DaNovak

Chair for Computer Aided Medical Procedures & Augmented Reality
Lehrstuhl für Informatikanwendungen in der Medizin & Augmented Reality

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Attentive User Interfaces for DWARF

Student: Vinko Novak
Supervisor: Dipl.Inf. Christian Sandor
Professor: Prof. Gudrun Klinker
Submission date: 14.06.2004

Abstract

This diploma thesis covers the problems associated with the tracking of users’ attention during human computer interaction(HCI), and how the attention can be used to improve the HCI. A system to track, visualize and use attention as an input has been implemented. From the attention focus it can be understood what people do, how they interact with the system and which objects are currently of interest for them. We are going to use this information to simplify the human computer interaction. Nowadays, every user is surrounded by many devices (i.e. PC, cell phones, PDA’s, note book etc.), each of them requesting immediate user’s attention. This requests are often interfering with the current user’s task and result in an unwished interruption. The main problem lies in the user interfaces for these devices because they use the old WIMP (windows, icons, menus, pointers) paradigm, which has been developed 20 years ago. At that time, one user was interacting with at most one computer, and WIMP developers assumed, that the whole user’s attention is set to this one device. Presently, such behavior is often fatal, because users get bombarded by requests for attention from different devices. We use Attentive User Interfaces (AUI) to solve this problem by augmenting the devices with the capability to sense and reason about users’ attention. The viewing direction of humans tells a lot about their attention focus. This includes which person, device or task the user is paying attention to, the importance of that task, and how eyes are used to open communicational channels in interpersonal communications. Researches in the cognitive psychology showed that there is a close relation between the eye direction and attention focus. Therefore, we will use eye tracking in combination with headtracking to compute eye direction in the 3D space and use it as the input for AUI. Our main goal is to develop a working application to demonstrate the advantages of the AUI versus the WIMP paradigm.

Work products

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  • Diploma Thesis (pdf)


ProjectForm
Title: Attentive User Interfaces for DWARF
Abstract: This diploma thesis covers the problems associated with the tracking of users’ attention during human computer interaction(HCI), and how the attention can be used to improve the HCI. A system to track, visualize and use attention as an input has been implemented. From the attention focus it can be understood what people do, how they interact with the system and which objects are currently of interest for them. We are going to use this information to simplify the human computer interaction. Nowadays, every user is surrounded by many devices (i.e. PC, cell phones, PDA’s, note book etc.), each of them requesting immediate user’s attention. This requests are often interfering with the current user’s task and result in an unwished interruption. The main problem lies in the user interfaces for these devices because they use the old WIMP (windows, icons, menus, pointers) paradigm, which has been developed 20 years ago. At that time, one user was interacting with at most one computer, and WIMP developers assumed, that the whole user’s attention is set to this one device. Presently, such behavior is often fatal, because users get bombarded by requests for attention from different devices. We use Attentive User Interfaces (AUI) to solve this problem by augmenting the devices with the capability to sense and reason about users’ attention. The viewing direction of humans tells a lot about their attention focus. This includes which person, device or task the user is paying attention to, the importance of that task, and how eyes are used to open communicational channels in interpersonal communications. Researches in the cognitive psychology showed that there is a close relation between the eye direction and attention focus. Therefore, we will use eye tracking in combination with headtracking to compute eye direction in the 3D space and use it as the input for AUI. Our main goal is to develop a working application to demonstrate the advantages of the AUI versus the WIMP paradigm.
Student: Vinko Novak
Director: Prof. Gudrun Klinker
Supervisor: Dipl.Inf. Christian Sandor
Type: Diploma Thesis
Status: finished
Start:  
Finish: 2004/06/14


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