One of the major perceived barriers to the adoption of Classroom Response Systems, a.k.a. "clickers", is limited interactivity. Students using dedicated clicker hardware are often only able to provide basic multiple choice or simple numeric responses. The accessibility and flexibility of smartphones make them an intriguing platform for managing some of the shortfalls of traditional classroom response systems. This approach not only leverages a resource that a growing number of students already own, but also aims to enhance the effectiveness of the system by tapping into the robust interaction capabilities that these devices afford. This poster will describe a smartphone implementation of a classroom response system and discuss efforts to extend the basic clicker interaction model.

Collaborative control systems have shown great promise in offloading tasks to an automated peer, allowing the human operators to focus their efforts on perceptual judgments and decision-making that exceed the current capability of automation. This paper initiates a discussion about exposing camera orientation to the collaborative control interaction model. It may be the case that the robot can work with the human operator to automatically direct attention to critical features in an environment by systematically influencing the orientation of the camera. The results of a user evaluation suggest that this kind of interface has potential, but there are several additional interaction constraints that will need to be considered in a successful design.

Human judgment is an integral part of the teleoperation process that is often heavily influenced by a single video feed returned from the remote environment. Poor camera placement, narrow field of view, and other camera properties can significantly impair the operator's perceptual link to the environment, inviting cognitive mistakes and general disorientation. These faults may be enhanced or muted, depending on the camera mountings and control opportunities that are at the disposal of the operator. These issues form the basis for two user studies that assess the effectiveness of existing and potential teleoperation controls. Findings suggest that providing a camera that is controlled independently from the orientation of the vehicle may yield significant benefits. Moreover, there is evidence to support the use of separate cameras for different navigational subtasks. Third, the use of multiple cameras can also be used to provide assistance without encroaching on the operator's desired threshold for control.

A video stream from a single camera is often the foundation for situational awareness in teleoperation activities. Poor camera placement, narrow field-of-view and other camera properties can significantly impair the operator's perceptual link to the environment, inviting cognitive mistakes and general disorientation. This paper provides a brief overview of viewpoint control research for 3D virtual environments (VE) to motivate a user study that evaluates the effectiveness of viewpoint controls on a simulated robotic vehicle. Findings suggest that providing a camera that is controlled independently from the orientation of the vehicle may facilitate wayfinding tasks. Moreover, there is evidence to support the use of separate cameras and interfaces for different navigational subtasks.

Human judgment is an integral part of the teleoperation process that is often heavily influenced by a single video feed returned from the remote environment. This limitation on the perceptual links to the environment leaves the operator prone to cognitive mistakes and general disorientation. These faults may be enhanced or muted, depending on the camera mountings and control opportunities that are at the disposal of the operator. These issues form the basis for an experiment to assess the effectiveness of existing and potential teleoperation controls. Findings suggest that providing a camera that is controlled independently from the orientation of the vehicle may yield significant benefits.

Attitude control refers to controlling the pitch and roll of a mobile robot. As environments grow more complex and cues to a robot's pose sparser it becomes easy for a teleoperator to lose situational awareness. Information from separated attitude displays may be difficult to integrate with an ongoing navigation task and lead to errors. In this paper we report an experiment comparing a gravity referenced display (GRV) with a standard fixed camera with separated attitude Indication. Results show shorter task times and better path choices for users of the GRV.

Gaining an accurate mental representation of real environments and realistic virtual environments is a gradual process. Significant aspects of an environment may be obvious to a trained expert, but not to the novice trainee. If a user does not know where to look, he or she may concentrate on irrelevant objects. This detracts from learning the locations of truly prominent landmarks. The paper explores attentive camera navigation, a technique that guides the user to focus on certain objects through automatic gaze redirection. Results of a user study suggest that this technique can help filter out unnecessary objects, and allow users to quickly understand the configuration of a selected subset of landmarks.

HTML pages are designed to convey semantic information to human users through visual emphases, demarcations, spatial cues and repeating patterns which act as "perceptual markup". This human-centric syntax is not easy for machines to identify. Naturally-occurring HTML, especially the machine-generated variety, rarely follows strict markup rules and provides no semantic cues. The visual cues humans use to extract information from a Web page, however, must be reflected in the page's markup. If a human could convey the relationship between visual cues, available to the program as markup patterns, and semantic categories, passed to the program as user-supplied labels, the program would have been instructed in "how to extract information from that page". Scriptor is a program which, run in tandem with a Web browser, allows a user to interactively design a data extraction script for the Web site. It is intended for highly structured repetitive information such as is found in classified listings, online stores, tables for weather, stock or airline schedules, course listings, and other similar sources. Scriptor interleaves a variety of learning methods to allow the specification of extraction rules using extremely simple methods. These consist of repeating pattern recognition, supervised learning, deictics through highlighting, and dialogs in which the user selects the desired result for a set of possible extraction rules. Learning is augmented by direct instructions such as: "label text following '/spl sim/' as 'Author' ". Performance data for the authors and naive subjects are presented for a collection of Web pages showing the potential of this form of highly interactive instruction. Our results demonstrate that very simple programming by example techniques can generate effective parse rules in highly repetitive domains.