Gale, C., and Monk, A. F. Where am I looking? The accuracy of video-mediated gaze awareness. Perception and Psychophysics 3, 62 (2000), 586–595. [pdf]

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The experiments reported in this paper demonstrate that full gaze awareness is possible with sufficient accuracy to be used as a resource in face-to-face and video-mediated communication. Knowledge of what someone is looking at is used habitually in everyday life. The estimators were still very accurate when they could not see the hand-and-eye movement to the gazed-at object.

The next step in this research would be to demonstrate that a video configuration that include a single view of the face and the objects being gazed rather than these things on their own.

Participants worked in pairs, with one person gazing at a flat horizontal stimulus between them. The other participant estimated where the gazer was looking. Experiment 1 used linear scales as gaze targets. The mean root mean square error of estimation equates to 3.8 degrees of head-and-eye pan and 2.6 degrees of tilt. This small error of estimation was essentially the same in a video-mediated condition and in one in which a procedure that did not allow the estimator to see the head-and-eye movement to the target position was used. Experiment 2 obtained comparable gaze estimation performance in face-to-face and video-mediated conditions, using a combined pan-and-tilt grid. It is concluded that people are very good at estimating what someone else is looking at and that such estimations should be practical during video-mediated conversation.

Tversky, B. Language and Space. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, USA, 1996, ch. Spatial Perspective in Descriptions, pp. 463–491.

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Thaking other points of view is essential for a range of cognitive functions and social interactions, from recognizing an object from a novel point of view to navigating an environment to understand someone else’s position. This chapter tries at first to reconciliate different perspectives from different disciplines on spatial perspectives.

There are three bases for spatial reference: the viewer, other objects and external sources. These three bases seems to correspond to deictic, intrinsic and extrinsic uses of language. An interesting point is that deictic uses cannot be accounted for by the language alone. They require additional knowledge of the interactional situation in which they are produced.

Depending on the complexity of the task, the speaker can decide to take his own perspective, the perspective of the addressee or a neutral perspective, using a landmark, referent object, on the extrinsic system as a basis for the spatial reference.

The world is multidimensional but speech is linear. To describe the world linearly, it makes sense to choose an order. A natural way of conveying an environment is through a mental tour. These tours can differenciate between gaze tours and walking tours. In gaze tours the noun phrases are usually headed by objects and the verbs express states. In a walking tour, the noun phrases are headed by the addressee and the verbs express actions.

The choice of the perspective taken and the particular trategy chosed to encode the spatial situation will depend closely by the number of mental transformations required to produce or to understand an utterance. It stands to reason that speakers would avoid cognitively difficult tasks.

The chapter also report an interesting study on map descriptions. After learning a map, subjects were asked to describe them from memory. Two possible descriptions were found: a route description takes the reader on a mental tour. It uses a changing view and locates landmarks in respect to the addressee. A survey description, in contrast, takes a static view from above the environments and locates landmarks with respect to each other.

Going beyond perspective is critical to spatial cognition.

Levelt, W. J. M. Language and Space. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, USA, 1996, ch. Perspective Taking and Ellipsis in Spatial Descriptions, pp. 77–107. [pdf]

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This chapter recalled the distinction between macroplanning and microplanning. In macroplanning we elaborate our comunicative intention, selecting information whose expression can be effective in revealing our intentions to a pratner in speech. We decide on what to say, linearizing what goes first and next. In microplanning, or “thinking for speaking”, we translate the information to be expressed in some kind of “prepositional” format, creating a semantic representation, or message, that can be formulated. Applied to spatial discourse, we can say that macroplanning involves selecting referents, relata, and their spatial relations for expression. Instead, microplanning consists of applying some perspective systems that will map spatial directions/relations onto lexical concepts.

This chapter contains also a discussion of advantages and disadvantages of deictic, intrinsic and absolute systems for spatial reasoning. For instance deictic perspective is safe from conversness and transitivity mistakes.

Finally the paper offer a good example of visual patterns used to test perspective taking. The author hilights critical moves that leads to potential encoding problems.

The first part of this paper reviews some major properties of three perspectives language users can take in mapping spatial relations onto linguistic expressions, the deictic, intrinsic and absolute systems. Although the intrinsic system is most widely used in the languages of the world, its mathematical properties are a hindrance to spatial reasoning (it lacks transitivity and converseness). The second part of the paper explores whether ellipsis in spatial expressions (for instance in “you go right to a church and then to a bridge”) precedes or follows perspective taking. An analysis of Levelt-type network description data reveals that ellipsis is pre-perspective taking, which is a non-Whorfian conclusion.

