Touchless interaction in surgery

 From the key insights, it is said that the touchless interaction in surgery should be designed to work within operating-theatre practices. When I first saw it, I came up with the future cinema, I think  there are kind of similar because they both rely on the system to do the work.

    However, this kind of advanced knowledge still remains many problems, firstly, such practices are not risk free. Especially, for the long procedures, since it needs to take plenty of time which can be delayed, in other way, it can increase both financial cost and clinical risk. Also, the process of using such technology is very complex, so the implementation and refinement are very necessary for th touches system to develop. Moreover, operating on the patients need really high technology which should do the work very correctively step by step, it is not allowed to make a little mistake during the process, so it requires a much precise set of image manipulation options rather than simple adjustment of various image parameters.Moreover, the technology also combines the use of voice in the system with the gestural modality to achieve control. In designing the system we had to address notable socio-technical concerns with broader significance for how to think about system development.The other point requires to pay attention to is about collaboration and control, as I mentioned before, the surgeon is very serious about the technology to utilize, so the collaboration for each patient and procedure should be super clear. Moreover, the system engagement and disengagement are also problem, in specific, sometimes gesturing may be not correct to connect with the screen. I think it is kind of messy for people to interact with such system, like the article said, the design itself should be not merely focused on the technology but also the clinical demands. The technology itself should not be just innovative in also needs to concern the usability and safety from my personal perspective, developer also should understand what’s the first importance for the clinicians, so that the system can be more useful in the medical aspects.

VoxBox: a Tangible Machine that Gathers Opinions from the Public at Events

 Basically the Voxbox is designed as a tangible system to gather people’s opinions in interactive way through roughly 4 steps like questions, completion, answers and results.

     As we all know traditionally we always use the surveys to research people’ reaction, but since it has the limitation of approaching people,so in this way the voxbox which is made of both physical input and output devices tried to solve this problem which can invite people to use it in positive way. 

     Regarding to the background, the voxbox which include the use of large screens, mobile phones and voting box elicit opinions with clear and easy-understandable affordances. Meanwhile the researchers also focus on attracting public attention to let people approach the Voxbox through designing the voxbox as interesting and playful as possible.

     The voxbox is intended to stand out as modular system, at first, grouping similar questions mainly is about the questionnaire with a logical flow of questions. And then, after arranging the questions, we should encourage completion and show progress, the voxbox is visible for people to check the completion, the progress is also shown by lighting panels one by one. The next step is to gather answers to closed and open questions, they try to use the phone handset to give the answers willingly. Finally, the voxbox which make difference from the traditional methods to gather people’s opinion is  that people can see the collected results.

     According to the design and implemention od voxbox, it is mentioned that the voxbox was inspired by the archaic computer game” the incredible machine.” In details the questions group was divided into 5 types such as demographics, mood, the crowd, the event and open questions, so I think the difficult part is to match the different questions with different physical mechanisms. Since the voxbox inside is kind of complicated, which need the implementation to test it can work well or not. Voxbox was controlled by open source Arduino technologies. Moreover, voxbox was designed to not only allow people to share data on their demographics and views, but to also give them the opportunity to learn more about the opinions held by others.As for the initial deployment, the voxbox is concerned to connect the relationship between the government, digital democracy and the public. And from the article we can know that Voxbox was really well-welcomed. it is written that most users answered the open questions through the phone, and answer the questions in positive way. To some extent, this kind of way to gather public opinion is very effective, which just let them approach it by themselves rather than invite them.

      Since when I see how popular the Voxbox is, I will say it is really a successful work to attract public attention which take effective function on the gathering public opinions, but I think nowadays people use internet more that the product itself, so I just guess even the voxbox seems effective to let people approach it, but the people can know or use it, it’s a big problem. 

      

The Haptic Creature Project: Social Human-Robot Interaction through Affective Touch

 This paper also kind of relates the communication of emotion, especially for the touch. So from this point, the Haptic Creature project  that mimics a small pet seek to develop a deeper understanding of touch interaction between human and robot which contains companionship.

      Overall, the Haptic Creature Project mainly focuses the goal about building up companionship between human and robot by investigating the use of affective touch. The approach is to leverage research in human-animal interaction by developing a robotic creature which interacts with the human through the modality of touch. And the Haptic Creature project is influenced by several parts like social interactive robotics, affect, touch and human-animal interaction as well. 

      For instance, by the author’s order, I want to mention something about the socially interactive robotics and affect display. As the author mentioned the affect display with the vision and audition play an important role on the social interaction,the use of facial expressions is commonly used to convey emotion.

    Secondarily, regarding to affective touch and human-animal interaction, since the research focuses on the influence of affective touch on companionship, there are some reasons such as gender, familiarity, social status and culture which attribute the affective touch. The other one is differentiation,and the differentiation mainly have two parts, one is the concentration on the modality, another is the level of zoomorphism.

