2019 11th International Conference on Virtual Worlds and Games for Serious Applications (VS-Games)
The aim of the paper was to explore a new approach for flight simulation in virtual reality and t... more The aim of the paper was to explore a new approach for flight simulation in virtual reality and to study user's perception of virtual avatar embodiment. The exploratory research started with (i) the perception of wings on the body, and the natural movement that people do when flying. The results were used to (ii) create a model and a virtual environment in order to explore the extent of the virtual presence and virtual body ownership of the users. To get appropriate user feedback a questionnaire with 76 international participants was used. The results indicated that 78.6 % imagine having wings on their shoulders and on their back. In addition to that, 57.3 % move their arms as intuitive action to fly. Based on these results the model has to follow the flapping flight simulation in a way that wings would be attached to the shoulder. An angelic avatar was designed and a game-based story was used to justify the connection of moving hands and having wings on the shoulder. This provides an insight into the perception of wings and action of flying as felt by the user. The last experiment used questionnaires to assess the extent of immersion and presence of the users in the virtual environment. The results indicate that such a setting provides an immersive effect for flying in virtual reality.
a series of events targeting advanced system and application design paradigms driven by adaptiven... more a series of events targeting advanced system and application design paradigms driven by adaptiveness and self-adaptiveness. With the current tendencies in developing and deploying complex systems, and under the continuous changes of system and application requirements, adaptation is a key feature. Speed and scalability of changes require self-adaptation for special cases. How to build systems to be easily adaptive and self-adaptive, what constraints and what mechanisms must be used, and how to evaluate a stable state in such systems are challenging duties. Context-aware and user-aware are major situations where environment and user feedback is considered for further adaptation. The conference had the following tracks: Self-adaptation Adaptive applications Adaptivity in robot systems Fundamentals and design of adaptive systems Similar to the previous edition, this event attracted excellent contributions and active participation from all over the world. We were very pleased to...
Nowadays, most of the economic activities and business models are driven by the unprecedented evo... more Nowadays, most of the economic activities and business models are driven by the unprecedented evolution of theories and technologies. The impregnation of these achievements into our society is present everywhere, and it is only question of user education and business models optimization towards a digital society. Progress in cognitive science, knowledge acquisition, representation, and processing helped to deal with imprecise, uncertain or incomplete information. Management of geographical and temporal information becomes a challenge, in terms of volume, speed, semantic, decision, and delivery. Information technologies allow optimization in searching an interpreting data, yet special constraints imposed by the digital society require on-demand, ethics, and legal aspects, as well as user privacy and safety. The event was very competitive in its selection process and very well perceived by the international scientific and industrial communities. As such, it is attracting excellent con...
The quantified self-paradigm is well established. Its main purpose is to use numbers from sensors... more The quantified self-paradigm is well established. Its main purpose is to use numbers from sensors to derive self-knowledge. The massive availability of persuasive technology to monitor physiological parameters of humans made the paradigm available to a tremendous number of people. A multitude of different hard- and software platforms are available at the market. They all have different properties at different levels of quality. All in common is their promise to provide accurate and precise data about the humans’ physiological condition and performed activities. Basically, they all provide a tool to make people aware of formerly hidden, non-observable, body signals. The gained awareness can then be used by people to e.g. improve their health or fitness level. In this work, we emphasize the perception of the gathered sensory data by the people. We focus on the question of how the trustworthiness of the recorded and presented data is perceived by people. As a fact, non-credible data ca...
The conscious, efficient, and economical consump- tion of energy is being identified recently as ... more The conscious, efficient, and economical consump- tion of energy is being identified recently as crucial topic for industry, politics, and research. Limited earth resources that are still used for the majority of energy production head towards increasing energy prices and stress world climate and the budget of people. We present the PowerIT System that utilizes smart gadgets to achieve a more efficient and economical use of the available energy. By providing instant feedback of the current energy consumption in households by leveraging power metering technology and therefore raising awareness about the economics of the own energy usage, this work aims at reducing the energy consumption of people in their homes. The real-time energy consumption is captured, whereas the power signatures of electrical devices measured by power metering systems are the input modality for the system. This data is provided in real time as visual feedback to the residents using today's available smart ...
The human body is one of the most complex biological organisms on our planet. A multitude of para... more The human body is one of the most complex biological organisms on our planet. A multitude of parallel, interleaving and sometimes opposing physiological and psychological processes can happen without, as a human being, be conscious about them. Biofeedback is a well-established method in clinical treatment providing humans awareness of the hidden signals their body is emitting and control over these signals under a variety of differently perceived situations. The epoch of smart wearables enables people to wear the necessary sensors and to view the abstracted visualizations on their wrist. In putting the formally stationary and clinical approach into everyday life, we see the possibility of a more effective treatment during the daily routines of people and therefore a shorter and more effective therapy phase. This work presents the design and implementation of a fully mobile biofeedback system utilizing a smartwatch enabling people to do personalized bio feedback training while being ...
Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2021
Drone assisted navigation aids for supporting walking activities of visually impaired have been e... more Drone assisted navigation aids for supporting walking activities of visually impaired have been established in related work but fine-point object grasping tasks and the object localization in unknown environments still presents an open and complex challenge. We present a drone-based interface that provides fine-grain haptic feedback and thus physically guides them in hand-object localization tasks in unknown surroundings. Our research is built around community groups of blind or visually impaired (BVI) people, which provide in-depth insights during the development process and serve later as study participants. A pilot study infers users’ sensibility to applied guiding stimuli forces and the different human-drone tether interfacing possibilities. In a comparative follow-up study, we show that our drone-based approach achieves greater accuracy compared to a current audio-based hand guiding system and delivers overall a more intuitive and relatable fine-point guiding experience.
Being able to fly is still a dream. Till today, it is only possible with heavy use of technology.... more Being able to fly is still a dream. Till today, it is only possible with heavy use of technology. Video games incorporated flying as a fancy way of movement inspired by mythical creatures, gods, and fantasies. In virtual reality (VR), with its deep immersion, the avatar control, especially for flying, is still performed by physical controllers that do not feel like a natural extension, thus, hindering the full immersion. To overcome this limitation, this work did an exploratory study on, first, the perception of wings as a natural body extension and, second, the natural movement performed by humans when flying. In a virtual environment, we studied the extent of the virtual presence and body ownership of wings. Results highlight that placing wings on the shoulders in an angelic form and controlling them by arm movements is the preferred way to extend human capabilities toward flying in nontechnologically restricted VR-Games.
International Journal of Distributed Sensor Networks, 2013
Opportunistic activity recognition as research discipline is characterized by the fact that human... more Opportunistic activity recognition as research discipline is characterized by the fact that human activities (and more generally the context) shall be recognized with sensors that are initially unknown to the system. In contrast to “traditional” applications—where sensors, their modalities, locations, and working characteristics have to be defined at design time—opportunistic systems do not rely on an initially defined and fixed sensing infrastructure. Sensors have to be utilized upon their spontaneous availability and activity recognition capabilities and dynamic sensor ensembles have to be configured at runtime with respect to maximized recognition accuracy and minimized energy consumption. This requirement contains two research challenges that this paper tackles: (i) estimating the accuracy of an ensemble without being able to compare the output in the form of recognized activity classes to a (labeled) ground truth and (ii) optimizing the accuracy/energy trade-off by applying exa...
Today’s activity and context recognition system have the drawback to use a static sensing infrast... more Today’s activity and context recognition system have the drawback to use a static sensing infrastructure that has to be defined at the design time of the system. The predefined sensing infrastructure needed to work properly, as well as the fixed recognition purpose limits the flexibility of such a system as it can’t react on changes in the sensing infrastructure nor it can address a change in its recognition purpose. In open ended dynamic, environments the sensing infrastructure can change during runtime of the system as new sensors can appear and disappear in a dynamic way. The term opportunistic sensing addresses this in selecting sensors that just happen to be available according to a stated recognition goal instead of using a predefined sensor infrastructure. Methodologies on how to state such a recognition goal to an opportunistic activity and context recognition system and how these goals can be translated into a machine readable and executable form to handle dynamic sensor setups have to be developed within the authors PhD-thesis.
The conscious, efficient, and economical consump- tion of energy is being identified recently as ... more The conscious, efficient, and economical consump- tion of energy is being identified recently as crucial topic for industry, politics, and research. Limited earth resources that are still used for the majority of energy production head towards increasing energy prices and stress world climate and the budget of people. We present the PowerIT System that utilizes smart gadgets to achieve a more efficient and economical use of the available energy. By providing instant feedback of the current energy consumption in households by leveraging power metering technology and therefore raising awareness about the economics of the own energy usage, this work aims at reducing the energy consumption of people in their homes. The real-time energy consumption is captured, whereas the power signatures of electrical devices measured by power metering systems are the input modality for the system. This data is provided in real time as visual feedback to the residents using today's available smart gadgets (e.g., smart phones, tablets, and smart watches) in order to raise awareness about the current power demands. Beside the pure monitoring and control of power consumers, the system additionally collects data about the activities of people by using smart watches. This data can be used to generate activity models resulting in activity aware power saving schemes. We argue that the awareness of people about their energy consumption can induce a behavioral change resulting in a more efficient use of energy without affecting their level of living.
