Cycling safety gestures, such as hand signals and shoulder checks, are an essential part of safe manoeuvring on the road. Child cyclists, in particular, might have difficulties performing safety gestures on the road or even forget about them, given the lack of cycling experience, road distractions and differences in motor and perceptual-motor abilities compared with adults. To support them, we designed two methods to remind about safety gestures while cycling. The first method employs an icon-based reminder in heads-up display (HUD) glasses and the second combines vibration on the handlebar and ambient light in the helmet. We investigated the performance of both methods in a controlled test-track experiment with 18 children using a mid-size tricycle, augmented with a set of sensors to recognize children's behavior in real time. We found that both systems are successful in reminding children about safety gestures and have their unique advantages and disadvantages.
Research has begun to investigate the interruption of VR users but lacks an understanding of how social factors (setting / relationship to the VR user) might impact the interruption and why bystanders interrupt as they do. We conducted a survey (N=100) into bystander comfort when interrupting a VR user (known / unknown) in 4 settings (private spaces, public spaces, private transport, public transport) and their willingness to use a range of interruption strategies. Our results suggest relationship to the VR user is more influential than setting when considering comfort and acceptability of interruption strategy. A follow-up lab study (N=16) investigated bystander interruption of a known VR user in a private setting. Most used a combination of speech and touch to interrupt though a subset used unconventional, improvised strategies we term playful interruptions. With the recent inclusion of open ear audio in VR headsets and preference towards verbal interruptions in our results we conducted a survey (N=76) into the consumer response to open ear audio in VR headsets. We report open ear audio was used regularly by 52.6% of our respondents 60% of who rate their experience with it positively.
We present a model of a reality aware VR headset, a VR headset capable of identifying, interpreting and responding to elements of a user's reality. We report on an evaluation of 2 prototypes which investigated potential behaviours such a headset might have. Our first prototype compared 4 notifications to automatically notify a VR user to a bystander's presence. We compared notifying with and without information about the bystander's position. Our results highlight a subset of VR users who when notified of copresence without position were made uncomfortable. Our second prototype investigated how dynamic audio adjustment could react to audio events in the user's surroundings. We compared on-board headset audio and headphones with a dynamic audio version of each which decreased the application volume to direct attention to an audio source and increased application volume to block out an audio source. Our results found positive results when decreasing application volume but increasing volume to block out a nearby audio source was ineffective.
Public displays are being increasingly used to entice citizen participation, yet their content often lacks the true voice of local inhabitants. This paper investigates the potential of allowing user-generated videos to be shown unto public displays. We thus evaluated a preliminary version of 'Story Maker', a cross-media platform that invited local inhabitants to contribute video snippets in reaction to a thematic calls to action. The uploaded videos were edited into a weekly story by a professional media moderator, and shown on three large displays located in different semi-public contexts. Our qualitative analysis of a five-week in-the-wild study translates into design considerations that focus on how user-generated content should emphasize a clear purpose, valorise an already existing community, follow immediately actionable expectations with few practical complications, and should be edited by people with local knowledge. We expect these considerations to be helpful towards future public applications of citizen-empowered content creation.
Public display networks are increasingly seeking to provide personalised content to viewers. A key challenge in this area is to how to support conflicting personalisation requirements from multiple concurrent viewers. In this paper we present a four dimensional design space that describes a wide range of approaches to addressing this issue. This design space can be used by developers and researchers to understand how systems can be engineered to deliver an increase in the effective communications bandwidth to viewers while meeting their conflicting content requirements. This is the first attempt at systematically examining the challenges and design choices in this important emerging area.
Interactive public displays are becoming increasingly commonplace. Two important challenges for these displays exist: 1) how interactivity is communicated to the passer-by and 2) once the audience have engaged, how the interactive affordances are communicated. We explore these challenges through the lens of a new emerging interaction modality - contactless mid-air gesture controlled public displays. This paper presents several solutions to the problems above, inspired by the findings existing within the related research on public displays. These solutions are deployed in an in-the-wild setting - a cinema for an 8 week duration - and evaluated through observational and quantitative research. The data forms a set of design guidelines for successfully attracting the passer-by and conveying the affordances of the contactless gestural public displays.
