Multimodal interfaces for camera phones

Abstract

Camera phones are now very common but there are some issues that affect their usability. These can occur because users look through the LCD to frame the image and can often miss the icons displayed around the edge that present important information about exposure, battery life, number of shots remaining, etc. This may lead to shots being missed or poorly exposed. We created a sonified luminance histogram to present exposure information, a sound cue to indicate memory card space remaining and a tactile cue for battery charge status. A user study showed that participants were able to use the sonified histogram to identify exposure successfully and could recognise the status of the battery and memory card well, suggesting that alternative forms of output could free-up the screen for framing the image.

Rethinking camera user interfaces

“…The aim of this feedback was to give a simple overview of the current exposure. In previous research [5], we developed a complete audio histogram but this was hard to interpret for novice users.…”

Novel interfaces for digital cameras and camera phones

“…The aim was to enable photographers to capture better images for their collections and reduce the number that would have to be deleted or post processed (especially as Rodden and Wood suggest many people do not post process). We chose to work, for example, on sonifying the luminance histograms as these are very useful for assessing exposure before a picture is taken but take up a lot of screen space and are quite hard for novices to interpret [9] (see Figure 2 bottom right hand corner). Providing this information non-visually would allow the user to focus on using the screen for composition.…”

“…In our own previous work, Brewster & Johnston [9] developed a camera phone interface that provided multimodal feedback to the user on a number of different camera features. Tactile cues were used to indicate the remaining battery level on the device, and audio cues were used to indicate the remaining memory card capacity.…”

Synesthetic enrichment of mobile photography

“…For instance, there are three optical parameters that affect the correct exposure of a photograph: shutter 1 At the time of writing http://www.flickr.com/cameras Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored.…”

“…rule of thirds), or inclination indicators [3]. Moreover, audio cues have been used to inform about exposure features of the photograph at focus time [1].…”