Body Experience in the Ubiquitous Era: towards a new gestural corpus for smart spaces

BODY EXPERIENCE IN THE UBIQUITOUS ERA:
TOWARDS A NEW GESTURAL CORPUS FOR SMART SPACES
Assunta Matassa Federica Cena
Department of Computer Science - University ofTorino

RESEARCH QUESTION
What is the role of body in a Ubiquitous era?
2

RESEARCH QUESTION/2
To answer this question we
propose a study for the design
of an innovative gestural
corpus to allow a natural,
simple interaction and
communication in social smart
space through the body
3

1) to examine the relation between body and space in
Ubiquitous era;
2) to investigate the potential of body and senses to improve
one’s ability to interact with surroundings;
3) to present a study for a new gestural corpus for smart
spaces, adopting a bodystorming approach.
GOALS
Department of Computer Science - University ofTorino4

BODY & SPACE
A long tradition in studying the relationship between human
bodies and space describes an anatomy of space generated by
living bodies.
It presented an important relation between body and its
material features, deﬁning how it is a measure of the space
and occupies its space.
5

SOCIAL SPACE
Social Space is the place where people interact to each other,
using artifacts (digital and non- digital) as means of
communication.
6

In everyday life, people establish an
interpersonal distance to recognize them
and create an interaction layer with others
in the space.
Intimate distance.
People share a
unique level of
comfort with one
another. Those who
are not comfortable
with someone who
approaches them in
the intimate zone will
experience a great
deal of social
discomfort or
awkwardness.
Personal distance for
talking with family
and close friends. It is
still very close in
proximity to that of
intimacy, and may
involve touching.
If a stranger
approaches someone
in the this zone, he/
she is likely to feel
uncomfortable.
Social distance in
meeting new people
and interacting with
groups. People do
not engage in
physically.
People may be
particular about the
amount of social
distance that is
needed.
Public distance.
An example of this is
illustrated in the
following picture,
where two men sit far
apart on a park
bench, in order to
preserve their public
distance.
7
PROXEMICS DISTANCE

Finally, we can deﬁne a social
space as composed by a
plethora of social practices
derived from gesture and
objects as an extension of
the body’s capabilities to
interact with external world.
The interaction happens
according to the social
distances.
8

The interaction practices can be collected in a gestural
system as a nonverbal shared language, made on a set of
symbolical signs and codes, known in a speciﬁc social space,
that enables the communication between people without
any additional components.
9

SYMBOLIC
INTERACTION
There is a set of gestures that
people perform toward artifacts on
the basis of the meaning that the
artifacts themselves have for people.
Thorough these gestures people are
engaged in a non-verbal
conversation, a “conversation of
gestures” that allows them to
interpret these gestures as signiﬁcant
symbols (symbolic interaction).
10

In Ubiquitous era the social
space is made also by several
devices (intelligent but also by
non-computational ones such as
non-digital object) that interact
each other and support
people's interaction.
11
UBIQUITOUS
ERA

12
It is changing the relationship
between people and space
creating a new layer between
them, as a mediator.

13
In general, technologies are
bringing novel interactional
modalities in daily routine.

SMART SPACE
The space itself is changing in a smart space with new intelligent
capabilities thanks to the technologies embedded in it.
14

SMART SPACE/2
The new properties of this
space are changing the way in
which people interact with it
through body and gestures,
requiring people to learn new
artiﬁcial and often non-
natural forms of interaction
in order to be able to interact
with the space.

This is where proxemics can help.
Just as people expect increasing engagement and intimacy as
they approach others, so should they naturally expect
increasing connectivity and interaction possibilities as they bring
their devices in close proximity to one another and to other
things in the social and smart space.
16

OUR
EXPERIMENT
We propose a study in
order to understand the
new interaction
modalities in a social
smart space and to design
an innovative code to
allow a natural interaction
and communication using
technologies.
17

OUR APPROACH
A. Smart space as a composite object whose intelligence
derives by the aggregation of the level of intelligence of the
composing objects.
B. Social smart space as the smart setting where social
activities happen supported by smart computational and
non- computational artifacts.
18

EXPECTED RESULTS
Taking inspiration from this example and starting from a set of
common gestures used in a social smart space,
our ﬁnal goal will be to re-design a system of meaningful
gestures for humans in order to enable a natural interaction
between body and space in a Ubiquitous Era.
19

RESEARCH STUDY
1. identify a set of everyday objects in a speciﬁc social space;
2. identify the everyday user gesture in that speciﬁc space
with those objects;
3. enhance the objects in order to be smart and able to
understand such gestures as new input/output modalities.  
20

1° Step: Understanding through an observation in situ
Through an observation in situ and using a ‘deep hanging out’
approach, a method based on observing people’s activities as they
happen in the real world, we intend to select a set of gesture
performed in a speciﬁc social space using an everyday objects.
21

2° step: bodystorming and experience prototyping approach
We will give users an everyday object enhanced with new capability
and observing how users interact with it and adopt it in everyday
activities.
We will exploit two speciﬁc techniques: bodystorming and
experience prototyping.
22

3° step: designing a gestural corpus
The deﬁnition of a set of gestures starting from the observed ones
in a new corpus or gestural system, in order to enable the enhanced
functionalities of smart objects in the social smart place exploiting
natural body movements and gestures.
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This is three steps approach to a new gesture corpus for enabling body-based
interaction in social smart space.
Observing a set of everyday gestures, we intend to ﬁgure out the potentialities to
enhance them exploiting the computational capabilities offered by smart objects and
smart spaces.
We expect we will be able to answer our research questions about the relation
between body and space, and how it can be enhanced in the Ubiquitous era thanks to
the potentialities offered by the body to interact with spaces.
IN CONCLUSION
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Assunta Matassa
University of Torino
matassa@di.unito.it
Thank you for the attention!
Q&A

Body Experience in the Ubiquitous Era: towards a new gestural corpus for smart spaces

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