This paper explores the concept of using human shadows as an ambient information display. As shadows are an integral part of the physical world, consisting of non-illuminated and dynamic shapes, they provide a potential basis for the design of unobtrusive ambient displays. We created a set of artificial human shadows to explore the concept, and conducted a user study (n = 12) to chart perceptions on the idea. As salient findings, the concept was perceived as interesting, and provoked strong reactions during the user study, e.g. surprise, laughter, and, at times, the feeling of spookiness. Synchronisation of movements between the manipulated shadows and the physical world and the ability to visually recognize the human shape, even when distortions are applied, are essential for the user experience.
Self-moving robots may soon be ubiquitous in urban spaces, thereby enabling a wide range of use cases. To increase their social acceptance, previous work has explored how non-humanoid robots can express emotional states through various modalities, such as lights and movement. However, the majority of research has been carried out in controlled lab experiments, raising questions about their ecological validity. In this work, we present the design of emotional expressions for an urban robot via low-resolution lighting patterns and motion cues. We present an in-the-wild evaluation using questionnaires and interviews (N=72). Our findings suggest that a range of contextual aspects can influence the perception of the robot and its emotional expressions, such as overall choreography and interactional context, immediate impact of the environment, coupled with people's own emotions and past experiences. Our analysis thus outlines challenges and provides guidance for designers and researchers working with urban robots.
Prior work on clothing with integrated displays has typically presented catwalk-style garments, with light output from hundreds of LEDs. In contrast, we present the IdleStripes shirt, a garment for normal daily office wear, that encourages the wearer to avoid long sedentary periods through an integrated ambient display. Rather than adding the display functionality to an existing shirt, we present a process where a clothing designer designed the smart garment from scratch, in this way creating a more aesthetic and comfortable garment. A display element in the upper chest area of the shirt utilises cloth with embedded optical fibers, stripes of which illuminate based on the wearer's inactivity. Taking a short walk then resets the display. Participants in an in-the-wild user study wore the shirt during their normal working day, and, e.g., report positively on the design of the garment and their willingness to wear it. Those that were not already frequently active during their working day, reported that the shirt encouraged them to break their sedentary behaviour and take short walks.
Useful and easy-to-use digital passenger services are one component for increasing the overall attractiveness of public transportation. In this paper, we provide an overview and a critical review of the current state of interactive passenger services through a case study involving mobile apps as well as situated public screens at two major stations. By relating the identified key features to prior research in the field, we identify trends and opportunities for impactful future research. We found that intermodal routing and ticketing in today's mobile apps are sophisticated, yet socializing features and interactive applications on public screens lag behind research in this field. Promising future research opportunities include improving personalization and investigating trust in public transportation and its digital services.
In this paper we present a lamp prototype that projects controllable shadows to create an ambient backdrop for dialogic reading between parents and their children. The lamp uses four electrochromic displays that allow masking the light and thereby control the shadows that are projected upward onto the ceiling. The displays can switch between general ambience picture and a certain story point in a Smurf book. These displays were used in a reading study with parents reading for their children and a focus group session. The results indicate that the lamp helped in spurring interest and a dialog about the story being read. The used technology proved to be implicitly triggering questions and discussion about the story by creating suspension when switching between the different shadows.
Communication with remote persons over a video link is common today, e.g. to connect with family members abroad, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, social activities such as board games are rarely shared in this way, as common video chat software does not support this scenario well. However, interactive tabletops provide inherent support for natural tangible interaction with items on the tabletop surface. We present the Tabletop Teleporter, a setup designed to merge two remote locations into a single shared interaction space. We evaluate the system using a board game, focusing on the perceived immersion and connectedness of participants. Our evaluation shows that most measures for the social quality of a remotely shared game are not significantly different from one played with co-located participants, and that players prefer our setup over a pure videochat scenario.
