multi-modal interface in the future, freeing the user from holding interaction devices. Four types of body-based interfaces have been identified: Body-inspired metaphor (BIM); Body-as-interaction-surface (BAIS); Mixed mode (MM); and Object mapping (OM). These four body-based interfaces were applied to a few different applications (and associated tasks) and were tested for their performance and preference. It was generally found that, among the four, the BIM exhibited low error rates, but produced relatively longer task completion times and significant fatigue. The BAIS method had the contrasting character of higher error rates, but shorter task completion times and lower intuitiveness. The OM method exhibited high error rates, longer completion times, and much fatigue. Overall, the MM was superior in terms of both performance and preference as it combined the merits of the above three methods. Thus, it is expected, for applications with many associated tasks, a careful division of tasks among those that have natural semantic links to body parts and those that do not, is necessary to design the most performing body-based interface.

Product interface design: A participatory approach based on virtual reality

“…The research described in Kima et al (2004) explores different ways to use some ''body-based interfaces'' for interacting with wearable computers. The authors describe a usability test conducted to compare the performance and subjective preference of the four different styles of the interfaces.…”

“…The effectiveness of the PD approach in the product design is well documented in literature (Schuler and Namioka, 1993;Finn and Blomberg, 1998;Kujala, 2003), but there are also apparent limits of the current approaches that we have tried to tackle through the introduction of specific technologies and tools: The designers' proposals have to be presented as expensive prototypes, because many users cannot understand theoretical concepts and prefer discussing existing products or realistic mock-ups (Kima et al, 2004;Nevalaa and Tamminen-Peter, 2004;Olsson and Jansson, 2005;Sharma et al, 2008). A physical mock-up of the product concept can be realised only in the final stages of the development process, causing a delay in discovering design problems.…”

Perceived qualities of smart wearables

“…At first hand, the attempts were on creating software applications such as: environmental interactions, i.e., detecting finger movements for image capturing by wearing an image capturing system [31], bodily interactions, i.e., creating body-based interfaces [32]; capturing changes in the body i.e., monitoring the human bod y's ph ysiological fun ction s throu gh wearing ambient sensors [33], and sharing human emotions and experiences, i.e., identifying social interactions [34]. Apart from engineers, in 2000's, the wearables also attracted the attention of fashion Some of the wearable's were criticized to be huge and complex for a user to put on and use [13].…”

Development of field programmable modular wireless sensor network nodes for ambient systems

“…Ambient conditions such as temperature and humidity could be monitored to help improve crop yield by flagging conditions that lead to susceptibility to infectious disease and enabling preventative actions to be taken [2,3]. Wearable computing is another area where wireless sensor nodes are key to successful integration [4][5][6] with several companies already producing goods related to this topic [7,8].…”