Mobile HCI

The  aim  of  this  study  is  to  explore  how  bringing  art  to  life  using  Augmented  Reality  (AR)  technology  can affect  viewer  engagement  and  interest  compared  to  the  viewing  of  traditional  static  artwork.  To measure these  properties  this  study  uses  a  combination  of  surveys:  The  User  Engagement  Scale  (UES)  and  a  slightly modified  version  of  the  Museum  Experience  Scale  (MES).  The  results  from  both  questionnaires  were aggregated to obtain a more accurate measurement of engagement, as the UES questionnaire is specifically focused  on  interactive  systems  while  the  MES  is  focused  on  an  overall  view  of  an  exhibit.  Using  both questionnaires a more accurate measurement of “engagement” can be reached for the purposes of this study.

In a world more and more competitive, where the requirements and demands from technology-aware users grow as the supply is increased, telecom operators face great challenges to be able to deliver their products. In order to achieve this, enterprises are growing awareness of the fact that evaluating the product's internal and external quality is not enough anymore. The user experience and the quality in-use of a product are equally important, if not more. This paper describes a framework for the measure and evaluation of the user experience based on the standard ISO/IEC 9126-4. The evaluation is based on four main aspects: effectiveness, productivity, safety and satisfaction. The aim of this paper is to prove that the evaluation of the quality in use of mobile services can be significantly sped up by the automation of its capture and analysis processes.

Audition and vision are the two most common senses used by several types of industries as bridge for interaction with the users. And even when skin is one of the largest organs in human body, the sense of touch remains underutilized.
Several limbs of human body are constantly in touch with technological interfaces, especially the hands, which are mostly employed to grasp devices such as mobile phones or tablets. Nowadays, things like the way your smart phone feels in your hand or the content you are able to reproduce and receive from it makes the combinations of hardware and software matters because those are important considerations when buying a device.
Many of the existing devices' back are flat surfaces, usually unused, which could be improved by adding small actuators that convey an underappreciated but worthy type of information: haptic information.
Furthermore, if the broadcasting haptic contents could be easily transmitted through any communication network such as the Internet, for some scenarios like streaming contents, may help to increase the appeal of such immersing multimedia contents to be experienced through mobile devices.
To tackle the former situations, this project takes advantage of the sense of touch by providing users with synthetized haptic audio visual contents through a modified mobile device that integrate ultrasonic actuators that delivers tactile feedback in user’s hand.

Smartwatches now allow information to be conveniently accessed directly from the user’s wrist. However, the smartwatches currently available in the market offer a limited number of applications. In this paper, we propose a new interaction technique named Harmonious Haptics, which provides users with enhanced tactile sensations by utilizing smartwatches as additional tactile displays for smartphones. When combined with typical mobile devices, our technique enables the design of a wide variety of tactile stimuli. To illustrate the potential of our approach, we developed a set of example applications that provide users with rich tactile feedback such as feeling textures in a graphical user interface, transferring a file between the tablet and the smartwatch device, and controlling UI components.

Audio-based mobile technology is opening up a range of new interactive possibilities. This paper brings some of those possibilities to light by offering a range of perspectives based in this area. It is not only the technical systems that are developing, but novel approaches to the design and understanding of audio-based mobile systems are evolving to offer new perspectives on interaction and design and support such systems to be applied in areas, such as the humanities.

The understanding of characteristics of gestures, such as ergonomic, cognitive and social aspects could potentially contribute to an interface design mediated by hand gestures. In this research, a questionnaire model is implemented to suggest some guidelines about the use and gestures of MYO armband in a map application. The user-feedback and observations found during our testing have led us to offer some practical insights to designers and developers on how the prototype of gesture applications on MYO can be extended.

In recent years, the vision-based innovation of hand motion acknowledgment is a significant piece of human computer interaction (HCI).In the last decades; keyboard and mouse play a significant role in human-computer interaction. However, owing to the rapid development of hardware and software, new types of HCI methods have been required. In particular technologies, such as speech recognition and gesture recognition receive great attention in the field of HCI. Hand gesture recognition is very significant for human-computer interaction. On survey many models were used to recognize hand gestures with different custom images from various datasets captured by camera. One of the approaches that highly used in image feature extraction is Convolution neural network (CNN). In this work, we present a novel real-time method for hand gesture recognition. In our framework, the hand gesture is detected from the trained dataset of images. Then, the palm and fingers are segmented so as to detect and recognize the fingers. Finally, a rule classifier is applied to predict the labels of hand gestures. The experiments on the data set of 2569 images show that our method performs well and is highly efficient. Finally we have shown the comparison among the CNN with Softmax and KNN classifier on the images which leads accurate result.

This handbook is the result of an exploratory study that tries to connect rhetoric and user experience (UX). Here, the user interface (UI) becomes the middle point through which rhetorical figures can be applied to influence the user experience.

