My diploma project dealt with presenting a novel device with a projection and capture system to fit into the ecology of today’s digital products. This system or device was structured for table-top interactions and had a support for multimodal interactions.
The reach of the internet and computational devices is continuously growing and human dependence on them is tremendous. With the increasing number of forms these devices come in — from huge desktops to mobiles and tablets — users now have a wide variety to choose from for their daily computational needs.
In the first phase of the project the aim was to understand the latent daily requirements of a middle-class Indian household and the role of internet/computer plays in providing for those needs. Effort was put into translating these needs into a useful and interesting case study for the device under consideration and exploring the ways in which paper or other household artefacts could be usefully linked to digital information.
The second phase involved designing the interface and defining interactions for the case study. The design explorations thus covered interface design for an educational scenario centred on the use of a tangible (book). Also suitable multimodal (both speech and gesture) interactions for interacting with the interface were investigated.
The project elaborately covered all aspects of the design process, from extensive user research to user evaluation of the defined multimodal gestures. This helped me understand each of the stages in the process. The project turned out to be very interesting because it exposed me to the new area of projection interfaces and multimodal interactions.