Exploring the potential of mobile eye tracker as an indoors intuitive pointing device: A case study in cultural heritage
Time: March 2, 2017, h. 2:30 pm
Location: Room Garda, Polo scientifico e tecnologico "Fabio Ferrari", Building Povo1, via Sommarive 5 - Povo (Trento)
Speaker
Prof. Tsvi Kuflik, University of Haifa
Abstract
With the advent of mobile and ubiquitous computing, it is time to explore the potential of mobile eye tracking technology for natural, intelligent interaction of users with their smart environment, not only in specific tasks and uses, but for a more ambitious goal of integrating eye tracking into the process of inferring mobile users’ interests for providing them with relevant services, an area that received little attention so far. The talk will present a study where we examined the potential of integrating mobile eye tracker as a natural interaction device into museum visitors’ audio guide system (mobile eye tracker audio guide). Using it as a pointing device that enables systems to reason unobtrusively about the user’s focus of attention and deliver relevant information about the focus of attention as needed. For that, we developed a technique for location awareness based on eye gaze detection and image matching, and integrated it with a two different versions of mobile eye tracker audio guide: (1) proactive version that delivers automatically information whenever it detects interest and (2) reactive version that gives the user/visitor more control on information delivery. Furthermore, we developed a conventional museum visitors’ mobile guide system using smartphone and BLE (Bluetooth low energy) beacons that was used as reference system for comparison, the mobile guide delivers multimedia presentation to the visitor once s/he reaches predefined area/region in the museum.
About the Speaker
Prof. Tsvi Kuflik is the former head of the Information Systems Dept. at The University of Haifa. Over the past ten years, the focus of his work was on ubiquitous user modeling applied to cultural heritage. In the course of his work, a “Living Lab” has been developed at the University of Haifa – a museum visitors’ guide system was developed for the Hecht museum. It is available for visitors on a daily basis and serves also as a test bed for experimenting with novel technologies in the museum. Currently, the system is being used for research on Social Signal Processing where signals transmitted by devices carried by the visitors are used for modeling group behavior, in order to reason about the state of the group visit. Another research direction focusses on the use of intelligent user interfaces in ubiquitous computing within the “living lab”. Where issues like interaction with large, situated displays; interrupt management; navigation support; temporal and lifelong aspects of ubiquitous user modeling are studied. Tsvi got BSc. and MSc. In computer science and PhD. In information systems from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel. Over the years Tsvi collaborated with local and international researchers, supervised graduate students working with him on this research, organized the PATCH workshops series (Personal Access To Cultural Heritage) and published about 200 scientific papers, out of them 30 papers about this specific research. Tsvi is also a distinguished ACM scientist and a senior IEEE member.
Contact person regarding this talk: Nicu Sebe, sebe [at] disi.unitn.it