Based on the "Rhetorical Handbook" by Hanno Ehses and Ellen Lupton (1988).

We live surrounded by computing devices, but applications are mostly confined to run on a single device. It should be possible to make better use of the multiple devices around us by coming up with ways of integrating and combining them, while leveraging the specific strengths of some devices and minimizing the individual weaknesses of others. We want to explore the possibility of building applications that have their user interface seamlessly distributed across co-located devices. We created the YanuX Framework to provide the guidelines and tools needed by developers to build those applications. This paper presents the framework and its architecture, which is outlined along with the description of its components. We end by presenting an early evaluation of YanuX and by discussing the status of our work along with directions for further research.

Recently, museums and historic sites have begun reaching out beyond their traditional audience groups, using more innovative digital display technology to find and attract a new audience. Virtual, mixed, and augmented reality technologies are becoming more ubiquitous in our society and "virtual history" exhibits are starting to be available to the public. The authors have undertaken multiple experiments at a historic fort in upstate New York, evaluating digital display technology used by site visitors. The paper also contains a discussion of the potential benefits and problems of designing interactive virtual museum/heritage displays, based on standard usability guidelines.

There is a growing interest in chatbots, which are machine agents serving as natural language user interfaces for data and service providers. However, no studies have empirically investigated people's motivations for using chatbots. In this study, an online questionnaire asked chatbot users (N = 146, aged 16–55 years) from the US to report their reasons for using chatbots. The study identifies key motivational factors driving chatbot use. The most frequently reported moti-vational factor is " productivity " ; chatbots help users to obtain timely and efficient assistance or information. Chatbot users also reported motivations pertaining to entertainment, social and relational factors, and curiosity about what they view as a novel phenomenon. The findings are discussed in terms of the uses and gratifications theory, and they provide insight into why people choose to interact with automated agents online. The findings can help developers facilitate better hu-man–chatbot interaction experiences in the future. Possible design guidelines are suggested, reflecting different chatbot user motivations.

This paper discusses and presents a new prototype design for a smartwatch user interface. The user interface was designed aiming to adhere to some of the main universal design principles and be a more usable design. The prototype user interface was then compared with a Samsung Gear S3 smartwatch user interface. The comparison was done via an experiment and a series of realistic tasks. The aspects being investigated were task times, errors and subjective user satisfaction. The data collected were statistically analysed. The overall results showed that the prototype user interface fostered faster task times, fewer errors and more user satisfaction.

Considerable scholarly discussion has been given to the idea that we are moving toward a state of “posthumanism.” This essay examines some possible implications of a posthuman existence, specifically as it relates to that most basic of human needs—sexuality. I explore the spiritual aspects of sexuality to see what is lost and what is gained in technologically mediated forms of sexuality. To that end, I consider the interplay between sexual behavior and our conceptions of the sacred, how technologies are changing our views of—and realities concerning—our bodies, and the potential for a sacred posthuman sexuality.

A potential revolution is happening in front of our eyes. For decades, researchers and practitioners in human-computer interaction (HCI) have been improving their skills in designing for graphical user interfaces. Now things may take an unexpected turn—toward natural language user interfaces, in which interaction with digital systems happens not through scrolling, swiping, or button clicks, but rather through strings of text in natural language. This is particularly visible in recent developments in chatbots, that is, machine agents serving as natural language user interfaces to data and service providers [1], typically in the context of messaging applications. Need a reminder to pick up some flowers for your husband on the way home? Ask Jarvis the chatbot to remind you. Wonder if you should bring an umbrella to that meeting in Stockholm? Send Poncho the artificial weather cat a message and ask. If technology giants like Google, Facebook, and Microsoft are right, we will be moving our digital interaction from websites and apps with graphical user interfaces to messaging platforms such as Messenger and Allo. If this happens, huge challenges and opportunities await in the field of HCI.

With the spread of mobile games targeting preschoolers there is an increased need for the creation of high-quality, research-based content for this age group. But how can "quality" be defined here? To answer this question, an extensive review of literature and available rating systems was needed which resulted in a detailed set of attributes which constitute a fun, usable, beneficial and, above all, successful mobile learning game targeting preschoolers. The resulting framework (Pre-MEGa) is presented in this paper with the aim of facilitating the process of translating research into concrete, measurable characteristics for designing and evaluating this type of software.

