The idea collector is a tangible interaction device to support managing whiteboard contents during creative group discussions, like brainstorms.  It helps users organize information displayed on an electronic whiteboard, demonstrating a ‘pick and drop’ interaction style.  A working prototype of the Idea-collector was made, following a series of early mock-ups and video prototypes.  The ISense 600 tracking system is used, that tracks a ‘puck’ in which are embedded an infrared receiver and ultrasound emitter. User tests confirmed the potential of the interaction style designed.   

The idea collector was awarded a best short paper prize at HCI 2002.

Van Turnhout, K.G., Malchanau, A., Disaro, R.M.,  Markopoulos, P., (2002) The idea-collector: A device for supporting creative face-to-face meetings. In: Sharp, H., Chalk P., LePeuple, J., Rosbottom, J., Human Computer Interaction 2002, Volume 2, ISBN 1-9020505-48-4, BCS, 74-78.

This project was an investigation into using haptic output to de-liver guidance to pedestrians, who do not have any particular disability.  More specifically it was used to help them find their way to a particular destination indoors, e.g., a room in a hospital.  A prototype device called GentleGuide was designed iteratively, resolving several design issues regarding haptic output (e.g., the amplitude of vibrations, their frequency, duration, how many signals can be reliably discriminated by users in realistic testing conditions, etc.). GentleGuide was assessed experimentally in 2 different buildings inside the TU/e campus. Our conclusion was that haptic output offers significant promise both in improving performance and in reducing the disruptiveness of technology.  

Project supervised by M.de Graaf and P.Markopoulos

Bossman, S., Groenendal, B., Findlater, J-W, Visser, T., de Graaf, M., Markopoulos, P., (2003) GentleGuide: An exploration of haptic output for indoors pedestrian guidance. In Chittaro, L. (Ed.) Proceedings Mobile HCI, LNCS 2795, Springer, 358-362.

This USI design case concerned the design of a small navigation system that can be worn around the wrist.  It was designed for tourists to help them navigate around a city and to provide them with location bound information.

The project produced a series of prototypes, (form-prototype, video-prototype, and software-prototype) and included a small scale evaluation outdoors.

Van der Kooij, J., van de Camp, A.M.G. , Gritsenko, A.N. , Kong, H., Krysiak, R., Yordan, U. (2003) HERMES: a navigation aid for city tourists.  In Grey, P., Johnson, H., and O’Neil, E., (Eds.) Proceedings HCI 2003, Vol.2, 9-12.

This USI design case resulted in a tangible user interface for viewing personal photo-collections.  It produced an industrial design prototype and a software prototype.  The combination of the two was used in the evaluation of the Photo-Pyramid with the Wizard of Oz method.   

Deshpande, N., Panas, A., Bondaryeva, A., Kirillova, N., Bondareva, N., (2003): The Photo Pyramid. In Rauterberg et al. (Eds.) Proc. INTERACT 2003, IOS-Press, 949-950.

This research project developed lightweight means of informal social communication.  It used picture and drawing based messages to connect mobile and home users.  It aimed to create a feeling of connectedness by supporting serendipitous communication between family members.  Mobile users accessed the service through a mobile phone while home users through a commercial wireless touch screen device by Philips.

The project was co-supervised with Wijnand IJsselsteijn and Boris de Ruyter

The project has produced a patent on the interaction technique, and was nominated for the UFE design prize in 2003.  It was exhibited at EUSAI 2003 and IST 2004 and was featured in the ACM TechNews newsletter. 

It has produced a long list of publications, of which the most outstanding are:

Markopoulos, P., Romero, N., van Baren, J., IJsselsteijn W., de Ruyter, B, Farshchian, B, (2004) Keeping in touch with the family: home and away with the ASTRA awareness system. CHI Extended Abstracts 2004, ACM, 1351-1354.

Romero, N., Markopoulos, P., van Baren, J, de Ruyter, B., IJsselsteijn, W., Farshchian, B. (2005) Connecting the Family with Awareness Systems.  Accepted for publication in Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, Springer-Verlag, London, ISSN: 1617-490

The pOwerball is a novel augmented reality computer game for children aged 8-14.  It features a tangible user interface to tabletop augmented reality. It was designed to bring together children with and without a physical or learning disability and to encourage social interactions surrounding the play.   From a design perspective, pOwerball exemplifies social gaming, which refers to an emerging class of computer games where the interaction style and game mechanics support social interactions amongst the players.  

Project was co-supervised with Matthieu Gielen, Arnold Vermeeren (TUD)

Brederode, B., Markopoulos, P., Gielen, M., Vermeeren, A., de Ridder, H. (2005) pOwerball: The design of a novel mixed-reality game for children with mixed abilities.  Interaction Design and Children, June 8-10, Boulder, Colorado, USA, ACM Press.

The SCORPIODROME is a mixed reality game for groups of 3-4 children aged 11-14.  It is designed for social gaming; i.e., computer gaming that is intended to support and trigger social interaction between players to occur within and around playing the game.  The game includes a construction phase where children compose the racing landscape out of tiles that they place on a grid.  Construction is followed by a high action phase, where they drive remote controlled cars around the circuit and combat with each other.  The game exhibits the potential of mixed reality, as virtual and physical worlds are combined to create several effects and create an engaging and sociable gaming experience.

Metaxas, G., Metin, B., Schneider, J., Shapiro, G., Zhou, W., Markopoulos, P., (2005) SCORPIODROME: An exploration in Mixed Reality Social Gaming for Children.  ACM conference on Advances in Computer Entertainment. 15-17 June, Valencia, Spain, ACM Press.

