Colloquium Cognitive Systems

Designing human-centered body-worn User Interfaces
Prof. Dr. Antonio Krüger, DFKI Saarbrücken

Abstract: User Interfaces move towards our bodies. They have already started to leave the desktops, are occupying our pockets and are attached to our wrist, head and skin. Designing appropriate User Interfaces for these new device classes come with particular challenges associated with the restrictions and novel possibilities of this development. An important aspect is that of perceptual equivalence,  meaning that these UI need to be aware of the human’s attention, their ergonomic restrictions and the cognitive costs associated to the interaction itself. At the same time they need to be able to support and induce novel types of perceptions as well. Since body-worn User Interfaces can be used in a plentitude of different situations there are several interesting technical design challenges that need to be addressed. This includes Augmented (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) set-ups where these UI have the potential to improve the user experience.  In this talk, I will present examples of our own endeavor to better understand the design challenges grounded to the cognitive and technical requirements of body-worn interfaces. I will describe an interaction-framework for wrist-worn devices that we have developed, present a novel calibration-free eye-tracker that has the potential to inform a perceptual model of the user’s current attention, and  discuss a novel VR controller aiming to improve weight perception of virtual objects. Finally, I will discuss an in-situ body-worn training device for runners, that uses electric muscle stimulation to actuate correct foot postures.

Bio: Since 2009 Antonio Krüger is a Globus-endowed professor for Computer Science in Retail and the scientific director of the Innovative Retail Laboratory at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI GmbH). He is an internationally renowned expert on Man-Machine-Interaction and Artificial Intelligence. He has established the Mediainformatics study programme at the Saarland University  in 2010 and directs it to this day. Antonio is a co-founder of the Saarbrücken-based technology company Eyeled GmbH, which focuses on the development of mobile and ubiquitous information systems. Many of his research findings have found their way into applications in retail and other industrial domains. He holds several high tech patents in the area of Human Computer Interaction. From 2004 to 2009 he was a professor of computer science and geoinformatics at the University of Münster and acted as the managing director of the institute for geoinformatics. He studied Computer Science and Economics at Saarland University and finished his Ph.D in 1999  as a member of the Saarbrücken graduate school of „Cognitive Science“. Antonio  has published more than 200 scientific articles and papers in internationally recognized  journals and conferences and is member of several steering committees, editorial boards and scientific advisory committees.