Hello everyone, my name is Pierre Mahieux and I’m presenting SABLIER, a tangible interactor
to navigate through space and time inside a digital environment.
This is work done with Romain Biannic, Sébastien Kubicki and Ronan Querrec at the ENIB engineering
school and the Lab-STICC laboratory in France.
History of Science and Technology study the spatial and temporal evolutions of technical
systems on multiple timescales.
The first scale represents long-term evolutions and is centered around the notion of landscape.
The second timescale represents the short-term evolutions of studied systems and relies on
the notion of procedures.
Results of historians' work can be exhibited in museums for cultural mediation applications.
On one hand, museums use more and more new technologies, such as Tangible User Interfaces
and Virtual Reality, to attract more visitors and make their exhibitions more engaging.
On the other hand, using new technologies allow visitors to explore digital reconstructions
of past environments and navigate through space and time.
Previous research and propositions about spatio-temporal navigation did not allow for multiple scale
interaction and few of them proposed to use TUIs.
Given the multiple advantages of Tangible User Interfaces in a context of cultural mediation
we propose a new interface allowing users to navigate through space and time on multiple scales.
In order to propose an interface that would be relevant we set-up a co-design process
involving cultural mediation experts.
This process consists of 2 collaborative workshops.
The first one was to identify and define a set of functionalities that would allow users
to navigate through space and time in a digital environment.
And the second was to propose tangible interactors to carry out the functionalities identified
previously.
The first workshop involved 16 cultural mediation experts.
They were asked to write user stories involving spatial and temporal navigation.
From these user stories we deduce 11 elementary functionalities, 7 of which we consider primary.
They are directly linked to spatial or temporal navigation and were involved in most of the
user stories.
These functionalities allow the users to interact with the speed of time inside the digital
environment, navigate between different time periods, that we call landscape, and navigate
spatially inside these landscapes to observe different parts of the environment.
Users can also interact with the procedures, they can navigate in the course of a selected
procedure or start its simulation in the virtual world.
Functionalities number 8 and 9 are considered secondary, these are functionalities that
are not as essential for spatio-temporal navigation.
However they allow users to access information about the landscapes and superimpose them
in the digital environment to compare them.
Finally, the 2 last functionalities are not involved in spatial or temporal navigation,
therefore we consider them to be optional.
The second workshop involved 16 participants, 2 of them were cultural mediation experts
and the others had experience in psychology, human-computer interaction, design and engineering.
They had to propose low-fidelity prototypes and interactions to navigate through space
and time on multiple scales.
In the end, 11 prototypes were proposed.
Some of them took inspiration in everyday objects associated with time whereas others
were designed as generic interactors.
In order to identify which interactor from the 11 proposed we should implement, we set
up an evaluation involving 10 cultural mediation experts.
The experts had to evaluate each prototype according to 2 criteria : affordance and usability.
This evaluation was carried out in two phases: first, participants had to fill in a questionnaire,
we then conducted interviews to gather complementary qualitative data.
The quantitative evaluation did not show any significant differences between the prototypes,
however we were able to draw 3 guidelines from the interviews :
first, the shape of the interactor should be linked with time;
second, the interactions should remain simple;
and third, each interaction should be associated with few actions and functionalities.
Taking these guidelines into consideration and adding engineering criteria the prototype
which stood out is an hourglass shaped interactor.
This is why we propose SABLIER, a tangible interactor to navigate through space and time
inside a digital environment.
We propose 4 interactions : tilt (based on the natural use of an hourglass), tap,
move and rotate.
In order to make these interactions possible we equipped SABLIER with different electronic components,
an inertial unit to sense SABLIER’s tilt angle, inductive sensors to notice the
“tap” interaction, LED strips to simulate the flow of sand inside the interactor, and
a Raspberry Pi Zero to control these components and communicate with the digital environment.
SABLIER is a 3D-printed 16cm high, 12cm large hourglass shaped interactor.
In order to link our functionalities to SABLIER, we propose to couple SABLIER to an interactive
tabletop that will allow us to display a Graphical User Interface.
This interface allows us to give more information to the users and the tabletop allows us to
propose more diverse interactions.
For example, as with a real hourglass, we propose to change the speed of time in the
digital environment by tilting SABLIER.
Another example, to navigate between landscapes, we propose to move SABLIER on the Graphical User Interface
and validate the interaction with a tap.
Finally, in order to immerse the user in a virtual environment we propose to use a CAVE.
In order to assess the acceptability of our proposition we set up a user evaluation involving
25 participants during which they could interact with our interface and a virtual environment
showing a former bridge in Brest, France.
We let the participants use the system without any time constraints and asked them to fill
a questionnaire consisting of two parts assessing the perceived usefulness
and perceived ease of use of our interface.
Results show that participants largely considered our proposition to be useful and easy to use.
Moreover SABLIER is rated as “Good” on the System Usability Scale.
To conclude, we set-up a co-design process involving cultural mediation experts to propose
a new Tangible User Interface allowing spatio-temporal navigation in digital environments.
The result of this process is SABLIER, an hourglass shaped tangible interactor.
Thanks for listening.
Please reach out for any questions.