Yesterday I attended the talk of Thomas Henry Culhane, a Ph.D. Candidate at UCLA. He is working on a fascinating project called Solar Cities. The basic idea is to engage local poor population in Cairo, Egypt, to build fully functional solar hot water systems. There is not much on the web but here I could find an abstract of a paper published this year.

Solar C3ITIES pilot program has resulted in the creation of three effective and fully functioning solar hot water systems in Cairo built completely out of local materials – even recycled solid waste – using local labor and expertise. These three units now sit on top of two residences in Darb El Ahmar and the Zabaleen recycling school in Muqattam, Manshiyat Nasser.  Popularizing science through relevant, hands-on applications and integrating technology for industrial ecology systems, the “Cairo Communities” approach is a project undertaken by the mainly Coptic Manshiyat Nasser and the mainly Muslim Darb El Ahmar communities to bring together craftsmen and craftswomen, artisans, carpenters, welders, electricians and plumbers to build and introduce grassroots sustainable development infrastructure and technology through a new kind of vocational training program.

Here are some random notes I took during the talk:

– Before you teach you need to understand. Sybille, Culhane wife and colleague, was referring to the fact that most of the time we, people coming from industrialized countries, have the attitude of going to poor countries to teach something to them while, most of the time, it is the opposite case. In order to interact between such different cultures we need to live there and understand their culture.

– People want to feel part of history, they do not want to be left behind. Sybille was referring to the fact that people in Cairo are fully aware of what happens in other parts of the world. They have satellite television. They are fully aware that their living system sucks and they desire to have the same basic things that we have in other more developed parts of the world.

– You cannot buy a ‘heat collector’ in ‘The Sims’. Thomas was talking about the simulation game called ‘The Sims’, where you can fully furnish your apartment. However, the objects you can buy in the game are mostly useless in a country where the basic infrastructure is not there. The sets of objects and actions you can take in the game are modeled upon a rich country, read the States, and do not fit other cultures. Besides using these games could be possible to teach the basic principles behind renewable energies but these games are not meant for that.

– Kids in Egypt have skills and access to technology. Thomas was reporting examples of kids playing online games in Internet Cafés in Cairo city. Technology is there, just in different forms and solutions we are used to. Using these channels might be possible to spread new ideas in the community.

– The intelligence is in the network. This seems to be an advertisement message of a mobile phone operator. However, Thomas strongly believe that in order for projects like his to be self sustainable, there is a need for participatory design with the community. There is the need of involving the community in the loop. Once the competences are injected in the community then we might expect initial technological solutions to replicate and evolve spontaneously.

– Bottle Bricks. This was the most fascinating idea. Thomas mentioned the fact that to build the heat collector he was using PVC bottles that he had to sew and glue together. These bottles are thought with a single purpose in mind: carry a liquid. What if we think about a second use for each of our packaging. He was thinking about a Cola bottle that could be used to build a heat collector once the cola was drunk. Instead of sewing and gluing the bottle itself was ready to be connected to other bottles without any extra effort. This might not make a lot of sense in our culture but in developing countries it would make the difference between a pile of junk and technologically advanced materials to build collectors.

Wood, S., Cox, R., and Cheng, P. Attention design: Eight issues to consider. Computers in Human Behavior 22 (February 2006), 588–602. [pdf]

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This paper describes eight issues that are fundamental when designing attentive systems. First of all there is no consensus on what is attention. Many models are proposed that tend to represent it as a spotlight or as a ‘coherence field’, or a ‘dymanic telephoto system’. Most research tend to assimilate attention with visual search through eye-gaze. However this is not necessarily correct.

Second point attention is difficult to measure. Vision has a selective nature. The implication is that direction of gaze is not necessarily a synonym with focus of attention and therefore studies will need to validate focus of attention through further evidence.

The third point raised in the paper is to understand how graphical displays interact with attention. Larkin and Simon (1987) demonstrated that the way an extrernal representation encodes information is critical to how easy it will be for the user to find relevant information. This is connected to the split-attention effect. Shimojima (1999) claims that ‘free rides’ and ‘derivative meaning’ occurs when constraints on the relation between local and global structure in the representation and the target domain, are satisfied by the semantic conventions of the representation.

A fourth point of interest is what are the potential effects of introducing artificial feedback in systems designed to monitor the user’s attention. It has been demonstrated that the introduction of an an artificial feedback loop can, in some circumstances, cause variables that are ussually highly correlated to become decoupled.

A recent article [1] of the official journal of the Jesuits focused on the opportunities offered by virtual worlds for evangelization. Jesuit Father Antonio Spadaro said that “The best way to understand (the Second Life phenomenon) is to enter into it, (and) live inside it to recognize its potential and dangers”.

