The Density Paradox

Online synchronous tutoring allows for immediate engagement between instructors and audiences over distance. However, tutoring physical skills remains challenging because current telepresence approaches may not allow for adequate spatial awareness and viewpoint control of the demonstration activities scattered across an entire work area and the instructor’s sufficient awareness of the audience. We present Asteroids, a novel design space for tangible robotic telepresence, to enable workbench-scale physical embodiments of remote people and tangible interactions by the instructor. With Asteroids, the audience can actively control a swarm of mini-telepresence robots, change camera positions, and switch to other robots’ viewpoints. Demonstrators can perceive the audiences’ physical presence while using tangible manipulations to control the audiences’ viewpoints and presentation flow. We conducted an exploratory evaluation for Asteroids with 12 remote participants in a model-making tutorial scenario with an architectural expert demonstrator. Results suggest our unique features benefited participant engagement, sense of presence, and understanding.

Pisciculture and floriculture consumption are of vital importance as one fulfills Kolkata’s average residents’ physical need in food and the latter supports their social need in religion practice.

As the core of religious rituals in Kolkata, up to 1,500 tons of fresh-cut flowers are exchanged at Kolkata Flower Market daily before being distributed to retailers and temples. Nonetheless, major flower suppliers travel up to 12 hours to reach Malik Ghat Market, in this primitive transportation process, a large portion of flowers are withered and thus wasted.

Currently, the wetlands directly supply 13,000 tons of fish to Kolkata annually while treating 60% of its sewage water. However, pisciculture is losing its people to other industries as fishermen struggle to make a profit from the shallowing ponds caused by city pollution.

While indigenous ice making has long been a tradition practiced by the Calcuttans. Yet, it is the scarcity of ice which limits the distance and time allowed for fish and flower transportation/storage and constrains the development of by-product industries in Kolkata.

Inspired by the natural sewage treating system and the different levels of water exchanged in the wetland, our proposal challenges the conventional way of ice making by introducing ice of varied qualities, catering to the different needs of environmental cooling, fish/flower transportation and human consumption.

As temporality is a unique aspect of Kolkata, an area prone to monsoons, our project aims at transplanting the agricultural calendar into physical design interventions. By overlaying cycles of pisciculture, floriculture and ice with natural rainfall, solar radiation and temperature patterns, we are introducing three critical points on the hydrological system for further elaboration.

Building compelling augmented reality (AR) experiences is challenging due to designers inability to assess how uncontrolled contexts can influence the user experience.
Current approaches include capturing the end user’s environment through imagery or video; and building mini-size studio-interactive spaces to emulate AR environments. However, the former approach can raise privacy concerns and the later approach involves physical setups that are costly and time-consuming.
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We propose a non-intrusive, low-cost approach that supports rapid iterations for AR designers through gathering data from crowdworkers in a privacy friendly manner.

The evaluation framework extends classical 3D ui evaluation metrics by adding an AR specific persepctive-- context performance.

A augmented reality prototype is being tested is different scenarios.

The results reflect on the dashboard in real-time.