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Cameras are a useful source of input for many interactive applications, but computer vision programming is difficult and requires specialized knowledge that is out of reach for many HCI practitioners. In an effort to learn what makes a useful computer vision design tool, we created Eyepatch, a tool for designing camera-based interactions, and evaluated the Eyepatch prototype through deployment to students in an HCI course. This paper describes the lessons we learned about making computer vision more accessible, while retaining enough power and flexibility to be useful in a wide variety of interaction scenarios.

We present Inky, a command line for shortcut access to common web tasks. Inky aims to capture the efficiency benefits of typed commands while mitigating their usability problems. Inky commands have little or no new syntax to learn, and the system displays rich visual feedback while the user is typing, including missing parameters and contextual information automatically clipped from the target web site. Inky is an example of a new kind of hybrid between a command line and a GUI interface. We describe the design and implementation of two prototypes of this idea, and report the results of a preliminary user study.