Grant: Strategic Projects - Group

Pervasive access to networked information can bring connectedness, efficiency and enjoyment into our lives while we listen to podcasts, skype with collaborators and check messages. Too often, however, people experience digitally enabled interactions with other people, technology and data as an irritating series of asynchronous interrupts, frequently requiring explicit attention to manage. The resulting attention overload, information loss and corruption of social cues can lead to a wide variety of highly negative consequences - social, personal and economic. This project targets the challenges of excessive sensory / cognitive load and loss of social cues resulting from inadequacies in today's interfaces to networked information and communications. Our main goal is to offload some of the user's explicit interactions with these systems to an implicit sub-attentional level, thereby making the interactions more transparent and allowing the user to focus on his/her primary task. The core innovation is the Haptic-Affect Loop (HALO): we will utilize the sensed affect response of the user (psycho-physiological reaction to a current environment or situation) to trigger changes in the interaction, while providing immediate, unintrusive feedback to the user about the change through the tactile channel of the haptic sense. Our core objectives are: (1) to implement and model the HALO, refining current affect sensing and tactile technology and prototyping the core interaction in an abstracted setting; and (2) to validate HALO through user evaluation in two real use contexts - navigation of streaming media (e.g. podcasts), and background communication in distributed meetings - which exhibit key interface challenges observed in networked communication. This work will result in state-of-the-art lightweight affect sensing and tactile display technologies and interaction techniques that can be used in concert or alone, and will advance both single-user human-computer interaction with networked data and group interaction in a networked scenario.