• Interaction by human voice
  • Non-verbal vocal interaction
• User interfaces for people with difficulties
  • User interfaces for the vision-impaired, motor-impaired, and the elderly users
  • Assistive technology for the vision-impaired users
  • Visualization of sound for people with hearing difficulties
• General HCI
  • Familiarity and Formality in the user interfaces
  • Text input techniques
• Information design
  • Usability of public signage
• Computer-supported collaboration work of orchestra players
• 3D sound rendering

Remarks:

Non-verbal Vocal Interaction (NVVI). The potential of the non-verbal sounds (such as humming or whistling) as well as non-verbal components of speech (”err”, “uhm”) has been taken into consideration only recently by the research community. In my PhD thesis, I focus on the use of non-verbal sounds to control the user interface both indirectly (by emulating common peripheral devices, such as movement of a mouse cursor) and directly (by mapping the non-verbal sounds to the desired response of the application, such as movement of a game figure). I am very proud that with my friends Sri Kurniawan and Susumu Harada, we have hosted a first workshop in this field at CHI 2007. See also List of papers.

Visualization of sound for people with hearing difficulties. It has been already demonstrated that modality conversion may – to certain extent – help compensate the impaired hearing by providing visual substitution of the acoustic modality. My goal is to build and perform user testing of an augmented reality system that would present the surrounding sounds in an unobtrusive way. I am interested in seeing the results of a usability study, especially the efficiency of such a system in different applications, such as general acoustic activity awareness, visualization of speech, etc.

Familiarity and Formality in the user interfaces. Most of languages allow their speakers express informality vs formality or familiarity vs distance in the relation to the other parties. We can ask how likely the users are to seek for and expect these dimensions in the wording of the messages of the user interface. An example: At the end of the Czech version of a game of Reversi on a cell phone, the display read, “You have lost, sir or madam” as translated from the Czech “Prohrál(a) jste”. I found very funny that the authors of the translation used one of the most formal and distant phrasing available in Czech. I would expect something like this on my bank statement and not from a game that was supposed to provide a light entertainment. On the other hand, can “serious-business devices”, such as the ATM machines call their users “hey buddy”? When should user interfaces display messages in formal language? Which cultures would expect and require different user interfaces to be formal and distant as opposed to informal and familiar?