Augmented Reality (AR) devices and applications are gaining in popularity, and - with recent trends such as Pokemon Go - are venturing into public spaces where they become more and more pervasive. In consequence, public AR displays might soon be part of our cityscapes and may impact on our everyday view of the world. In this work, we present ChalkboARd, a prototype of an AR-enabled public display that seamlessly integrates into its environment. We investigate the influence of our system on the attention of bystanders in a field study (N=20). The field deployment of ChalkboARd provides evidence that AR for public displays needs to be interactive and adaptive to their surroundings, while at the same time taking privacy issues into account. Nevertheless, ChalkboARd was received positively by the participants, which points out the (hidden) potential of public AR displays.
Information overload from voluminous lifelogs hinders effective comprehension and sense-making. Despite extensive prior work to summarize such datasets, selection of important moments is an ongoing research challenge. An alternative is to redesign interaction techniques and visualizations to leverage the human cognition to interact with complete datasets. In this work, we present and evaluate LifeRewinder , a prototype for sequentially reviewing lifelogs as a time-lapse video with controllable speed using a knob.
This paper presents a conceptual application of drone-based in-situ projections to support people when crossing busy roads that lack dedicated pedestrian crossings. To overcome technical, legal and risk challenges of evaluating these kinds of speculative pervasive display applications, we introduce the concept of hyperreal prototypes. We describe the layers that contribute to a hyperreal prototype and how such prototypes allow the evaluation of HCI solutions in high-risk scenarios in a virtual-reality environment.
Interactive installations that are controlled with gestures and body movements have been widely used in museums due to their tremendous educational potential. The design of such systems, however, remains problematic. In this paper, we reflect on two open research challenges that we observed when crafting a Kinect-based prototype installation for data exploration at a science museum: (1) making the user aware that the system is interactive; and, (2) increasing the discoverability of hand gestures and body movements.
We explore how pervasive displays could offer unique opportunities for enhancing discovery and learning with "big data". In 2012-2014, our collaboration across three universities undertook a series of design exercises investigating approaches for collaborative, interactive, tangibles, and multitouch-engaged visualizations of genomic and related scientific datasets. These exercises led to several envisionments of tangible interfaces that employ active tokens and interactive surfaces to facilitate colocated and distributed engagement with large datasets. We describe some of the motivation and background for these envisioned interfaces; consider key aspects linking and distinguishing the designs; and relate these to the present and near-future state of the art for tangible and multitouch engagement with pervasive displays toward collaborative science.
In his vision of "calm technology", Weiser thought of people being surrounded by devices and displays that only come to the user's attention when needed. Non-light emitting electrochromic (EC) displays are one approach to conveying information in a calm and unobtrusive way. The dynamic graphical segment based EC displays are extremely low power, require no special driving electronics, and are not limited to rectangular form factors. In our demo, we present four prototypes exploring the design space for EC displays in different application domains for information presentation and decorative aesthetics.
This paper is focused on the design of a tangible interface to be installed in a public space for improving children's awareness of climate change and permitting them to understand the relation between CO2 and other environmental variables. The interface was developed in the context of an EU project targeted at re-populating the flora of selected sea shores of Northeast Italy and measuring the results of this work - in terms of CO2 concentration - using a network of sensors gathering a set of environmental parameters. A prototype of the tangible interface, which allows young citizens to access the collected data and understand the relations between them, was implemented and experimented with a class of children of the Primary School, in order to understand its benefits in terms of engagement and learning.
The pervasiveness of public displays is prompting an increased need for "fresh" content to be shown, that is highly engaging and useful to passerbys. As such, live or time-sensitive content is often shown in conjunction with "traditional" static content, which creates scheduling challenges. In this work, we propose a utility-based framework and a novel scheduling algorithm for handling live and non-live content on public displays. We also experimentally evaluate our proposed algorithm against a number of alternatives under a variety of workloads.
