For those who attended November’s LFPUG, I thought I’d say a big thanks for attending, and giving me so much feedback on the issues of ownership, identity, privacy, and the presentation itself. To let you know that, even though Tink observed I wasn’t taking notes on paper, I definitely haven’t forgotten about your suggestions to identify a user. For those who weren’t there, the most intriguing part of the conversation following the presentation was: How to distinguish one user’s touch from someone else’s on a multi-touch, and multi-user screen?


view the video of the presentation here ¦ it was a first so please bear with me

To give a bit of a background on this post for those who didn’t attend, I have presented parts of the work-in-progress that is my graduation project for the faculty of Industrial Design Engineering at Delft University of Technology. The project is all about how to raise awareness of the privacy and ownership issues of digital media. I have been looking at how kids today use their phones, camera’s, instant messengers and online communities, and the impact it has, both short-term and long-term social relations and risk.

With my product/service design I hope to achieve a level of understanding that firstly shows that digital media can assist users in face-to-face communication, and secondly, that sharing digital content impacts the privacy and ownership in ways physical products can not. The three-tier product service solution I have come up with does this by providing a literal translation of social communities into a real space, which visualises the transactions otherwise taking place silently on the internet.

With the presentation I intended to get feedback on whether my assumptions are to be fine tuned or corrected, and whether this is an issue that we should really be looking at. I am glad to have found that my presentation sparked quite a bit of discussion and, even though the above explanation may not have come across as well as I hope it has now, there is definitely a value in raising awareness of issues to do with the internetconnectedness amongst teens. There is a clear digital generation gap, where parents or even teachers don’t really grasp the opportunities and threats the current era provides, and the teens don’t quite understand the future implications yet of what they do today may still exist for years to come, well beyond their own intent.

The practical implementation of visualising this issue in the real world is down to a shared table which displays images taken by the teens themselves. Following a field study with 12 year-olds I have distilled means of interaction I feel should be enabled by a this table. Gesture based interaction with the digital media, as seen in many examples of multi-touch and multi-user devices is a great starting point, but rules for interaction to visualise control, ownership and privacy is not often touched upon. One problem I seem to come across again and again is how to distinguish one user’s touch from another’s, which brings me back to the start of this post.

DiamondTouch is one option to do this, is by sending a small current through the users body, to identify user A, as user A, and not user B, C or D. Although I can imagine not many people would be happy to have their kids using such a table as innocent and safe as it may be (although I should do some more research into this assumption). Following the presentation, many had ideas about how to solve the issue of identifying a user’s touch; a) using an infra-red camera to identify the user and matching that to the screens touch sensors, b) using coloured bands to be picked up by a camera, and linking those the the fingers attached c) using rfid, although I’m not sure how the actual touch would be linked to the rfid signal, unless the grid was to be made up of rfid receivers. (please add in if I ommited to mention more possibilities). Ideally, the solution would be a back-projected or a TFT/Plasma solution, which would work without any overhanging projectors, camera’s etc, so the table can be simple to set up, move around, and used without shadows interfering with the actual screen.

I’d like to sum up with some of the part-solutions I have encountered so far for multi-user/multi-touch screens;
DiamondTouch
FTIR
MS Surface
Cabinet
Entertaible
i-Bar
Please do add to this list via the comments if you come across other interactive displays.

Any comments, recommendations, thoughts, random ideas on the topic I’ve just described are very welcome.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 4th, 2007 at 12:51 and is filed under Privacy, Interaction, Interface, Gesture, Multimodal, Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.