     Therefore, roughly if we intend to explain to people how the haptic creature is, in the article it said that the haptic creature is a robotic device tat mimics a small lap animal such as a pet cat or dog, in this way which really makes a model of the affective interaction between human and animal. First of all, the creature interacts with the world primarily through the modality of touch and regulates its emotional state based on this interaction.

        Nevertheless, the design consideration covers three major ones for the Haptic Creature, there are the interaction centers, providing an organic interaction whereby the sensing and in the level of zoomorphism. And then, the development phases are being conducted in three parts which are Wizard of Oz prototype, automated prototype and final creature.from those three, I would like to talk a little more about the automated prototype, this prototype is being used for rapid implementation and testing of software, hardware, and interaction techniques. Also, the haptic creature also contains the high-level architecture with  low-level sensing, gesture recognizer, emoter, physical renderer, and low-level actuation.By those components the haptic creature can response to the human appropriately. Personally, I think the emoter has a huge function of architecture. also, those different components take affect with each other.

     Since the author did the user studies which is important from my personal view, too. Through the preliminary investigation,interaction decomposition and companionship, the author try to get knowledge of the use of affective touch in socially interactive robotics.

    Above all, the haptic creature focus on the affect of the touch interaction. In fact, I think the tough is very important for users to interact with the products which relates with people’s emotion and feelings, so besides developing the quality, such affective touch can offer beneficial function.

“Moon Phrases”: A Social Media Faciliated Tool for Emotional Reflection and Wellness

   After I read the article which talks about the “moon phrase”, I was kind of getting interest of this. Actually before, I also curious about the people’s posts in the social media, sometime I found people don’t want to share the emotions and words with you face to face, but they will choose write it down in the social media like twitter, Facebook or Instagram. 

    Roughly, the moon phrases is a tool like “behavioral fingerprint” to track the emotion and linguistic expression on the social media which can record and reflect individuals’ own behavior over time.

    Firstly, why it’s necessary to invent the “moon phrases”, I think the significant reason is that emotion is closely related with our health and body which easily can impact some aspects of our lives. in this way the moon phrases can offer people awareness and acceptance of their feelings, so they might adjust their situation in time which can help individuals to work or enjoy social life efficiently. Additionally, in order to avoid getting disorder, for people  the moon phrases record the historical posting over time to facilitate emotional wellness.

   Second, social network and environment take an important function on individual’s emotional wellness. Therefore, the expression of language can affect human intentions, moods and disorders effectively. Since people use there language in the social media, to sone extent, the social media can provide a signal for people to figure out the emotional behaviors. The tool for emotional wellness seems very valuable for  people to in corporate mood together data, which also can encourage people’s health self-reflection.

    Third, regarding to the design process, the author intended to produce low-fidelity prototypes and gather reactions and comments based on the six media users’ experience. The patterns and levels of activity can define the interactions. In details, the moon phrases can offer a good way to observe how individual’s emotion change with the usage of various style categories like interrelated patterns of cognitive processes, physiological arousal, and behavioral reactions. Also, the moon phrases pay attention to the privacy and ethical considerations.

      Moreover, the moon phrases have the part of limitations and future directions. 

     In general, I think the moon phrases are very valuable for people to utilize, nowadays the emotion really became an important reason  to influence people’s life and work, even for the healthy. So through the moon phrases people can easily get reflection and awareness of their trend of moods, personally, not only it develops the significance of the social media, but also it provides good benefits for people to improve their life quality.  

    

   

three days in Gold Miner

Game instructions

     Use the claw and reel to mine gold and other treasure out of the earth. The claw will swing back  and forth. Press the down arrow to lower it. Once it has grabbed something it will reel it up. Heavy objects like rocks and large pieces of gold will be harder to reel up. Grab bags contain random amounts of money, a strength power-up, or a stick of dynamite. Between levels you can buy items that can help you.

     Collect the target amount of money by the end of the level. If you don’t meet your goal by the end of the level it’s game over. Your money carries over from one level to the next.

      

Game character

an old Gold Miner who seems fifty years old try to collect a certain amount of gold to reach the gold goal    

Dairy

 Day1

 I like taking adventures,especially Treasury Seeking. One day I came to an ancient and magical world which seems like nothing just desert, but I think here might be something cool for me to explore. Suddenly when I was walking, I found my feet touch something hard on the ground . I took a look at that, it was a stone door, I was so excited to find it, with the curiosity I intend to open the door and go down along the downstairs. but, the underground is quiet dark, and I am already very tired because of my old age, I need to sleep early today, good night! Everyone!