2019 11th International Conference on Virtual Worlds and Games for Serious Applications (VS-Games)
The aim of the paper was to explore a new approach for flight simulation in virtual reality and t... more The aim of the paper was to explore a new approach for flight simulation in virtual reality and to study user's perception of virtual avatar embodiment. The exploratory research started with (i) the perception of wings on the body, and the natural movement that people do when flying. The results were used to (ii) create a model and a virtual environment in order to explore the extent of the virtual presence and virtual body ownership of the users. To get appropriate user feedback a questionnaire with 76 international participants was used. The results indicated that 78.6 % imagine having wings on their shoulders and on their back. In addition to that, 57.3 % move their arms as intuitive action to fly. Based on these results the model has to follow the flapping flight simulation in a way that wings would be attached to the shoulder. An angelic avatar was designed and a game-based story was used to justify the connection of moving hands and having wings on the shoulder. This provides an insight into the perception of wings and action of flying as felt by the user. The last experiment used questionnaires to assess the extent of immersion and presence of the users in the virtual environment. The results indicate that such a setting provides an immersive effect for flying in virtual reality.
a series of events targeting advanced system and application design paradigms driven by adaptiven... more a series of events targeting advanced system and application design paradigms driven by adaptiveness and self-adaptiveness. With the current tendencies in developing and deploying complex systems, and under the continuous changes of system and application requirements, adaptation is a key feature. Speed and scalability of changes require self-adaptation for special cases. How to build systems to be easily adaptive and self-adaptive, what constraints and what mechanisms must be used, and how to evaluate a stable state in such systems are challenging duties. Context-aware and user-aware are major situations where environment and user feedback is considered for further adaptation. The conference had the following tracks: Self-adaptation Adaptive applications Adaptivity in robot systems Fundamentals and design of adaptive systems Similar to the previous edition, this event attracted excellent contributions and active participation from all over the world. We were very pleased to...
Nowadays, most of the economic activities and business models are driven by the unprecedented evo... more Nowadays, most of the economic activities and business models are driven by the unprecedented evolution of theories and technologies. The impregnation of these achievements into our society is present everywhere, and it is only question of user education and business models optimization towards a digital society. Progress in cognitive science, knowledge acquisition, representation, and processing helped to deal with imprecise, uncertain or incomplete information. Management of geographical and temporal information becomes a challenge, in terms of volume, speed, semantic, decision, and delivery. Information technologies allow optimization in searching an interpreting data, yet special constraints imposed by the digital society require on-demand, ethics, and legal aspects, as well as user privacy and safety. The event was very competitive in its selection process and very well perceived by the international scientific and industrial communities. As such, it is attracting excellent con...
The quantified self-paradigm is well established. Its main purpose is to use numbers from sensors... more The quantified self-paradigm is well established. Its main purpose is to use numbers from sensors to derive self-knowledge. The massive availability of persuasive technology to monitor physiological parameters of humans made the paradigm available to a tremendous number of people. A multitude of different hard- and software platforms are available at the market. They all have different properties at different levels of quality. All in common is their promise to provide accurate and precise data about the humans’ physiological condition and performed activities. Basically, they all provide a tool to make people aware of formerly hidden, non-observable, body signals. The gained awareness can then be used by people to e.g. improve their health or fitness level. In this work, we emphasize the perception of the gathered sensory data by the people. We focus on the question of how the trustworthiness of the recorded and presented data is perceived by people. As a fact, non-credible data ca...
The conscious, efficient, and economical consump- tion of energy is being identified recently as ... more The conscious, efficient, and economical consump- tion of energy is being identified recently as crucial topic for industry, politics, and research. Limited earth resources that are still used for the majority of energy production head towards increasing energy prices and stress world climate and the budget of people. We present the PowerIT System that utilizes smart gadgets to achieve a more efficient and economical use of the available energy. By providing instant feedback of the current energy consumption in households by leveraging power metering technology and therefore raising awareness about the economics of the own energy usage, this work aims at reducing the energy consumption of people in their homes. The real-time energy consumption is captured, whereas the power signatures of electrical devices measured by power metering systems are the input modality for the system. This data is provided in real time as visual feedback to the residents using today's available smart ...
The human body is one of the most complex biological organisms on our planet. A multitude of para... more The human body is one of the most complex biological organisms on our planet. A multitude of parallel, interleaving and sometimes opposing physiological and psychological processes can happen without, as a human being, be conscious about them. Biofeedback is a well-established method in clinical treatment providing humans awareness of the hidden signals their body is emitting and control over these signals under a variety of differently perceived situations. The epoch of smart wearables enables people to wear the necessary sensors and to view the abstracted visualizations on their wrist. In putting the formally stationary and clinical approach into everyday life, we see the possibility of a more effective treatment during the daily routines of people and therefore a shorter and more effective therapy phase. This work presents the design and implementation of a fully mobile biofeedback system utilizing a smartwatch enabling people to do personalized bio feedback training while being ...
Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2021
Drone assisted navigation aids for supporting walking activities of visually impaired have been e... more Drone assisted navigation aids for supporting walking activities of visually impaired have been established in related work but fine-point object grasping tasks and the object localization in unknown environments still presents an open and complex challenge. We present a drone-based interface that provides fine-grain haptic feedback and thus physically guides them in hand-object localization tasks in unknown surroundings. Our research is built around community groups of blind or visually impaired (BVI) people, which provide in-depth insights during the development process and serve later as study participants. A pilot study infers users’ sensibility to applied guiding stimuli forces and the different human-drone tether interfacing possibilities. In a comparative follow-up study, we show that our drone-based approach achieves greater accuracy compared to a current audio-based hand guiding system and delivers overall a more intuitive and relatable fine-point guiding experience.
Being able to fly is still a dream. Till today, it is only possible with heavy use of technology.... more Being able to fly is still a dream. Till today, it is only possible with heavy use of technology. Video games incorporated flying as a fancy way of movement inspired by mythical creatures, gods, and fantasies. In virtual reality (VR), with its deep immersion, the avatar control, especially for flying, is still performed by physical controllers that do not feel like a natural extension, thus, hindering the full immersion. To overcome this limitation, this work did an exploratory study on, first, the perception of wings as a natural body extension and, second, the natural movement performed by humans when flying. In a virtual environment, we studied the extent of the virtual presence and body ownership of wings. Results highlight that placing wings on the shoulders in an angelic form and controlling them by arm movements is the preferred way to extend human capabilities toward flying in nontechnologically restricted VR-Games.
International Journal of Distributed Sensor Networks, 2013
Opportunistic activity recognition as research discipline is characterized by the fact that human... more Opportunistic activity recognition as research discipline is characterized by the fact that human activities (and more generally the context) shall be recognized with sensors that are initially unknown to the system. In contrast to “traditional” applications—where sensors, their modalities, locations, and working characteristics have to be defined at design time—opportunistic systems do not rely on an initially defined and fixed sensing infrastructure. Sensors have to be utilized upon their spontaneous availability and activity recognition capabilities and dynamic sensor ensembles have to be configured at runtime with respect to maximized recognition accuracy and minimized energy consumption. This requirement contains two research challenges that this paper tackles: (i) estimating the accuracy of an ensemble without being able to compare the output in the form of recognized activity classes to a (labeled) ground truth and (ii) optimizing the accuracy/energy trade-off by applying exa...
Today’s activity and context recognition system have the drawback to use a static sensing infrast... more Today’s activity and context recognition system have the drawback to use a static sensing infrastructure that has to be defined at the design time of the system. The predefined sensing infrastructure needed to work properly, as well as the fixed recognition purpose limits the flexibility of such a system as it can’t react on changes in the sensing infrastructure nor it can address a change in its recognition purpose. In open ended dynamic, environments the sensing infrastructure can change during runtime of the system as new sensors can appear and disappear in a dynamic way. The term opportunistic sensing addresses this in selecting sensors that just happen to be available according to a stated recognition goal instead of using a predefined sensor infrastructure. Methodologies on how to state such a recognition goal to an opportunistic activity and context recognition system and how these goals can be translated into a machine readable and executable form to handle dynamic sensor setups have to be developed within the authors PhD-thesis.
The conscious, efficient, and economical consump- tion of energy is being identified recently as ... more The conscious, efficient, and economical consump- tion of energy is being identified recently as crucial topic for industry, politics, and research. Limited earth resources that are still used for the majority of energy production head towards increasing energy prices and stress world climate and the budget of people. We present the PowerIT System that utilizes smart gadgets to achieve a more efficient and economical use of the available energy. By providing instant feedback of the current energy consumption in households by leveraging power metering technology and therefore raising awareness about the economics of the own energy usage, this work aims at reducing the energy consumption of people in their homes. The real-time energy consumption is captured, whereas the power signatures of electrical devices measured by power metering systems are the input modality for the system. This data is provided in real time as visual feedback to the residents using today's available smart gadgets (e.g., smart phones, tablets, and smart watches) in order to raise awareness about the current power demands. Beside the pure monitoring and control of power consumers, the system additionally collects data about the activities of people by using smart watches. This data can be used to generate activity models resulting in activity aware power saving schemes. We argue that the awareness of people about their energy consumption can induce a behavioral change resulting in a more efficient use of energy without affecting their level of living.
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