Robots’ abilities to communicate with humans are often limited, missing expressive power and non-verbal communication cues. We present a concept design and a wizard-of-Oz prototype of a wearable emoji display, which aims to provide additional communication cues to communicate the robot’s intent and provide means for a more affective communication towards a human. We explore the concept of an emoji necklace with a robot dog, which has more limitations in expressing its intent compared to a humanoid robot design. The concept was evaluated in a user study with ten participants. The salient findings indicate that the robot dog’s intentions were perceived as easier to interpret with the wearable emoji display, especially when displaying clear emojis matching the robot’s movements.

This demo presents a virtual reality (VR) experience on recycling plastics. Through the interactive, immersive virtual experience, the user can become familiar with the recycling center site and sort a selection of plastic products. The playful experience was designed to refine and evaluate the design of a planned physical recycling station. The interactive prototype served two purposes: first, to encourage recycling behavior and increase familiarity with plastic recycling practices; and second, to gather feedback on the design of the recycling site to optimize user experience and recycling efficiency.

Wearable displays can be helpful in the winter outdoors, where using a mobile phone is difficult due to gloves. In this paper, we explore the concept of integrating a graphical navigator display into a skiing glove. We created a prototype that was trialed on the slopes while snowboarding. After this, we organized a focus group with snowboarders and downhill skiers to evaluate the concept and wearable display use cases in the winter mountain context. The results emphasize use cases that focus on the awareness of group members for safety, navigation, and unobtrusive and simple design.

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.

We present the design and prototype of ShadowSparrow, an ambient display utilizing lights & shadows. The concept uses illustrative bird images and other relevant visuals (e.g., dishwasher and e-mail icons) cast on the surroundings for ambient information visualizations and notifications. Our work creates an alternative channel to convey non-critical information in an unobtrusive and aesthetic way.