Father Spadaro looked also at the risks to which users of this new medium might be exposed: users might experiment their virtual appearance with less inhibitions of their real appearance, “but on the other hand one can also get caught up in a spontaneity that knows no limits or discretion,” he said. Another big danger he pointed out is to become alienated from the real world and begin to identify oneself according to one’s self-created myth.

Another problem is that virtual world users play with a low level of responsibility. As many actions can be reverted or easily erased, users are exposed to a “low level of risk,” he said. While this might be good in some situations, it can yield negative psychological and spiritual consequences, like having fear of getting engaged in real-life actions, with an higher level of risks. “This has worrying emotional and affective consequences,” noted the article. In the virtual world everything is “under control and reversible,” making the real world look frightening.

Si va espandendo in internet il fenomeno della Second Life, cioè la possibilità di vivere in maniera simulata una sorta di ‘seconda vita’ digitale. L’articolo descrive il fenomeno, valutandone rischi e opportunità, e segnalando anche la presenza di elementi religiosi. Ogni iniziativa capace di animare positivamente questo ‘luogo’ è da considerare opportuna: la terra digitale è, a suo modo, anch’essa ‘terra di missione’. Occorre, comunque, essere attenti al bisogno ormai diffuso di un ‘altrove’, nel quale l’uomo pretende, in modo talvolta scorretto, di ritrovare se stesso.

[1] Antonio Spadaro S.I. “SECOND LIFE”: IL DESIDERIO DI UN’ALTRA VITA – La Civiltà Cattolica, 2007, III, pp. 266-278, quaderno 3771-3772.

More: [2] – [3] – [4] – [5]

Copyright notice: the present image was taken from the following URL, the copyrights are reserved by the respective author/s.

Colston, H. L., and Schiano, D. J. Looking and lingering as conversational cues in video-mediated communication. In CHI ’95: Conference companion on Human factors in computing systems (New York, NY, USA, 1995), ACM Press, pp. 278–279. [url]

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The authors report an interesting finding: the amount of time spent looking at an unknown problem is inferred to suggest the level of difficulty involved solving the problem, and this inference is highly sensitive to timing parameters.

A study is described in which observers rated the difficulty people had in solving problems, based either upon simply how long the person looked at each problem, or also how long his or her gaze lingered on it after being instructed to move on. Initial results show a linear relationship between gaze duration and rated difficulty, with lingering as an added significant factor. These findings are discussed in terms of the role(s) gaze cues play in tracking understanding in conversations, with implications for the design of video-mediated communication (VMC) systems.

Velichkovsky, B. M. Communicating attention: Gaze position transfer in cooperative problem solving. Pragmatics and Cognition 3, 2 (1995), 199–222.

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Velichkovsky highlighted the importance of transferring gaze information at distance for collaborative work. Two participants were asked to solve a puzzle collaboratively. One of them had access to the solution while the other was operating the moves on the target puzzle. While the participants shared the same visual workspace, one of them had access to the solution but s/he could not rearrange the pieces. Velichkovsky manipulated the participants communication features. In the control condition the participants could only communicate via voice, while in a second condition the gaze of the participant who had access to the solution was projected on the workspace of the other, while in a final condition the one who had access to the solution could use a mouse pointer to show to the other the relevant parts. Both the experimental conditions, transfer of gaze position and pointing with the mouse, improved performance, however he did not register a significant differenb between mouse+voice and the gaze+voice conditon.

He also processed the data on verbal communication to verify changes in the conversation content. He found a significant reduction of the number of words in conditions of direct reference compared to the voice only condition. Spatial words were replaced by deictic demonstratives and definite referring expressions.

His experiment however did not show differences between the direction of the gaze position transfer (expert to novice vs. novice to expert). Also the experiment did not show differences in mouse vs. gaze reference. Gaze direction is intimately tied to the focus of attention, or better yet, to the focus of external forms of attention. This is only rarely the case for manual pointing.

The author argues that the duration of fixation alone is not a perfect correlate of its communicative role. The means that in order to elucidate the communicative aspect in eye-movements linguistic heuristic should be at work. He makes the example of long fixations which temporaly conicide with verbal remarks of the deictic type could trigger the attention of the partner.

Last Saturday we spent some time in Besançon, in France. It is a lovely city. Downtown is a pedestrian area with lots of shops and restaurants. Here are some pictures.

L’8 settembre sarà il giorno del Vaffanculo day, o V-Day. Una via di mezzo tra il D-Day dello sbarco in Normandia e V come Vendetta. Si terrà sabato otto settembre nelle piazze d’Italia, per ricordare che dal 1943 non è cambiato niente. Ieri il re in fuga e la Nazione allo sbando, oggi politici blindati nei palazzi immersi in problemi “culturali”. Il V-Day sarà un giorno di informazione e di partecipazione popolare.

Beppe Grillo