Abstract – Lego Mindstorms NXT is a platform highly suitable for prototyping in the field of interactive social robotics. During a technology masterclass at Eindhoven University of Technology students from the department of Industrial Design have developed five novel extensions (sensors and actuators) for the Lego Mindstorms NXT which extend the ability of Lego to prototype for robotics even further. Applications include a water-pump, GPS sensor, wireless sensor bridge, optical mouse sensor and a magnetic grabber. In this paper we will present these extensions and showcase applications in which these extend possibilities of Lego Mindstorms NXT to a new level.

Keywords: robot, Lego, Mindstorms, NXT, social, prototyping

Abstract – In the light of Cultural Computing, this study influences user affect and behaviour by touching upon core values of Western culture. We created an augmented reality environment in which users experience a predefined sequence of emotional states and events. This study concerns two typically Western drives: boredom and curiosity. We specifically address the arousal of boredom, a mental state characterized by a heightened drive for exploration, making it easier to guide people in their decision making. Based on psychology literature, we introduce general design guidelines for arousing boredom. We report on the design of the augmented reality environment, the experiment effectively arousing boredom and on the redesign of the environment based on the experimental results.

Keywords: User Affect, Emotions, Cultural Computing, Boredom, Diversive Exploration, Alice in Wonderland, User Behaviour, Modelling Experience, Design, Affective Computing

Abstract. Social navigation in a community of practice is an approach of locating information with increased social awareness. Social navigation alone is not a system, whereas the community of practice is. User requirement definition on social navigation is difficult. On the one hand, without the context of the community of practice, it is hard to collect the user requirements on navigation, especially when the concept of virtual community is new to the target user group. On the other hand, to set up such a virtual community, preliminary studies on social navigation is however necessary. This paper presents the experiences how we dealt with such a chicken and egg problem. Different approaches were used, from theoretical study online questionnaire, observation on an existing virtual society, analysis on similar systems, to prototyping and expert walk-through.

This paper addresses issues of distributing multimedia presentations in an ambient intelligent environment, exams the existing technologies and proposes IPML, a markup language that extends SMIL for distributed settings. It uses a powerful metaphor of play, with which the timing and mapping issues in distributed presentations are easily covered in a natural way.

This year's theme for Designing Designers Milano 2006 was "Unbranded design for new user expectations, in East and West".  Our paper,  "Empowering people, empowering students" is included in the proceedings that is to be published. 

In
this paper we present two results and lay out the underlying philosophy
and practical implementation of the Empowering People track, one of the
two sub-programs of the Industrial Design Master’s at TU/e in
Eindhoven. Several aspects of the competency based education framework
are discussed, from both East and West perspectives.

• Wiki, a Blog (Weblog) for groups: Communities can organize and share content in an organic and free manner
• Extended
  with the right set of functionality, a Wiki can be applied to
  distributed teams to schedule, manage, document, and support their
  daily activities
• The web as a whiteboard for everybody.

We conducted a cross cultural study to test
the influences of different cultural backgrounds on the user’s presence
experience in interacting with a distributed interactive movie. In
addition we were interested in the effects of embodied interaction on
presence. The influence of culture background is clear – Chinese
participants perceived more presence than Dutch participants in all
conditions. The results also show that interaction methods (direct
touch against remote control) had no influence, while embodiment (robot
against screen agent) had mixed effects on presence.

The effect of presenting a distributed interactive movie at different levels of control and distribution on the end user’s fun and presence experience was studied. The results suggest that an increased level of end-user control on the flow in the video increases the level of the user’s experience and impacts the feeling of presence significantly. The effects of distribution are less clear and are very much depending on the presentation devices and the content modality. These results are discussed in terms of the measurement instruments and the experimental design, and suggestions are made for further research.

For presence, we presented an experiment that  tested the
influence  the user’s culture background on the presence
experience in a distributed interactive movie. The results shows that
interaction methods had on influence, while embodiment had mixed
effects on presence. The influence of the culture background is clear –
Chinese perceived more presence than Dutch in all conditions. The
influence of distribution on presence needs to be further investigated,
but from the current results we tend to believe that distributed
presentations decrease presence.

For distributed media, two applications from different projects in which video content is distributed over in-home networked devices are presented. Multiple displays and ambience objects are used to display interactive content. Major issues concern the design of appropriate evaluation methodologies, the use of perceived video quality to achieve efficient resource allocation and the subjective role of content consumption.

The goal of this exhibit is to demonstrate how effective multidisciplinary research efforts are, what the impact of user-centered design methodologies can be, and how crucial the cooperation between specialists from the behavioural and the engineering sciences is to achieve innovative solutions for people’s problems. Research projects of graduate students of the Technical University Eindhoven conducted in public/private cooperation R&D projects will be shown. The demonstrations will illustrate the power and effectiveness of multi-disciplinary education programs at the graduate and post-graduate level. User-system interaction is at the core of these programs, which bring people from different backgrounds, i.e., behavioural and technical sciences, engineering and design disciplines, together. The demonstrations focus on problems and situations from the daily life of people, they address viable and sensible solutions, and maintain the balance between user requirements and technology driven solutions. The exhibit aims to demonstrate the effect and inspiration that is radiated by multidisciplinary research and education programs. The demonstrations will show results from different research projects which all have their roots in user-system interaction technologies and methodologies. The following demonstrations will be presented. – ASTRA: People will see how you can capture and send pictures and handwritten notes with a mobile device to a home-bound device, which displays these messages and additional reachability information. The focus is on the social environment of families on their wishes for maintaining provicy and on the feeling of awareness. An innovative user interface on the home-bound device incorporates different aspects of availability, awareness and presence, and has navigation possibilities which are time and location related. – Read-it: People will see a tabletop with multi-modal interaction with tangible objects. The system is designed to help children with learning to read. It is based on the concept of a matching card game that supports memory for 5-7 year old children. – Powerball: People will see a 4-player table-top game, working with a projected display, which aims to allow disabled children to play together with non-disabled children. The design aim and strength has been to enable enjoyable play, encourage cooperation between children and social interaction around the game. – Robotic toys, interfaces and tangible interaction devices: People will see how interactive toys can be used as entertainment devices or management system, can express emotional behaviour or be part of an entertainment show. And show how a robot with such expressive abilities can function as a universal easy to use and approach interface to drive other less intelligent systems like home equipment. – Video conferencing with eye contact: People will see how eye contact can be made and maintained even when people are still moving their heads. Not having natural eye contact is a notorious problem for video conferencing systems. – P2P physical interaction: People will see the effects of tangible and tactile feedback when they use peer-to-peer systems.