SenseMS is a design exploration into emotional communication through mobile phones for teenagers.  A participatory design approach was followed, that lead to the development of two potential enhancements to text messaging services that are feasible with today’s mobile phones.  These enhancements refer to using MMS technology for: First, identifying callers through personalized avatars which are also coupled with context related information for the caller and, second, using semi-automated text enhancements.  Preliminary evaluation results were encouraging regarding the value of the emotional and contextual cues that can be conveyed in this way.

Amin, A.K., Kersten, B.T.A., Kulyk, O.A., Pelgrim, P.H., Wang, C., Markopoulos, P., (2005) The SenseMS: Enriching the SMS experience for Teens by Non-verbal Means.  To be presented at MobileHCI 2005, Salzbourg, Austria, 19-22 september 2005.

This project explores the concept of social intelligence in the context of designing dialogue systems for an Ambient Intelligence home. A series of human-like behaviours were designed and implemented on an existing robot device to make it display social intelligence.  The robot acted as a home-dialogue system.  An experiment showed that endowing the home dialogue system with some social intelligence will: (a) create a positive bias in the user’s perception of technology in the home environment, (b) enhance user acceptance for the home dialogue system, and (c) trigger social behaviours by the user in relation to the home dialogue system.  The project was coached by P. Markopoulos (TU/e) and B. de Ruyter (Philips Research).

De Ruyter, B., Saini, P., Markopoulos, P., van Breemen, A., (2005) Assessing the Effects of Building Social Intelligence in a Robotic Interface for the Home.  Interacting with Computers, 17, 5, Elsevier, 522-541.

Markopoulos, P., de Ruyter, B., Saini, P., van Breemen, A., (2005) Case Study: Bringing Social Intelligence into Home Dialogue Systems.  Volume 12, Number 4, July+August 2005 issue, 37-44.

The PhotoMirror is an intra-home communication appliance for supporting informal, lightweight communication and awareness between home inhabitants.  The PhotoMirror captures and displays images of trivial daily events and rituals reflecting the commotion and activities of home inhabitants. It combines automatic capture of commotion in front of it and explicit input of video clips captured with a detachable, wireless camera.  Photomirror was field tested for a short time and has been exhibited at the 3AD appliance design conference.

The project was coached by P. Markopoulos and B. Bongers.   Equipment was provided courtesy of Philips Research.

Markopoulos, P., Bongers, B., van Alphen, E., Dekker, J., van Dijk, W., Messemaker, S., van Poppel, J., van der Vlist, B., Volman, D., van Wanrooij, G. (2005)  To appear in a special issue of Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, including papers of the 3rd conference on Appliance Design Bristol, UK, June 28-29, 2005., Springer-Verlag, London, ISSN: 1617-490.

Camelot was designed to be a mobile outdoor game for small groups of children aged 7-10. Camelot was designed with the aim to encourage social interaction between the players and to encourage physical activity. Apart from the game itself, the deign of Camelot was interesting as an interesting case study in novel methods for designing for children. The paper extends the research literature on design methodology for children, by recording and reflecting upon the lessons learnt by applying a range of techniques for involving children in the design of interactive systems.

Verhaegh, J., Soute, I., Kessels, A., and Markopoulos, P. 2006. On the design of Camelot, an outdoor game for children. In Proceeding of the 2006 Conference on interaction Design and Children (Tampere, Finland, June 07 - 09, 2006). IDC '06. ACM Press, New York, NY, 9-16.

Diarist was a system providing awareness of a remote elderly person living alone. Using a sensor network installed at his or her home, information was collected throughout the day presenting: presence/absence, activity in the kitchen, multiple persons at the living room and whether the person is sleeping or not. This information could be accessed at the remote location through an iPronto interface, presenting a 24 hour history, and allowing inspection of the 'seams' of the system: the assumptions on which the awareness inferences were based. The Diarist was field tested for a week at two different homes.

Metaxas, G., Metin, B., Schneider, J., Markopoulos, P., de Ruyter, B., (2007) Daily Activities Diarist: Supporting Aging in Place with Semantically Enriched Narratives, INTERACT 2007, Springer, LNCS 4663: 390-403.

Aurama is an exploration of the electronic picture frame concept as a display in awareness systems. It focuses on the scenario of providing awareness of an elderly living alone. Rather than presenting daily life activities, this system focuses on the presentation of long term trends regarding the health and well being of the elder.The system developed by a team of researchers at Philips Research was field tested for various periods starting initially with 2 weeks; and then moving on to 6 month long tests.

 Dadlani, P., Markopoulos, P., Aarts, E., (2009) Intertwining Implicit and Explicit Awareness of Wellbeing to Support Peace of Mind and Connectedness. Proceedings, AmI 2009, LNCS 5859, 153-158.

Heartbeat is a pervasive game for children that demonstrates the vision of Head-Up games, a genre of pervasive games that puts outdoors play center stage, combining the benefits of traditional outdoor games with the opportunities for richer experiences and innovation offered by new media.  HeartBeat, explores the use of physiological sensing and more specifically heart rate measurement as input to the game and as an approach to enhance the pervasive gaming experience. Evaluation with 32 children outdoors showed how the game promotes physical activity and social interaction between children in ways one would expect from traditional outdoor games.

 Magielse, R. and Markopoulos, P. 2009. HeartBeat: an outdoor pervasive game for children. In Proceedings of the 27th international Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Boston, MA, USA, April 04 - 09, 2009). CHI '09. ACM, New York, NY, 2181-2184. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1518701.1519033