HCI

Understanding communication in collaborative design is helpful for development and selection of communication software and technology in design project. The aim of this article attempts to explore the differences between the influences of synchronous and asynchronous modes on collaborative design learning projects. Two experiment projects were conducted, and the participation record and the content of communication were collected. Both quantitative and content analysis methods used in order to indicate the attributions of different communication mode. Results of this study showed that there have differences in participation and communication pattern between the synchronous and asynchronous modes on collaborative learning project. It should be noted that this study is restricted to the size of sample and uncertain variables. The future research is obviously required.

This study investigated the design and evaluation of a sonification, created for an astronomer who studies exosolar accretion discs. User design methods were applied to sonify data that could allow the classification of accretion discs. The sonification was developed over three stages: a requirements gathering exercise that inquired about the astronomer’s work and the data, design and development, as well as an evaluation. Twenty datasets were sonified and analysed. The sonification effectively represented the accretion discs allowing the astronomer to commence a preliminary, comparative classification. Multiple parameter mappings provide rich auditory stimuli. Spatial mapping and movement allow for easier identification of fast changes and peaks in the data which improved the understanding of the extent of these changes.

This paper explores how to research the opportunities for emotional engagement that mobile technologies provide for the design and enactment of learning environments. In the context of mobile technologies that foster location based linking, we make the case for the centrality of in-situ real-time observational research on how emotional engagement unfolds and for the inclusion of bodily aspects of interaction. We propose that multimodal methods offer tools for observing emotion as a central facet of person-environment interaction, and provide an example of these methods put into practice for a study of emotional engagement in mobile history learning. A multimodal analysis of video data from sixteen pairs of 9-10 year olds learning about the WWII history of their local Common is used to illustrate how students’ emotional engagement was supported by their use of mobile devices through: multimodal layering and linking of stimuli; the creation of digital artefacts, and changes in pace. T...

Use of the web-enabled software iWRITE in courses across the disciplines at several Canadian universities demonstrates that implementing instructional technology can lead faculty members to reconsider and reformulate their teaching methods. iWRITE operates in course-specific sites. It supports the integration of writing into disciplinary courses by displaying examples of past student work alongside grading criteria and instructor comments. Instructors unfamiliar with learning theory that validates the use of models may initially fear student copying or distrust the adequacy of student samples as guides, but many have rethought their assignments and strengthened other methods of instruction to take advantage of this method. In co-taught courses, selecting benchmark papers and formulating grading criteria requires examination of disciplinary values and frank discussion of standards. The effort of writing clear comments on the student samples also requires explicit formulation of disciplinary assumptions about the nature of knowledge and the relationship between writing and thinking.

An important strand of research that is often neglected in the field of affective computing is that of how users respond to simulated displays of emotion. We present an overview of the few studies that have explicitly investigated this space and discuss a number of issues related to simulated emotion research. An overview of our own work in this area is then provided, along with forthcoming studies that we plan to conduct. We conclude with a number of suggestions of where future research in this space should focus.

Ubiquitous Computing promises seamless access to a wide range of applications and Internet-based services from anywhere, at anytime, and using any device. In this scenario, new challenges for the practice of software development arise: Applications and services must keep a coherent behavior, a proper appearance, and must adapt to a plenty of contextual usage requirements and hardware aspects. Especially, due to its interactive nature, the interface content of Web applications must adapt to a large diversity of devices and contexts. In order to overcome such obstacles, this work introduces an innovative methodology for content adaptation of Web 2.0 interfaces. The basis of our work is to combine static adaption — the implementation of static Web interfaces; and dynamic adaptation — the alteration, during execution time, of static interfaces so as for adapting to different contexts of use. In hybrid fashion, our methodology benefits from the advantages of both adaptation strategies — ...

The creation of new knowledge that comes from Knowledge Mode Conversion (KMC) activities improves New Product Development (NPD) activities. However, there is still limited understanding of “how” a Knowledge Mode Conversion activity varies using collaborative and conversational technologies to improve product development performance. The main contribution of this research is to establish a set of indicators that can be used as guides to help identify effective Knowledge Mode Conversion activities that can be useful for ...

