Abracadabra: Wireless, High-Precision, and Unpowered Finger Input for Very Small Mobile Devices - summary

This article is mainly about how we will interface with touch screens as they become smaller. This particular unit shown offers a screen and behind the screen is a magnetic sensor that is used to essentially track the magnet attached to a users finger. There are several ways to control the screen via the magnet. The first control is a click which is done by starting with the magnet in front of the screen and slowly dropping below the screen's horizon. As the magnet drops below the screens horizon the sensors will pick up a polar shift from north to south of the magnet thus initiating a click. the second type of control is the scrolling capability. the sensor is able to detect when the magnet moves across the screen activating the scrolling mechanism programmed into the screen.


This would be useful for current touch screens to remedy the "fat finger" problem, however a screen this small as depicted would be hard to read and would not be popular. Also vision would be impaired since you need to pass your finger in front of a small screen instead of a pin point of a stylus.


Article written by: Chris Harrison, Scott E. Hudson Human-Computer Interaction Institute Carnegie Mellon University, 5000 Forbes Ave., Pittsburgh, PA 15213 {chris.harrison, scott.hudson}@cs.cmu.edu

Ripples: Utilizing Per-Contact Visualizations to Improve User Interaction with Touch Displays - summary

This article is about trying to fix the ambiguity problem of touch screens. When a user touches the screen he or she receives visual feedback of where they touched. Receiving visual feedback helps a user with accuracy when using a touch screen. This technology will also increase a users confidence in touch screen devices because they get a visual of how their fingers influence the screen. This type of application adds a sort of invisible map pointer allowing a user to further increase precision when manipulating the touch screen.


I believe this is a great idea, i have an iphone and several times i have clicked something on the edge of the screen and nothing happens. I believe this application would help to determine if the phone is just slow, misaligned or im just not clicking the right place.

Article by: Daniel Wigdor1, Sarah Williams2, Michael Cronin2, Robert Levy1, Katie White2, Maxim Mazeev1, Hrvoje Benko3 Microsoft Surface1 | Microsoft Corp.2 | Microsoft Research3 One Microsoft Way Redmond, WA, 98052 { dwigdor | sarahwil | micron | rlevy | katwhite | maximm | benko } @microsoft.com

Integrated Videos and Maps for Driving Directions - Summary

This article is about increasing the effectiveness of GPS navigation. By using streaming video of the path you are taking the creator ha shown that the effectiveness is increased. By showing the video familiarity of the area is increased making a driver more comfortable. The creator also syncs the speed of the vehicle with the video so as a user stops so does the video. The videos are automatically generated and can be changed to better suit the driver. The user can change the aspect ratio and view.

This new GPS technology sounds like a great improvement. Some people are more visually oriented so this would greatly enhance the "driving to a new place" experience. When the driver is more confident about where they are going thwn they are less likely to make traffic errors.

Collabio: a game for annotating people within social networks - summary

Collabio stands for collaborative biography This article is about enhancing the current social networking tagging system; essentially turning it into a game. The purpose for making tagging into a game is to encourage users to provide accurate information about themselves and their friends. The game gives out points to users who can correctly guess the tag of one of their friends. Users get an extra point if they guess a tag already guessed by another user. Users can manage tags created for them and by them this feature helps to improve accuracy as a user can untag items that are not correct. The game allows for the expansion of its user base and retains the current users. For every one user tagging an other user, they received 11 tags in return. Basically the game is engineered to gather as much data of individuals as possible.




I believe this type of game is deceptive because it offers a point system to trick a user into giving out semi personal information. This gathered information could be used to hack into users accounts. For example on some bank websites a user can recover their password by typing in a correct answer to a security question. Some questions include where you went to school or the name of your pet. Therefore a hacker just needs to login and view the tags and can easily determine where you went to school and access your account. This just seems like a new method of phishing and once the information hits the internet it can never be removed.

Article by:
Michael Bernstein1, Desney Tan2, Greg Smith2, Mary Czerwinski2, Eric Horvitz2
1 MIT CSAIL
32 Vassar Street, Cambridge MA 02139
msbernst@mit.edu
2 Microsoft Research
One Microsoft Way, Redmond WA 98052
{desney, gregsmi, marycz, horvitz}@microsoft.com