ABSTRACT
Small point lights (e.g., LEDs) are used as indicators in a wide variety of devices today, from digital watches and toasters, to washing machines and desktop computers. Although exceedingly simple in their output - varying light intensity over time - their design space can be rich. Unfortunately, a survey of contemporary uses revealed that the vocabulary of lighting expression in popular use today is small, fairly unimaginative, and generally ambiguous in meaning. In this paper, we work through a structured design process that points the way towards a much richer set of expressive forms and more effective communication for this very simple medium. In this process, we make use of five different data gathering and evaluation components to leverage the knowledge, opinions and expertise of people outside our team. Our work starts by considering what information is typically conveyed in this medium. We go on to consider potential expressive forms -- how information might be conveyed. We iteratively refine and expand these sets, concluding with ideas gathered from a panel of designers. Our final step was to make use of thousands of human judgments, gathered in a crowd-sourced fashion (265 participants), to measure the suitability of different expressive forms for conveying different information content. This results in a set of recommended light behaviors that mobile devices, such as smartphones, could readily employ.
Supplemental Material
- Amazon Mechanical Turk. http://www.mturk.comGoogle Scholar
- Android API, "Adding flashing lights." Retrieved September 13, 2011. http://developer.android.com/ guide/topics/ui/notifiers/notifications.html#Lights.Google Scholar
- Arons, B. SpeechSkimmer: interactively skimming recorded speech. In Proc. UIST '93, 187--196. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Baumann, K. and Thomas, B. (2001). User Interface Design of Electronic Appliances, 1st Ed. CRC Press. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Blattner, M. M., Sumikawa, D. A., and Greenberg, R. M. Earcons and icons: their structure and common design principles. Human-Comp. Inter. 4, 1 (1989), 11--44. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Brewster, S. and Brown, L. M. Tactons: structured tactile messages for non-visual information display. In Proc. Australasian User Interface '04. 15--23. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Brewster, S. A., Wright, P. C. and Edwards, A. An evaluation of earcons for use in auditory humancomputer interfaces. In Proc. CHI '93. 222--227. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Chen, C., Forlizzi, J., and Jennings, P. ComSlipper: an expressive design to support awareness and availability. In CHI '06 Ext. Abs. 369--374. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Dahley, A., Wisneski, C., and Ishii, H. Water lamp and pinwheels: ambient projection of digital information into architectural space. In Proc. CHI '98. 269--270. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Easterby, R. The Perception of Symbols for Machine Displays. Ergonomics 13, 1 (1970), 149--158.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Enriquez, M. J. and MacLean, K. E. The Hapticon Editor: A Tool in Support of Haptic Communication Research. In Proc. HAPTICS '03. 356--362. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Gaver, W. Auditory Icons: Using Sound in Compute Interfaces. Human-Comp. Interac. 2, 2 (1986), 167--177. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Gaver, W. The Sonic Finder: An Interface that Uses Auditory Icons. Human-Computer Interaction, 4, 1 (1989), 67--94. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Hankinson, J. C. and Edwards, A. D. Designing earcons with musical grammars. SIGCAPH Comput. Phys. Handicap. 65 (Sep. 1999), 16--20. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Harrison, C. and Hudson, S. E. Texture displays: a passive approach to tactile presentation. In Proc. CHI '09. 2261--2264. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Harrison, C., Hsieh, G., Willis, K. D. D., Forlizzi, J. and Hudson, S. E. Kineticons: using iconographic motion in graphical user interface design. In Proc. CHI '11. 1999--2008 Google ScholarDigital Library
- Holmquist L. E., and Skog, T. Informative art: information visualization in everyday environments. In Proc. GRAPHITE '03. 229--235. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Huppi, B. Q., Stringer, C. J., Bell, J. and Capener, C. J. United States Patent 6658577: Breathing status LED indicator, 2003.Google Scholar
- Kittur, A., Chi, E. H., and Suh, B. Crowdsourcing user studies with Mechanical Turk. In Proc. CHI '08. 453--456. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Lee, S. H., and Blake, R. Visual form created solely from temporal structure. Science, 284 (1999). 11651168.Google Scholar
- Lim, B. Y. Shick, A., Harrison, C., and Hudson, S. E. Pediluma: motivating physical activity through contextual information and social influence. In Proc. TEI '11. 173--180. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Lodding, K. Iconic Interfacing. IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications. 3, 2 (1983), 11--20. Google ScholarDigital Library
- MacIntyre, B., Mynatt, E. D., Voida, S., Hansen, K. M, Tullio, J., Corso, G. M., Support for multitasking and background awareness using interactive peripheral displays. In Proc. UIST '01. 41--50. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Mankoff, J., Dey, A. K., Hsieh, G., Kientz, J., Lederer, S. and Ames. M. Heuristic evaluation of ambient displays. In Proc. CHI '03. 169--176. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Pintus, A. V. Tangible lightscapes. In Proc. TEI '10. 379--380. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Pintus, A. V. A collection of light behaviours (video). Retrieved Sept. 7, 2011. http://vimeo.com/8612242Google Scholar
- Rzeszotarski, J. and Kittur, A., Instrumenting the crowd: Using implicit behavioral measures to predict task performance. In Proc. UIST '11. 13--22. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Seitinger, S., Taub, D. M. and Taylor, A. S. Light bodies: exploring interactions with responsive lights. In Proc. TEI '10. 113--120. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Weiser, M. and Brown, J. S. 1997. The coming age of calm technology. In Beyond Calculation: The Next Fifty Years of Computing. Denning P. J. and Metcalfe, R. M. (eds), Springer-Verlag. 75--85. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Wessolek, D. 2008. Semiotic Foundations of Illuminants as Time-Based Medium in Space: Experiments and Artifacts. MFA Thesis, Bauhaus University Weimar, Germany.Google Scholar
- Wessolek, D. Bouncing glow: methods of creating content elements for one-pixel-displays. In Proc. TEI '11. 443--444. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Williams, A., Farnham, S., and Counts, S. Exploring wearable ambient displays for social awareness. In CHI '06 Ext. Abs. 1529--1534. Google ScholarDigital Library
Index Terms
- Unlocking the expressivity of point lights
Recommendations
Half-duplex visible light communication using an LED as both a transmitter and a receiver
In typical visible light communication VLC systems, light-emitting diodes LEDs are used as optical transmitters and photodiodes are used as optical receivers. Currently, many communication devices such as smart phones have a built-in LED lamp whereas ...
Pedralumen 3
ARTECH '23: Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Digital and Interactive ArtsThe artwork Pedralumen 3 is a project by Gilbertto Prado with Grupo Poéticas Digitais. In the exhibition space, we have a cube of blue LEDs (8 x 8 x 8), which responds to the tides of the Ria Formosa in conjunction with the noise of the wind on the ...
Martian -- message broadcast via LED lights to heterogeneous smartphones: poster
MobiCom '16: Proceedings of the 22nd Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and NetworkingVisible light communication (VLC) has been shown to have several advantages over traditional wireless communication. We envision a LED-to-smartphone VLC protocol for delivering messages to a group of unsynchronized mobile device receivers. We carefully ...
Comments