Films are unquestionably a part of Cultural Heritage. Problems of current systems for accessing Cultural Heritage resources which deal with film objects include some of the following aspects: Distributed sources which store huge amounts of information; different formats of the contents ranging from traditional ones such as paper to advanced multimedia objects; and finally, and what is more crucial for the content providers, lack of systems which support currently the needs of the user such as enriched content, interaction with the information, usability, and exchange of experiences with other users. Taking into account these gaps detected by some European cities with a strong connection with the film sector, CINeSPACE a European research project aims at designing and implementing a mobile rich media collaborative information exchange platform, scalable, accessible through a wide variety of networks, and therefore, interoperable and Location-Based for the promotion of Film Heritage, going beyond the current state of the art. CINeSPACE enables users to interact with Location-Based multimedia contents while navigating a city. Audiovisual information will be delivered through a unique and portable low-cost wireless high definition near-to-the-eye display and audio phones. CINeSPACE will also comprise a small camera able to record or send what the user is "seeing". This information can be uploaded to a database through a WLAN hot spot or a 3G connection in order to create collaborative experiences with other end users. This paper presents the current status of development of the project.

Abstract. The wide availability of game based technologies and sophisticated e-Learning possibilities creates new demands and challenges on Human–Computer Interaction and Usability Engineering (HCI&UE). Solid research in HCI must support improvement in learning ability and creativity for both teachers and students. According to recent market surveys the Wii remote controller or Wiimote is currently more wide spread than standard Tablet PCs and is the most used computer input device worldwide. As a collection of many ...

In the context of Face Recognition the paper compares between Principal Component Analyses (PCA) and Independent Component Analysis (ICA). In the psychological and algorithmic literature Principal Component Analyses (PCA) and Independent Component Analyses (ICA) are the basis of numerous studies. Classical technique in statistical data analyses is called Principal Component Analyses (PCA) and technique of array processing and data analysis is called Independent Component Analysis (ICA). This paper gives the better concept how each algorithms are worked. This concept helps to advance level experiment. Besides, those method is so strong others system and algorithm. In both case, ICA performs good but not as good as PCA. For Face Recognition Principal Component Analyses basis algorithm represents intelligent suction of a random search within a short time and its can detect to solve the problem.

We studied the effects of varying the fidelity and automation levels of a Ubicomp application prototype. Our results show that the interactive prototype captured the same usability issues that the paper prototype studies did and more. We found that paper prototyping is insufficient for supporting unique Ubicomp requirements, such as scalability, but a prototype with higher fidelity and automation levels can enhance the quality of interaction data available for evaluation.

This paper describes the use of adaptation patterns in the task of formulating standards for adaptive educational hypermedia (AEH) systems that is currently under investigation by the EU ADAPT project. Within this project, design dimensions for high granularity patterns have been established. In this paper we focus on detailing lower granularity adaptive patterns based upon learning styles. Several patterns from existing AEH system case studies are identified and classified according to an extended learning style "onion" model. This model forms the basis of a learning style taxonomy, introduced here, whose components determine adaptation patterns for AEH. These patterns are of importance both for authoring, as well as for interfacing between adaptive hypermedia systems. From an authoring point of view, these patterns may be used to establish a fine-grain approach to instructional strategies that can be implemented in AEH systems, as a response to a particular learning style. The implementation of this adaptation pattern taxonomy is discussed, both generally and in detail.

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.

There is evidence that recent developments in Augmented Reality (AR) technology has the potential to be applied as pervasive media on multiple devices in different ways and contexts, especially with low-cost devices including Mobile Augmented Reality (MAR) applications on smart phones or Pocket-PCs. In this paper we present a framework in order to combine the pervasive e-education concept with augmented reality content for e-training. We analyze current research, discuss some examples from ultralight / light sport aircraft maintenance and show how to apply this framework generically. We present a learning engine to deliver this special type of content and provide a further outlook of future research. A user-centered approach must ensure that the developments can stimulate motivation and enhance performance of the end users in different training sessions. The main benefit is, that the end users are enabled to better perceive complex, technical facts, systems and components.

This study assessed the efficacy of FaceSay, a computer-based social skills training program for children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). This randomized controlled study (N = 49) indicates that providing children with low-functioning autism (LFA) and high functioning autism (HFA) opportunities to practice attending to eye gaze, discriminating facial expressions and recognizing faces and emotions in FaceSay's structured environment with interactive, realistic avatar assistants improved their social skills abilities. The children with LFA demonstrated improvements in two areas of the intervention: emotion recognition and social interactions. The children with HFA demonstrated improvements in all three areas: facial recognition, emotion recognition, and social interactions. These findings, particularly the measured improvements to social interactions in a natural environment, are encouraging.

