Improving user experience with post-desktop interfaces through biomechanical modeling

Post-desktop user interfaces, such as smartphones, tablets, interactive tabletops and mid-air interfaces, are ubiquitous in everyday life. One of the key features of these interfaces is the reduced number or even absence of input movement constraints imposed by a device form factor. This freedom is advantageous for users, allowing them to interact with computers using natural movements. However, it is a source of difficulties for research and design of post-desktop interfaces, which makes traditional analysis methods inefficient. Miroslav presents efficient experiment- and model-based design and evaluation methods for post-desktop user interfaces in this talk. Biomechanical modelling and simulation are at the core of these methods, combined with optical motion capture of the experimental task in the inverse simulation approach or reinforcement learning in a forward simulation predictive model. The proposed methods effectively and efficiently deal with the issues of post-desktop interfaces at early and later design stages. The methods provide rich data on physical ergonomics (joint angles and moments, muscle forces and activations, energy expenditure and fatigue), making it possible to solve ergonomic problems.

Short bio:
Miroslav Bachinski is an associate professor at the University of Bergen. His research focuses on development and application of data-driven methods to improve post-desktop user interfaces with large space of alternative designs (e. g. Virtual Reality, Levitation). He adopts optical motion capture, movement dynamics modeling, biomechanical modeling and simulation besides standard performance measurement methods to uniformly cover the whole design space, formalize its performance and ergonomics properties in a mathematical models and find the optimal solutions.

The event is hybrid, zoom link: https://chalmers.zoom.us/j/69133808939
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