A Spatial Informance Design Method to Elicit Early Interface Prototypes for Augmented Reality

Designing for augmented reality (AR) applications is difficult and expensive. A rapid system for the early design process of spatial interfaces is required. Previous research has used video for mobile AR design, but this is not extensible to head-mounted AR. AR is an emergent technology with no prior design precedent, requiring designers to allow free speculation or risk the pitfalls of ‘path dependence’. In this paper, a participatory elicitation method we call ‘spatial informance design’ is presented. We found combining ‘informance design’, ‘Wizard of Oz’, improvisation, and ‘paper prototyping’, to be a fast and lightweight solution for ideation of rich designs for spatial interfaces. A study using our method with 11 participants, produced similar and wildly different interface configurations and interactions for an augmented reality email application. Based on our findings we propose design implications and an evaluation of our method using spatial informance for the design of head-mounted AR applications.

Lessons Learned About Product Redesign for Evolvability Using Reflective Entries

The operating conditions for, and requirements of, a product may change in unexpected ways while it is in service. Products incapable of meetings these new requirements lose value. This reduction in value diminishes the user experience or product replacement occurs. Previous studies in the literature have investigated principles of design flexibility, modularity, excess, and margins as they apply to the redesign of an existing product as a means of keeping it in service. Design tools, such as Design Structure Matrices (DSMs) and change propagation techniques, give the engineer insight into managing the redesign process. However, there is limited data about perceptions of the redesign process and the challenges that arise. This paper explores the redesign of a single system with particular focus on the design objective, the utility offered by existing design tools, and the perception of excess. A pod-based coffee maker is redesigned as the pod carrying the coffee grounds has been discontinued. Three conceptual redesign solutions are generated by the co-author who also wrote reflections discussing her perspectives and experiences throughout the redesign process. The reflections from the co-author highlight questions about how designers identify valuable system attributes when redesigning a system (already in service) to meet new requirements. The co-author’s experience also provides evidence that (1) there is a relationship between design tool and redesign strategy, (2) that it was easier to conceptualize redesign work with excess around functional requirements than spatial interfaces, and (3) that the perceived amount of excess in a system influences the chosen design strategy.

Songverse: a music-loop authoring tool based on Virtual Reality

We can define Digital Musical Instruments (DMIs) as hardware-software solutions that are interactive and crafted to output sound according to users' input. DMIs are well known to unleash users' creativity but also to allow different and innovative experiences for the creation process, for example, smoothing the learning curve towards musical concepts such as rhythm and composition. On the other hand, Virtual Reality (VR) allows users to explore spatial interfaces in a natural and limitless way, which shows potential synergy towards the rise of new DMIs. In this paper, we introduce Songverse, an immersive DMI placed in a Virtual Reality scenario that allows users to create music by interacting with an environment designed to resemble the outer space. By adding systems, planets, and satellites to the virtual environment, the user can shape the produced sound through interactions that were extensively tested during the development phase. We then evaluated the instrument with musicians and non-musicians by interviewing and applying the System Usability Scale (SUS) to assess the easiness for people to create music using Songverse. As a result, users reported the use of the DMI as intuitive and easy to use, also highlighting the produced song as enjoyable.

TerraBrasilis: A Spatial Data Analytics Infrastructure for Large-Scale Thematic Mapping

The physical phenomena derived from an analysis of remotely sensed imagery provide a clearer understanding of the spectral variations of a large number of land use and cover (LUC) classes. The creation of LUC maps have corroborated this view by enabling the scientific community to estimate the parameter heterogeneity of the Earth’s surface. Along with descriptions of features and statistics for aggregating spatio-temporal information, the government programs have disseminated thematic maps to further the implementation of effective public policies and foster sustainable development. In Brazil, PRODES and DETER have shown that they are committed to monitoring the mapping areas of large-scale deforestation systematically and by means of data quality assurance. However, these programs are so complex that they require the designing, implementation and deployment of a spatial data infrastructure based on extensive data analytics features so that users who lack a necessary understanding of standard spatial interfaces can still carry out research on them. With this in mind, the Brazilian National Institute for Space Research (INPE) has designed TerraBrasilis, a spatial data analytics infrastructure that provides interfaces that are not only found within traditional geographic information systems but also in data analytics environments with complex algorithms. To ensure it achieved its best performance, we leveraged a micro-service architecture with virtualized computer resources to enable high availability, lower size, simplicity to produce an increment, reliable to change and fault tolerance in unstable computer network scenarios. In addition, we tuned and optimized our databases both to adjust to the input format of complex algorithms and speed up the loading of the web application so that it was faster than other systems.