Realistic renderings contain a large amount of information about the spatial, geometric and material properties of prospective buildings that can directly affect design decisions, yet these images are most of the time used as after-the-fact representational visualizations. In this paper we propose a model to make the realistic images a very part of the design and decision making process. If we are to utilize realistic images during earlier decision making stages of the design processes, then we should develop experiential workflows in which we can create and interact with immersive realistic images real-time. We take several steps towards establishing an interactive rendering-animating-editing workflow that enables the designers to work with real-time rendered stereoscopic animations. In our system, we use realism to create an immersive exploration environment, as opposed to underutilizing it to represent a static moment.

HCI projects are increasingly evaluating technologies in the wild, which typically involves working with communities over extended periods, often with the goal of effecting sustainable change. However, there are few descriptions of projects that have been successful in the long-term. In this paper we investigate what factors are important for develop- ing long lasting community ICT interventions. We do this by analysing a successful action research project and provide five recommendations for facilitating sustained community engagement. CrowdMemo aimed to preserve local heritage in a town in rural Argentina and the project was set up so that it could be continued by the community once researchers had left. Participants created videos about personal memories of the town and over 600 people attended the premiere where they were first screened. The impact has not just been short-term and there has been sustained engagement with the project by stakeholders in the town and wider region: the lo- cal school integrated digital storytelling into its curriculum; the approach has been adopted by two nearby towns; and the project has influenced regional government educational policy.

In order to improve human computer interaction (HCI) for people with special needs, this paper presents an alternative form of interaction, which uses the iPad's front camera and eye/head tracking technology. With this functional nature/capability operating in the background, the user can control already developed or new applications for the iPad by moving their eyes and/or head. There are many techniques, which are currently used to detect facial features, such as eyes or even the face itself. Open source bookstores exist for such purpose, such as OpenCV, which enable very reliable and accurate detection algorithms to be applied, such as Haar Cascade using very high-level programming. All processing is undertaken in real time, and it is therefore important to pay close attention to the use of limited resources (processing capacity) of devices, such as the iPad. The system was validated in tests involving 22 users of different ages and characteristics (people with dark and light-colored eyes and with/without glasses). These tests are performed to assess user/device interaction and to ascertain whether it works properly. The system obtained an accuracy of between 60% and 100% in the three test exercises taken into consideration. The results showed that the Haar Cascade had a significant effect by detecting faces in 100% of cases, unlike eyes and the pupil where interference (light and shade) evidenced less effectiveness. In addition to ascertaining the effectiveness of the system via these exercises, the demo application has also helped to show that user constraints need not affect the enjoyment and use of a particular type of technology. In

The International Standards Organization definition of usability as documented in ISO 9241-11 is for " …specified users… specified goals… particular environments " which implies that usability varies based on those three factors. The System Usability Scale (SUS) is a ten item questionnaire developed to evaluate systems' usability. Consequently, SUS became the scale of choice for measuring usability, broadly applied to various systems including websites. Contemporary websites are visited by a wide range of users for different reasons and from all kinds of environments-can SUS still effectively measure their usability? For a professional organization such as IxDA whose focus is user interface design a heuristic evaluation aided by the Expert Review Checkpoints provides detailed feedback on its website's compliance with contemporary design standards that affect usability.

Much effort has been expended on developing applications to manage business and personal time. However, very little has been spent on information technology to manage the modern family's busy, complex life. We have performed a photo-diary of family bulletin boards in order to understand how this common coordination tool is used. In this paper, we report on the results of the photo diaries and discuss their implication for design of an electronic family bulletin board.

Recently, affective computing findings demonstrated that emotion processing and recognition is important in improving the quality of human computer interaction (HCI). In the present study, new data for a robust discrimination of three emotional states (negative, neutral and positive) employing twochannel facial electromyography (EMG) over zygomaticus major and corrugator supercilii will be presented. The facial EMG activities evoked upon viewing a standard set of pictures selected from the International Affective Picture System (IAPS) and additional self selected pictures revealed that positive pictures led to increased facial EMG activities over zygomaticus major (F (2, 471) = 4.23, p < 0.05), whereas negative pictures elicited greater facial EMG activities over corrugator supercilii (F (2, 476) = 3.06, p < 0.05). In addition, the correlation between facial EMG activities over these two sites and participants' ratings of stimuli pictures in dimension of valence measured by Self-Assessment Manikin (SAM) was significant (r = -0.63, p < 0.001, corrugator supercilii, r = 0.51, p < 0.05, zygomaticus major, respectively) . Our results suggest that emotion inducing pictures elicit the intended emotions and that corrugator and zygomaticus EMG can effectively and reliably differentiate negative and positive emotions, respectively.