Media technology—from mass media to social media and from video gaming to computer-mediated communication—plays an increasingly central role in people’s lives. Due to exponential increases in computing power, people now carry incredibly powerful computers—their smartphones—everywhere they go. This ever-greater access to media technology is generating an ever-greater conflict between media activities and the unmediated activities critical for psychological well-being—from our face-to-face conversations and family time to our down time and work lives. What are the costs and benefits of people’s modern media technology use for psychological well-being? Using a complementarity-interference (CI) framework, I review research to illuminate key psychological processes (i.e., mediators) and conditions (i.e., moderators) of the relationship between media technology and psychological well-being. Based on the existing evidence, I propose an initial theoretical CI model of the effects of media technology on psychological well-being. I use this CI model to outline important directions for future research, providing guidelines for an integrated, theoretically informed research on media technology.

Designers and developers are naïve about the ways impoverished people in rural Africa innovate new uses of mobile technology to circumvent access difficulties. Here, we report on the local appropriation of an USSD ‘Callback’ service in a rural community in South Africa’s Eastern Cape which enables people to send free text messages and includes strategies that respond to severe constraints on message length and local communication protocols. This report shows that a participative approach, in which community members co-generate methods and interpret data, elicits major and formerly unreported findings. We describe the results of two sets of interviews about the use of cell-phones and Callback locally and the implications of this use for designing and realizing a media-sharing system. Our findings indicate that the community needs: a system to charge phones and share media without consuming airtime; and, functionality for the 70-80% of people who do not own phones or high-end phones. Use of Callback suggests people will manage a system to create, store and share content at a local ‘station’ but notify others about content using separate networks. Callback-use reveals priorities that shape: the meaning of usability and utility locally; the ways people manage sequences of communication; and, the ‘rules’ that enable people to use Callback appropriately for multiple purposes and make sense of Callbacks despite ambiguity. These priorities inform introducing a prototype system and contribute to exploring the communication patterns that might subsequently evolve.

This paper describes our research on feedback mechanisms of wearables for supporting indoor landmark identification in the context of blind pedestrians’ mobility. It contributes with a promising alternative to audible patterns, which are consistently related to the 'masking phenomenon'. It also contributes with many lessons and insights that could benefit the designer of wearables for blind users. We started from an observational study followed by co-creation workshops with designers and potential users. The resulting prototypes were used in two Case Studies. The first study investigated the occurrence of 'masking', a problem caused by technology that affects negatively the sensorial perception of the wearer. The second study investigated the usefulness of the wearables for the identification of landmarks. The wearable succeeded in both tests for the particular context in which it was used.

Overview of ongoing research in the CISA group (WISE research lab) at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. The group is investigating cross-media information spaces and architectures, interactive paper and augmented reality solutions as well as multimodal and multi-touch interaction frameworks. Thereby, we are doing research on new document formats for representing information across different types of media as well as fluid user interfaces for interacting with the resulting cross-media information spaces. A significant part of our research is based on applying and extending the resource-selector-link (RSL) hypermedia metamodel.

More information: https://beatsigner.com/cross-media-information-spaces-and-architectures.html

The question of how and why people adopt technologies is an area that has received great scrutiny, but less attention is given to those who willingly choose to avoid particular technologies. This article considers current models of technology adoption and explores how technology influences us as a society and individually, paying special attention to how large-scale shifts in technological change come to bear on individuals who choose not to adopt specific technologies. By combining scholarship in the information sciences with observations from media ecology theorists, this article proposes a more nuanced view of technology adoption and resistance.

This thesis concerns the making and performing of music with new digital musical instruments (DMIs) designed for ensemble performance. While computer music has advanced to the point where a huge variety of digital instruments are common in educational, recreational, and professional music-making, these instruments rarely seek to enhance the ensemble context in which they are used. Interaction models that map individual gestures to sound have been previously studied, but the interactions of ensembles within these models are not well understood. In this research, new ensemble-focussed instruments have been designed and deployed in an ongoing artistic practice. These instruments have also been evaluated to find out whether, and if so how, they affect the ensembles and music that is made with them.

Throughout this thesis, six ensemble-focussed DMIs are introduced for mobile touch-screen computers. A series of improvised rehearsals and performances leads to the identification of a vocabulary of continuous performative touch-gestures and a system for tracking these collaborative performances in real time using tools from machine learning. The tracking system is posed as an intelligent agent that can continually analyse the gestural states of performers, and trigger a response in the performers' user interfaces at appropriate moments. The hypothesis is that the agent interaction and UI response can enhance improvised performances, allowing performers to better explore creative interactions with each other, produce better music, and have a more enjoyable experience.

Two formal studies are described where participants rate their perceptions of improvised performances with a variety of designs for agent-app interaction. The first, with three expert performers, informed refinements for a set of apps. The most successful interface was redesigned and investigated further in a second study with 16 non-expert participants. In the final interface, each performer freely improvised with a limited number of notes; at moments of peak gestural change, the agent presented users with the opportunity to try different notes. This interface is shown to produce performances that are longer, as well as demonstrate improved perceptions of musical structure, group interaction, enjoyment and overall quality.

