Remote presence: supporting deictic gestures through a handheld multi-touch device

This thesis argues on the possibility of supporting deictic gestures through handheld multi-touch devices in remote presentation scenarios. In [1], Clark distinguishes indicative techniques of placing-for and directing-to, where placing-for refers to placing a referent into the addressee’s attention, and directing-to refers to directing the addressee’s attention towards a referent. Keynote, PowerPoint, FuzeMeeting and others support placing-for efficiently with slide transitions, and animations, but support limited to none directing-to. The traditional “pointing feature” present in some presentation tools comes as a virtual laser pointer or mouse cursor. [12, 13] have shown that the mouse cursor and laser pointer offer very little informational expressiveness and do not do justice to human communicative gestures. In this project, a prototype application was implemented for the iPad in order to explore, develop, and test the concept of pointing in remote presentations. The prototype offers visualizing and navigating the slides as well as “pointing” and zooming. To further investigate the problem and possible solutions, a theoretical framework was designed representing the relationships between the presenter’s intention and gesture and the resulting visual effect (cursor) that enables the audience members to interpret the meaning of the effect and the presenter’s intention. Two studies were performed to investigate people’s appreciation of different ways of presenting remotely. An initial qualitative study was performed at The Hague, followed by an online quantitative user experiment. The results indicate that subjects found pointing to be helpful in understanding and concentrating, while the detached video feed of the presenter was considered to be distracting. The positive qualities of having the video feed were the emotion and social presence that it adds to the presentations. For a number of subjects, pointing displayed some of the same social and personal qualities [2] that video affords, while less intensified. The combination of pointing and video proved to be successful with 10-out-of-19 subjects scoring it the highest while pointing example came at a close 8-out-of-19. Video was the least preferred with only one subject preferring it. We suggest that the research performed here could provide a basis for future research and possibly be applied in a variety of distributed collaborative settings.

Energy harvesting from hydroelectric systems for remote sensors

Hydroelectric systems are well-known for large scale power generation. However, there are virtually no studies on energy harvesting with these systems to produce tens or hundreds of milliwatts. The goal of this work was to study which design parameters from large-scale systems can be applied to small-scale systems. Two types of hydro turbines were evaluated. The first one was a Pelton turbine which is suitable for high heads and low flow rates. The second one was a propeller turbine used for low heads and high flow rates. Several turbine geometries and nozzle diameters were tested for the Pelton system. For the propeller, a three-bladed turbine was tested for different heads and draft tubes. The mechanical power provided by these turbines was measured to evaluate the range of efficiencies of these systems. A small three-phase generator was developed for coupling with the turbines in order to evaluate the generated electric power. Selected turbines were used to test battery charging with hydroelectric systems and a comparison between several efficiencies of the systems was made. Keywords