Wheelchair users can find accessing digital content on large multi-touch tables particularly difficult and frustrating due to their limited reach. We present work in progress that is exploring the potential of enhancing touch table accessibility through the use of mid-air gesturing technology. An overview of an experimental prototype is provided along with the key findings from an evaluation conducted with fifteen wheelchair users at a public library and heritage centre.

In developing a website, it is essential to test its design. For example, users may look at a certain image or text paragraph without paying attention to what designers may consider being the most essential information or the users may erroneously interpret its design and get confused. If users don’t interact with the website as designers anticipate, the design of website becomes dubious. In our eye-tracking study we invited 11 undergraduate students from an introductory chemistry course to test the usability of newly developed website on climate change. The results show that animated features draw more attention regardless of strength of relationship to content. Based on quantitative and qualitative data, we present possible recommendations how to improve the design of the website and how to enhance user’s overall experience.

This study investigates the extent to which phonological characteristics of Farsi speakers of English interfere with their intelligibility when they interact with L1 Australian English speakers. Many students who are learning English within Iran, as well as Farsi speakers of English abroad, have difficulties in pronunciation that have an effect on their intelligibility when they interact with L1 English speakers. This study examines L1 Australian English speakers' perceptions of the effect of pronunciation on intelligibility of Farsi speakers of English. A sample of four Farsi speakers of English and five L1 Australian English speakers participated in this research. The research method included an unstructured interview, twenty sentences that contained specific phonemes, and ten sentences including consonant clusters. The Farsi speakers of English were invited to participate in the process by attending an interview and reading aloud the two sets of sentences whilst being tape recorded. Then, the L1 Australian English speakers were invited to listen to the tape recording of the Farsi speakers of English and answer the three sets of questions accordingly. The findings demonstrated that the phonemes and consonant clusters which do not exist in the Farsi sound system and syllable structure caused difficulties for Farsi speakers of English to a varying degree.

Approved for Public Release Distribution Unlimited NCOIC Oct 05-107-2 3 provides consistency between MNWG and other Working Groups (WGs) in the NCOIC. The MNE is the core product of the MNWG. The initial focus of the problem areas is primarily in the Communications Layer, specifically the Network and Transport layers. Interfaces to upper and lower layers are also addressed. The problem areas are the following: Network Planning and Management: In a mobile, ad hoc, environment with multiple administrative control authorities, Network Planning and Management must be responsive to topology changes, intermittent connectivity, and murky boundaries for administrative control authority, network congestion, and transition between domains. These domains may be associated with different first and second responders, government organizations, and private parties on site to address the emergency situation. Applications Interactions: This area evaluates the interactions between applications (IP Reference model Layer 5) and network transport (Layers 3-4). The study is limited to data abstractions, i.e., identification of types of information needed. Implementation details such as programming interfaces are not included. The data abstractions potentially allow the applications to better coordinate with network transport functions, (e.g. QoS, Routing, others), in responding to demands of the mobile environment. Quality of Service: IP QoS must be responsive to dynamics associated with mobility (path changes, demand, etc). In addition, mobile and/or ad hoc environments may have murky domain boundaries that need to be considered to enable satisfactory service across multiple heterogeneous networks. Information Assurance (IA): This area is responsible for ensuring that MNWG products are consistent with the NCOIC Information Assurance WG security framework in providing confidentiality, integrity, availability, non-repudiation, and authentication for mobile networks and nodes. Transport Layer Protocols: This area addresses transport (layer) session breakage resulting from network mobility. Network and Node Mobility: This area identifies the needs of 1) individual nodes moving within and between networks, subnetworks, and network infrastructure, 2) a network detaching from one part of a stable network and reattaching to another part of that network, and 3) functions associated with mobility management. Ad hoc Networks: This area addresses nodes forming a network with no core infrastructure. Routing: This area addresses layer 3 data and control planes, i.e. routing from IP upward, intra and inter domain routing, routing security, and routing performance in control and data planes (rate of topology change effects). Approved for Public Release Distribution Unlimited NCOIC Oct 05-107-2 4 Multicast: This area identifies the multicast members' needs as mobile nodes or networks traverse within the network infrastructure, including responsibility for handling branch distribution reconstruction within mobile network infrastructure. Physical and Data Link Layer Constraints: This area considers the impacts on network performance of physical and data link layers from both legacy and future systems, and suggests constraints and workarounds to compensate for those impacts, thereby improving network performance. The MNO initiates a common process for identifying open standards that address mobility needs for the ten identified problem areas and also enable net-centricity within the overall NCOIC concept. Working together with global customers and industry members, the framework is established to begin the detailed technical work of identifying candidate standards and approaches and evaluating them for recommendation as NCOIC endorsed standards for interoperable mobility solutions.