Overall, this research examined ensemble DMI performance in unprecedented scope and detail, with more than 150 interaction sessions recorded. Informed by the results of lab and field studies using quantitative and qualitative methods, four generations of ensemble-focussed interface have been developed and refined. The results of the most recent studies assure us that the intelligent agent interaction does enhance improvised performances.

Interactive non-fiction uses the affordances of emerging media to educate and persuade audiences. Practitioners of the form aim to create knowledge, and then to persuade others to act upon this constructed knowledge. However, the historical propensity of practitioners to use emerging media has resulted in uneven access and literacy. Privileged communities and groups have access to the technology and get to tell stories first. Communities without access to these media are slow to gain literacy and are unable to express themselves in an emergent digital culture fully. Compared to their privileged peers, these groups are unable to use the rhetorical affordances of these emerging media for their ends. This inequity puts them at a distinct disadvantage. Community workshops for interactive non-fiction can be established to democratize this didactic use of emerging media. These workshops are both pedagogical and a site for social action. To put this theory into practice, I developed a workshop based on historical cases of practitioners using emerging media to create non-fiction with communities as a form of social action. The emerging media chosen for my workshop was mixed reality. The workshop was part of a devised theater class on the campus of the Georgia Institute of Technology. Students gained media literacy through participating in the development of a mobile app that uses mixed reality, and by using that app to create knowledge about safety on campus through performance activities. The knowledge they created came from the students’ personal stories and documentary material. Combining the workshop tactics and the app, students were able to create rhetorically effective and didactic scenes. The ability to use physical space as a canvas to create a digital-visual-spatial argument about how an event should be represented was impactful. Particularly effective was a shared gaze that enabled all of the users to see and create in a shared mixed reality. Evaluation of the workshop showed that students believed that they were able to create compelling mixed reality scenes about their community through the app and that the scenes they created could encourage social action.

A prerequisite for implementing collaborative filtering recommender systems is the availability of users' preferences data. This data, typically in the form of ratings, is exploited to learn the tastes of the users and to serve them with personalized recommendations. However, there may be a lack of preference data, especially at the initial stage of the operations of a recommender system, i.e., in the Cold Start phase. In particular, when a new user has not yet rated any item, the system would be incapable of generating relevant recommendations for this user. Or, when a new item is added to the system catalogue and no user has rated it, the system cannot recommend this item to any user. This chapter discusses the cold start problem and provides a comprehensive description of techniques that have been proposed to address this problem. It surveys algorithmic solutions and provides a summary of their performance comparison. Moreover, it lists publicly available resources (e.g., libraries and datasets) and offers a set of practical guidelines that can be adopted by researchers and practitioners.

In recent years, public engagement is increasingly viewed as more than an 'add-itional extra' in academia. In the UK, it is becoming more common for research projects to embrace public engagement with the belief that it informs research, enhances teaching and learning, and increases research impact on society. Therefore, it is becoming increasingly important to consider ways of incorporating public engagement activities into digital humanities research. This article discusses public engagement and digital humanities in practice, highlighting how museums are utilizing digital technology to engage the public. This article describes the development and presents the results of a case study: The QRator project, an application for digital interpretation in the museum and cultural heritage sector. The QRator project took an innovative, multidisciplinary approach to creating new ways for museum visitors to engage with museum objects and discussions. The objective was to understand how digital technologies, such as interactive labels and smartphones, create new ways for users to engage with museum objects; investigate the value and constraints of digital sources and

In this paper, we explore people's perceptions and usage of social media during the COVID-19 pandemic, and how it had changed compared to the pre-pandemic times. As salient findings, we report increased activity in social media, which followed both from the increased opportunity to spend time in social media, the need to be socially connected, and the motivation to follow pandemic related updates. The perceived emerging content visible in social media postings were face masks, home and outdoors activities, remote events, and different challenges. Social media also made people aware of the divided opinions related to the pandemic, and could lead to more careful self-censoring of own postings. Our study is based on interviews of 29 and online survey of 172 people. CCS CONCEPTS • Human-centered computing → Empirical studies in collaborative and social computing.

A serious game can be entertaining and enjoyable, but it is designed to facilitate the acquisition of skills and knowledge performance in the workplace, classroom, or therapeutic context. Claims of improvement can be validated through assessments of successful, measurable practice beyond the game experience, the targeted context of the workplace, classroom, or clinical using the same tools as multiple traits and
multiple measure (MTMM) models. This chapter provides a post-mortem describing the development of the initial design and development of a measurable model to inform the design requirements for validation for a serious game. In this chapter, the reader will gain insight into the implementation of the lean process, design thinking, and field observations for generative research. This data informs the assessments and measurement of performance, validated through the MTMM model criteria for requirements. The emphasis examines the role of research insights for onboarding and professional development of newly hired certified nursing assistants in a longterm care facility.