Scott A. Carter

Scott A. Carter, Daniel Avrahami, Nami Tokunaga

While it is often critical for indoor-location- and proximity-aware applications to know whether a user is in a space or not (e.g., a specific room or office), a key challenge is that the difference between standing on one side or another of a doorway or wall is well within the error range of most RF-based approaches. In this work, we address this challenge by augmenting RF-based localization and proximity detection with active ultrasonic sensing, taking advantage of the limited propagation of sound waves. This simple and cost-effective approach can allow, for example, a Bluetooth smart-lock to discern whether a user is inside or outside their home in order to lock or unlock doors automatically. We describe a configurable architecture for our solution and present experiments that validate this approach but also demonstrate that different user behavior and application needs can impact system configuration decisions. Finally, we describe applications that could benefit from our solution and address privacy concerns.

Scott Carter, Pernilla Qvarfordt, Matthew Cooper et al.

Tutorials are one of the most fundamental means of conveying knowledge. Ideally when the task involves physical or digital objects, tutorials not only describe each step with text or via audio narration but show it as well using photos or animation. In most cases, online tutorial authors capture media from handheld mobile devices to compose these documents, but increasingly they use wearable devices as well. In this work, we explore the full life-cycle of online tutorial creation and viewing using head-mounted capture and displays. We developed a media-capture tool for Google Glass that requires minimal attention to the capture device and instead allows the author to focus on creating the tutorial's content rather than its capture. The capture tool is coupled with web-based authoring tools for creating annotatable videos and multimedia documents. In a study comparing standalone (camera on tripod) versus wearable capture (Google Glass) as well as two types of multimedia representation for authoring tutorials, we show that tutorial authors have a preference for wearable capture devices, especially when recording activities involving larger objects in non-desktop environments. Authors preferred document-based multimedia tutorials because they are more straightforward to compose and the step-based structure translates more directly to explaining a procedure. In addition, we explored using head-mounted displays for accessing tutorials in comparison to lightweight computing devices such as tablets. Our study included tutorials recorded with the same capture methods as in our access study. We found that although authors preferred head-mounted capture, tutorial consumers preferred video recorded by a camera on tripod that provides a more stable image of the workspace.