In this paper we interrogate the practices of imagining in human-computer interaction (HCI), particularly in scenario building (SBE) and persona construction. We discuss the philosophical premises of HCI imaginings in rationalism, cognitivism and phenomenology, and we propose (feminist) new materialist philosophy as an enriching perspective that helps generate a holistic, relational perspective of users, imaginaries and technologies. In the end we explore the method of figurations as a potential tool for HCI design.

Effective and efficient methodologies are essential for developing and maintaining information systems that are both secure and usable, especially in the case of Internet applications that require a combined effort from application, system, network, security, and human-computer interaction design areas. In this paper, we propose a user-centric approach towards achieving "usable security". As a case study we apply the proposed approach on the password management problem. Our work demonstrates that the "user-centric usable security" is a viable and promising future research direction.

@aegean Cultural Heritage Institutions (CHI) are increasingly aiming at enhancing their visitors' experiences in a personalised, immersive and engaging way. A personalised system for cultural heritage promotion potentially adapts, in terms of relevance, content and presentation according to the user's interests and needs. However, since a typical visit may be short and unrepeatable, the identification of user's profile must be quick and efficient, ensuring the successful respective personalisation process. Current paper discusses a methodology for cultural user personas extraction and identification. The CURE approach eliminates the requirement of explicit user input via registration or similar data acquisition methods and involves three main stages: data acquisition from the user's online and social activity, reasoning regarding persona similarity and finally data and experiences reuse from previous visits. Regarding the constructed personas, the proposed approach continuously adapts and refines the personas features from data gathered during multiple cultural experiences and accordingly creates, deletes or merges personas in case of significant deviation, poor correlation and convergence respectively.

This paper proposed a new visual tag system for enhancing realworld media interaction using handheld camera devices. This paper also described performance evaluations of the prototype, and its applications. C-Band is based on a ring with a color pattern code. A C-Band tag can provide a self-contained URL, and is flexible enough to allow various aesthetic designs for the tag's surface. Furthermore, the tag's structure is useful for building interactive techniques. Taken together, these features suggest that C-Band is an effective method to build various attractive camera-based media interactions.

This book explores how digital technology is altering the relationships between people and how the very nature of interface itself needs to be reconsidered to reflect this – how
we can make sense of each other, handle ambiguities, negotiate differences, empathise and collectively make skilled judgments in our modern society. The author presents new directions for research at the relational-transactional intersection of contrasting disciplines of arts, science and technology,and in so doing, presents philosophical and artistic questions for future research on human connectivity in our digital age.

▶ Introduces the relational interface, which questions the historical idea of the interface as a conduit of the transactional and addresses an aesthetic and ethical balance
▶ Formulates tacit engagement as an emerging concept for the study of human relations
▶ Proposes a fundamental framework of mediation for expertise and decision making in complex human systems
▶ Critiques the concept of data and what makes for the success of knowledge transfer

We analyze digital rhetoric in two computersupported collaborative settings of writing and learning, focusing on major depression: Wikipedia and Quora. We examine the procedural rhetoric of access to and interaction with information, and the textual rhetoric of individual and aggregated entries. Through their different organization of authorship, publication and reading, the two settings create divergent accounts of depression. Key points of difference include: focus on symptoms and causes vs. experiences and advice, use of lists vs. metaphors and narratives, a/temporal structure, and personal and relational knowledge.

This work is motivated by the goal of providing a non-contact means of controlling the mouse pointer on a computer system for people with motor difficulties using low-cost, widely available hardware. The required information is derived from video data captured using a web camera mounted below the computer's monitor. A colour filter is used to identify skin coloured regions. False positives are eliminated by optionally removing background regions and by applying statistical rules that reliably identify the largest skin-coloured region, which is assumed to be the user's face. The nostrils are then found using heuristic rules. The instantaneous location of the nostrils is compared with their at-rest location; any significant displacement is used to control the mouse pointer's movement. The system is able to process 18 frames per second at a resolution of 320 by 240 pixels, or 30 fps at 160 by 120 pixels using moderately powerful hardware (a 500 MHz Pentium III desktop computer).

