Notes for “Interactive Public Ambient Displays: Transitioning from Implicit to Explicit, Public to Personal, Interaction with Multiple Users”
by Daniel Vogel, Ravin Balakrishnan
This article is specifically relevant to my design concept of using proximity to display different levels of details, thus I took some notes to refer the prior similar works.
The article proposes a new strategy that make a public display can display different information bases on users’ position, proximity to the screen, and orientation. The concept is beneficial to address problems of privacy information in public environment, or to avoid from too much information overloading users’ sense. And how to notify and communicate with users in a minimally intrusive, socially acceptable manner? How can a public screen be shared with multiple users?
This diagram shows the 4 phases and states how interaction happen bases on the proximity of users to the screen.
4 Phases
Techniques for Ambient Display Phase
The ambient display phase functions on the periphery with minimal interaction when users are distant from the screen or have asked to have other interaction phases hidden. Our prototype
ambient display presents four categories of information suitable for an office environment: current weather conditions and forecasts; activity levels in branch offices; an event and appointment calendar; and public and personal messaging. We note that these categories and their presentation heuristics are only examples selected from many possible candidates. In particular, a production system should focus more time on privacy design, building for example upon Palen’s work on calendars [18].
Techniques for Implicit Interaction Phase
This phase is initiated as a user walks past the screen. It has two functions: notify the user of any urgent information and demonstrate to the user that the display is interactive.
Techniques for Subtle Interaction Phase
The user enters the personalized subtle interaction phase by facing the screen and3) standing still for a moment within a certain threshold distance (40”). Upon entering this phase, the user’s proxy bar widens, overview information for the notification flags are displayed, and some personal information augments the ambient display. We refer to this initial state as the OVERVIEW state (Figure 3 & Figure 5c). From here, the user begins interacting in a more explicit manner using hand gestures to select an information source for querying, thus entering the SELECT state (Figure 3 & Figure 5d). To exit this phase, the user either moves closer to the screen to enter the personal interaction phase or turns and walks away to return to the implicit interaction or ambient display phases.
Techniques for Personal Interaction Phase
By stepping closer to the display, the user enters4) the personal interaction phase where information in the detail display is queried using touch screen input. By standing close to the display, more personal information can be displayed safely by using a small font size and exploiting natural body occlusion. The phase is exited by stepping back to the subtle interaction phase, or turning and walking away to return to the implicit interaction or ambient display phases.
