Positive Technology Journal

From VRoot 

First-person experience and usability of co-located interaction in a projection-based virtual environment

A. Simon

Virtual Reality Software and Technology, Proceedings of the ACM symposium on Virtual reality software and technology, Pages: 23 - 30, 2005;

Large screen projection-based display systems are very often not used by a single user alone, but shared by a small group of people. We have developed an interaction paradigm allowing multiple users to share a virtual environment in a conventional single-view stereoscopic projection-based display system, with each of the users handling the same interface and having a full first-person experience of the environment. Multi-viewpoint images allow the use of spatial interaction techniques for multiple users in a conventional projection-based display.

Via Smart Mobs

Jon Lebkowsky (WorldChanging) interviews Adam Greenfield about his new book "Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing"

WorldChanging: So you're actually coming from a user experience perspective in your analysis of ubicomp?

Adam Greenfield: That's the genesis of it, yeah. That was the real emotional hook for me, just thinking about people having to configure their toilets and people having to configure their teapots to boil a kettle of tea. And just
taking a direct analogy with the technical systems that are around us now - you know, dropped cellphone calls and the blue screen of death, and everything that we're familiar with from the PC and mobile infrastructure.

WorldChanging: The blue toilet of death! (Laughter.)

Adam Greenfield: Can you imagine? And I think what heightened the sense of urgency was that this stuff was moving beyond prototypes in short order. It was moving toward consumer products, toward the digital home and digital convergence. The products were starting to be packaged and shipped. And still nobody was talking about the nonlinear interactions of network systems in one space all operating at once - it's as if none of the people who were designing them had, not so much thought, but felt what it would be like to sit in the middle of a room where you've got fifteen different technical interfaces around you, and you're responding to all of them at once, and they're all responding to you at once.

A List Apart presents an introduction of Everyware. Free sample sections are available at the Everyware mini site.

An exploratory mixed methods study of the acceptability and effectiveness of mindfulness-based cognitive therapy for patients with active depression and anxiety in primary care.

BMC Psychiatry. 2006 Apr 7;6(1):14

Authors: Finucaine A, Mercer SW

ABSTRACT: BACKGROUND: Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) is an 8-week course developed for patients with relapsing depression that integrates mindfulness meditation practices and cognitive theory. Previous studies have demonstrated that non-depressed participants with a history of relapsing depression are protected from relapse by participating in the course. This exploratory study examined the acceptability and effectiveness of MBCT for patients in primary care with active symptoms of depression and anxiety METHODS: 13 patients with recurrent depression or recurrent depression and anxiety were recruited to take part in the study. Semi-structured qualitative interviews were conducted three months after completing the MBCT programme. A framework approach was used to analyse the data. Beck depression inventories (BDI-II) and Beck anxiety inventories (BAI) provided quantitative data and were administered before and three months after the intervention. RESULTS: The qualitative data indicated that mindfulness training was both acceptable and beneficial to the majority of patients. For many of the participants, being in a group was an important normalising and validating experience. However most of the group believed the course was too short and thought that some form of follow up was essential. More than half the patients continued to apply mindfulness techniques three months after the course had ended. A minority of patients continued to experience significant levels of psychological distress, particularly anxiety. Statistically significant reductions in mean depression and anxiety scores were observed; the mean pre-course depression score was 35.7 and post-course score was 17.8 (p=0.001). A similar reduction was noted for anxiety with a mean pre-course anxiety score of 32.0 and mean post course score of 20.5 (p=0.039). Overall 8/11 (72%) patients showed improvements in BDI and 7/11 (63%) patients showed improvements in BAI. In general the results of the qualitative analysis agreed well with the quantitative changes in depression and anxiety reported. CONCLUSIONS: The results of this exploratory mixed methods study suggest that mindfulness based cognitive therapy may have a role to play in treating active depression and anxiety in primary care.

A comparison of common spatial patterns with complex band power features in a four-class BCI experiment.

IEEE Trans Biomed Eng. 2006 Apr;53(4):642-51

Authors: Townsend G, Graimann B, Pfurtscheller G

We report on the offline analysis of four-class brain-computer interface (BCI) data recordings. Although the analysis is done within defined time windows (cue-based BCI), our goal is to work toward an approach which classifies on-going electroencephalogram (EEG) signals without the use of such windows (un-cued BCI). To that end, we provide some elements of that analysis related to timing issues that will become important as we pursue this goal in the future. A new set of features called complex band power (CBP) features which make explicit use of phase are introduced and are shown to produce good results. As reference methods we used traditional band power features and the method of common spatial patterns. We consider also for the first time in the context of a four-class problem the issue of variability of the features over time and how much data is required to give good classification results. We do this in a practical way where training data precedes testing data in time.