Research Interests and Contributions
My research domain is the Human Computer Interaction, and more particularly, the design of Mixed Interactive Systems: Mixed Interactive Systems are interactive systems that combine the use of physical artefacts and digital entities.
A number of terms is used to denote this kind of interactive systems: Augmented Reality, Mixed Reality, Embedded Reality, Mixed Environment, Augmented Video, etc. To better define the concept of Mixed Interactive Systems, we propose:
- a definition of Mixed Interactive Systems (MIS)
- a taxonomy of Mixed Interactive Systems
- some illustrations of such systems
Objectives
The use of Mixed Systems is no longer limited to specific and very demanding application domains such as military applications, surgery and maintenance. More and more application domains are now interested in the fusion of the physical and digital worlds to offer new interaction situations to the users.
Exploratory approaches, leading to the development of ad'hoc solutions, are thus no longer
satisfactory:
there is now a crucial need for design tools and
methods, tackling the specificities of such interactive systems.
In this context, my research is mainly focused on the understanding of the user's interaction with Mixed Interactive Systems and the development of design elements for this kind of interactive systems. In the "approach" section below, the design elements and tools we are developping, are briefly detailed. Also refer to the section Projects for a presentation of on-going works and projects in which these design elements and tools are developped and used.)
I am working on the development of the ASUR model, a notation for describing mixed interactive systems with a user's interaction point of view, as opposed to a possible system point of view that would describe classes, activity, deployment, etc.
- the ASUR model
- GuideMe, the graphical environment for manipulating ASUR and associated models (principles, interactive design tools)
- RESIM, a repository of ergonomic recommendations for MIS (interactive repository)
- a repository of MIS, illustrated and modelled with our design tools (repository)
Tightly coupled to these works, I am working (or have been working on) on a number of refinements and enhancements to the ASUR notation: links with other models and tools relevant to the design of Mixed Interactive Systems, expression of ergonomic properties into ASUR terms, specification of a Mixed Interactive Systems design process, ...
-
ASUR-IL:
it is a model that supports the software design of Mixed Interactive Systems on the basis of the ASUR description of the given MIS. -
KMAD-ASUR:
the goal is to articulate the task analysis provided by a KMad task tree with the interaction design expressed by the ASUR model. -
SIMBA / IM + IF:
it consists in providing a 3D environment in which to simulate a Mixed Interactive System designed with ASUR. -
ASUR-Focus Group (also called Model Assisted Creativity Session MACS) :
the objective is to use ASUR during a focus-group to stimulate the creativity of participants by providing a structured list of MIS aspects to consider.
Developing and testing Mixed Interactive Techniques, i.e. interaction modalities for Mixed Interactive Systems, is another area of my research project. Initially, one of the main application domain of my work was Computer Assisted Surgery (CAS). I am now mainly focusing on application for public spaces and more particularly in the context of museums. You can refer to different projects to discover our "home-made MIS prototypes":
- Google Earth
- Rapace
- MIME, MimeCubeTile
- Tangible Palette
- CladiPump, CladiCube
- S3M, S3MP
- SimulHome
- Notepad Assisted Slideshow
- BDB
- Tactile camera / tangible camera
- ... more in the repository
Finally, I am also very interested in studying the impact of mixed systems onto human behaviour, or more generally on Human Factors. My goal is to be able to predict some usability aspects onto models. So far, we have been able to include some support to the predictive study of ergonomic property in the graphical environment GUIDE-Me.