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Concept Based website navigation using a Tangible User Interface

In this paper, we present a novel method for browsing an academic website using a tangible user interface. The problem is challenging since web-sites are page-centric making it hard for visitors to the academic unit determine the concept relationships. The concept relationships on a website change over time and this is captured in our framework. The tangible interface framework has four parts: vision-based acquisition, visual processing, tangible interaction and audio-visual feedback. We use abstract blocks to represent concepts and by mapping the visuals to the interaction surface, the visitors can determine concept relationships easily. The blocks are tracked using standard computer vision techniques. The auditory feedback uses bird sounds and is created dynamically, using generative models. User studies have provided encouraging results. INTRODUCTION In this paper, we present our approach to building a tangible user interface for concept driven navigation of an academic web site. The problem is interesting for two reasons – (a) web-sites are page-centric and make difficult an exploration based on concept relationships (people, projects, key ideas) (b) the affordances of tangible interfaces [3,4] makes understanding the research agenda of the academic unit easy for visitors to the unit. Our long-term goal is to create an interactive system that helps a user understand as well as manipulate the relationships between concepts. We call such multimedia systems that are situated, embodied and reactive [3], to be situated multimedia systems. There has been much prior work in tangible interfaces [4,5,6,9]. In [4], the authors discuss the role of tangible interfaces in urban planning , as well as in ambient displays. They have also been used in story telling [6], as well as in website construction [5]. In [9], the authors discuss how tangible interfaces can serve as URL’s for online information. In [7] the authors propose an approach to the automated generation of soundscapes in their work on Audio Aura. In [1], the authors have developed generative models for the automated synthesis of sonic environments and music. We first model the web site concept dynamics in the following manner. A web crawler periodically crawls the academic web site, and determines dominant site concepts using term frequency. We develop novel concept metric that incorporates hop distance as well the page rank of the page. Our situated web-site navigation framework has four parts: vision-based acquisition, visual processing, tangible interaction and audio-visual feedback. We develop a tangible interface using blocks, where each block represents a concept. The blocks are tracked using standard vision based techniques. The block interactions are coupled to a visual and auditory feedback. The visual feedback is provided on the same surface where the blocks are kept, allowing the users to manipulate the concept relationships easily. The auditory soundscape is created using a generative framework using bird sounds. This paper is organized as follows. In the next section, we present our problem in detail. We then discuss the construction and working of our current system. Finally, we present the results of our experimental evaluation and our conclusion.