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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
