BT

2014

Contacts: fraser.burton@bt.com

Projects proceeding:

• Multi-touch Conference
• Money World

original suggestions

Project 1 : How important is visual feedback to the success of in air gesture UIs ?

Catherine White

In air gesture control has been imagined for decades and was popularized by the film Minority Report. In recent years, hardware such as Kinect and Leap Motion have transformed the concept to technical reality. However, no really pervasive in air gesture control UI has emerged. One hypothesis for this lack of success is that lack of visual feedback make such UIs difficult to control, requiring too much conscious effort. You will investigate how providing visual feedback affects the ease of use of an in air UI. You will consider the users awareness of himself and his state of interaction with the system. You will develop a UI for the purposes of running experiments (based on Leap Motion or Kinect hardware) and run experiments to determine effortlessness of use. You will choose whether to design a UI to be fully intuitive, or to develop a UI which requires learning but is then very easy to use. The types of visual feedback that you could consider providing to the user include: wire frame models of the user interacting with the system; abstract geometric representations (such as an bounding ellipsoid mapped to a hand, or cursors mapped to the end of each finger); or variations of colour, shade and shadow on the screen.

Project 2: Collaborative Multitouch Interfaces

Catherine White

10 point multitouch screens are now widely available, and continuous surface touch interfaces are also technically possible. How can two or more people make use of such an interface on a large screen or surface, for collaborative activities? You can draw on examples from social activities, games or the workplace and will think of a concept, develop and implement it. Finally, you will need to design and run usability tests of your idea to assess whether it has potential.

Project 3: Novel interactive data visualisations and UI demo

Ben Azvine

BT’s networks are a source of huge quantities of time-varying data which have many variables. A wealth of information can be extracted from such data, but initial exploration of the dataset may be formidable, particularly when the features of the dataset are initially completely unknown. There are a few standard means of data visualisation including trend graphs, bubble diagrams, network diagrams, pie charts, geographical maps, sun ray diagrams, and radial views. This project asks you to discover alternative Opensource visualisation techniques beyond these methods and to build an interface using one of these for the purpose of exploring a large, complex graph dataset visually in a way that allows discovery of correlations and clusters in the dataset (such as relatedness in a single or multiple category).

2013

Contacts: paul.reid@bt.com james.mistry@bt.com oliver.newbury@bt.com

Final project was: Terabyte threat analysis

Original introduction via Calum Eadie