Day2

 I open my eyes, omg! I can’t believe that I come to such a fancy world, I see a lot of Gold, some are very big, some are kind of small, beside them there are also many grey stones. What interests me most is that the bag with question mark. However there is alarm which shows that the time for every step to get the gold is limited. Luckily I carried claw and reel with me, since it runs the time, I take aim at the largest gold, oh yes, I get it, and continue getting large gold as quickly as possible, but again since I am very old, I already run out of my strength and am so exhausted to get more gold, hmmmm, okay, I gonna try the  mysterious bag, oh, thanks God, the bag inside is a lot of energy for me to make abundant supplement in time. When I intend to get more, the alarm is knocking, oaky, fine I get pass for the first track, take a rest, and do tmr!

Day3

 So excited to continue my adventures here, after one-night’s enough rest, I decide to get more golds as I can, wow, many diamonds appeared, hhhhhhhh, also, some moving pigs carries the diamonds, they look so cute, let me catch you~~`. oh no, they move so fast, i think i should get them later, just get the gold more I can, okay, enough, maybe the diamonds over there are easy to get, what a pity, I don’t control the direction well, it grabs the stone which runs me a lot of time, aaaaaaa, the alarm is knocking, okay, how poor me ㅜㅜㅜㅜㅜ

The Reactable: Tangible and Tabletop Music Performance

  The Reactable : Tangible and Tabletop Music Performance

   Basically this paper talks about the musical instruments turns music into a tangible and visual experience, enabling musicians to experiment with sound, change its structure control its parameters and be creative.

    As we all know, the traditional musical instruments are really physical for the performances to be played with, actually, the traditional musical types still have the effects on inspiring the musicians to deal with the musical new interfaces.but this new type of instruments totally shifts from the lower-level details to the higher-level details from the views of performers. So, in the way the musician performance can pay attention to controlling strategies rather than perform data, which I think it can give the performers more freedom to create the sound, structure and parameters, therefore, to some extent, more creative works can exit.

    What I mentioned above  is called musical tables which becomes difficult to keep track of every new proposal, personally I think musical tables are pretty interesting for me, because the music itself for people is hard to be tangible, especially for those who don't have talents on editing the music, that will be a good try for those people to get step on. And also, the musical tables can be used well in collaboration and control sharing.

  Firstly, for music controllers, such an innovative musical interface is really essentially different from the original ones. it’s pretty a good start for them to develop changing musical structure by using them. 

   Secondarily, the visual feedback play a significant role on the tangible music interfaces and musical tabletops, which becomes an important asset to communicate the states and behaviors during the musical process, also the visual feedback can solve another relevant problem of laptop music performance.

    According to the last part, I want to mention more about the reachable system, mainly, it is about rotating and connecting the translucent and luminous  to each other, which is based on computer vision, deeply inspired by modular analogue synthesizers.

Technology affordances

This article more focus about the relation with technology and affordance, from the angle of technology, why affordances should be paid high attention to. And also the users’ culture, experience and learning can become the important part to deicide the actual perception of affordances. On the other way, the technology like media can offer the stage for affordance to be utilized well. So mainly, I want to mention three parts to express what I get from the article.

      Affordance is kind of abstract concept for people to understand at first time, but affordance really deeply connected with people’s interactions and human actions. The reason why people link the affordance to the technology is that technology itself remains the capabilities and limitation for people, so affordance as a tool to help people how to use the technology, also it can serve the strength and weakness of technologies. In addition the affordance have ecological approaches and cognitive approaches. In the article it takes the climbing as an example, the affordance for the climbing and the users have close interaction. Meanwhile, the concept comes from perception and action, metaphor and learning and sth else.

      Above all what are affordances? Firstly, we should think of our human organic system, the affordances should offer the tips for human to figure out how they input their action to the technologies.

     Tools afford different actions,and here I would like to mention the differences between the smart phone and keyboard phone. The keyboard phone through the keyboard to afford the signal for users to interact with it, but for the smart phone, it requires higher design skills for users to figure out how to manage it at the first time. Therefore, making affordances perceptible is one approach to designing easily-used system. Moreover, in author’s view, appearance play an important role on offering perceptible affordances. 

      Secondarily the actual perception of affordance was influenced by observer’s culture, social setting and experience,etc. So it seemed that we can design and analyze our own term of affordances. The perceptual system make possible are relevant to culture.  For example, I want to show the users that something is a button, so I should utilize the various graphical techniques to make the button looks like a button for users to figure out easily.  However, it doesn’t mean the more perceptual information, the better effect will come out. I like the sentence from the article, the role of a good interface is to guide attention via well-designed groups of sequential and nested affordances.

     The last part is about modes,media and affordances. Through the role of media can make affordances are very diverse, users can see or hear to get use to the technology, which are easier for user to understand.