Sacred Imagery in Techno-Spiritual Design

This article is by Susan P. Wyche, Kelly E. Caine, Benjamin K. Davison, Shwetak N. Patel,
Michael Arteaga, and Rebecca E. Grinter from Georgia Tech.

Since people are using computers to help with religious and spiritual practices, designers need to learn to design for these faith-related purposes. The authors of this paper present a design for mobile phones that help Islamic practices.

Design information for faith-related purposes is hard to come by, but people use computers for such purposes. For example, Muslims, have to pray 5 times a day. Certainly a phone application to help remind them would be useful, although if they pray 5 times a day, they should be used to it. They use some applications such as camera phones already to take pictures of shrines when they visit and they pray to the pictures. Meanwhile, Christians use applications to help them learn new Bible verses.

There are about 2.3 million Muslims in the US, and the religion is growing. They've always used compasses to determine the location of Mecca, and sun-dials to see what time it was so that they might pray at the right time. About 15 minutes before it's time to pray, they begin by washing themselves and other rituals. In Muslim countries, television stations halt broadcasts during these times. Finally, it's where the sun is at that tells EXACTLY when to pray.


This program helps the users see where the sun is to pinpoint when they should get ready to perform their rituals and pray. And to mimic nature, the sky changes colors as the sun moves across the sky. And there are sillouettes of mosques in the background so that users get a feeling for religion. It helps them reflect on their faith. This imagery is much better suited for it's use than a simple beep for an alarm which lets Muslims know when it's time to pray. The imagery helps them reflect on their faith and feel more natural than an alarm telling them to pray.

There are many other religions which could benefit such as Christians using a crucifix on their screen to help them remember to be thankful for the sacrifice that Christ made. This is in the future works hopefully.

Shadow Reaching: A New Perspective on Interaction for Large Wall Displays

This article is by Garth Shoemaker, Anthony Tang, and Kellogg S. Booth.

Basically, the article is about shadow recognition and stretching which we call "reaching". By using technology called 6DOF, it can actually detect where a shadow is. Another technology used is similar to Magic Lenses. The magic lens was a lens one would hold over an image or picture to get another image back. For example, if someone holds a lens over a map, it may show pictures from that area. If I held a magic lens over a map of the world and held it over New York, I could expect to see the Statue of Liberty. If I held it over Paris, I could expect to see the Eiffel Tower.

The first application, however, is similar to touch-screen technology. The user holds a tracker or marker that will allow them to interact with the screen. So if they hold it in their hand, the tracker (the green button below) will be what is grabbed. Wherever the item is on the shadow is where the marker is on the screen. This is useful so that the rest of their shadow doesn't mess anything up. In the image below, it uses this shadow to allow the user to drag and drop items on the screen.


You can see the user putting a puzzle together. This is helped by the fact that the user can stretch or "reach" their shadow by either altering the light source or by moving closer towards the light source and away from the projection. This is extremely useful for larger images where the user can move closer to the light and gain the ability to stretch and reach to the top.

Similarly, the second application uses full-body shadows and not only a few points which are marked by markers. For example, the paper spoke of a program where balls are bouncing on a screen and if they hit the shadow, they will bounce off and away.

The third application is more similar to the Magic Lenses. As you can see in the picture below, the two girls cast shadows on a map to give a satellite view of the map whereas the rest is just a normal view of the map.

This is a neat application that is very similar to the Magic Lens. In the future, they are hoping to alter the light source to make other applications possible. They also plan to test and see how shadow reaching and recognition compares to other methods of giving presentations.