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.

This paper targets the automatic detection of personality traits in a meeting environment by means of audio and visual features; information about the relational context is captured by means of acoustic features designed to that purpose. Two personality traits are considered: Extraversion (from the Big Five) and the Locus of Control. The classification task is applied to thin slices of behaviour, in the form of 1-minute sequences. SVM were used to test the performances of several training and testing instance setups, including a restricted set of audio features obtained through feature selection. The outcomes improve considerably over existing results, provide evidence about the feasibility of the multimodal analysis of personality, the role of social context, and pave the way to further studies addressing different features setups and/or targeting different personality traits.

The use of hand gestures provides an attractive alternative to cumbersome interface devices for human-computer interaction (HCI). In particular, visual interpretation of hand gestures can help in achieving the ease and naturalness desired for HCI. This has motivated a very active research area concerned with computer vision-based analysis and interpretation of hand gestures. We survey the literature on visual interpretation of hand gestures in the context of its role in HCI. This discussion is organized on the basis of the method used for modeling, analyzing, and recognizing gestures. Important differences in the gesture interpretation approaches arise depending on whether a 3D model of the human hand or an image appearance model of the human hand is used. 3D hand models offer a way of more elaborate modeling of hand gestures but lead to computational hurdles that have not been overcome given the real-time requirements of HCI. Appearance-based models lead to computationally efficient "purposive" approaches that work well under constrained situations but seem to lack the generality desirable for HCI. We also discuss implemented gestural systems as well as other potential applications of vision-based gesture recognition. Although the current progress is encouraging, further theoretical as well as computational advances are needed before gestures can be widely used for HCI. We discuss directions of future research in gesture recognition, including its integration with other natural modes of humancomputer interaction.

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.

El dominio del empirismo en la sociedad occidental alteró el significado antiguo de la medida. En el caso del estudio de la relación entre el ser humano y la computadora se considera de forma casi exclusiva parámetros físicos o cuantitativos de la interacción; sin embargo, existen aspectos cualitativos de la experiencia humana que se ven empobrecidos por este tipo de análisis.

D. Harris (Ed.): Engin. Psychol. and Cog. Ergonomics, HCII 2007, LNAI 4562, pp. 42–51, 2007. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007 ... Embodied Virtual Agents: An Affective and Attitudinal ... Approach of the Effects on Man-Machine Stickiness in a

Geographically distributed virtual teams are increasingly prevalent in global organizations. Despite the growing attention to virtual teams, there is limited understanding of how cross-cultural collaboration and electronic dependence in communication affect virtual workers' psychological reactions and well-being. This qualitative multi-case study aims at understanding the different causes of stress in cross-cultural collaboration. An overarching analysis across seven case studies revealed that globally distributed team members experienced job stressors such as language challenges in English, or lingua franca, misunderstandings, and conflicts due to different mindsets, communication and behavior styles, and work-leisure orientations. Without adequate skills in lingua franca, or proper cultural and local awareness of distant team sites, coping was not successful, thereby stressors lead to distress.

This paper describes three initial case studies of software use by teachers to support learners with special educational needs. In each case, the teachers were observed to be appropriating the software in ways that went beyond the intended use of the technologies. Appropriation has been previously explored as a positive process that provides benefits to users, yet these cases suggest that there may be specific benefits of appropriation for teachers in this context, and this is worthy of deeper investigation in the future.

Commercial 3D scene acquisition systems such as the Microsoft Kinect sensor can reduce the cost barrier of realizing mid-air interaction. However, since it can only sense hand position but not hand orientation robustly, current mid-air interaction methods for 3D virtual object manipulation often require contextual and mode switching to perform translation, rotation, and scaling, thus preventing natural continuous gestural interactions. A novel handle bar metaphor is proposed as an effective visual control metaphor between the user's hand gestures and the corresponding virtual object manipulation operations. It mimics a familiar situation of handling objects that are skewered with a bimanual handle bar. The use of relative 3D motion of the two hands to design the mid-air interaction allows us to provide precise controllability despite the Kinect sensor's low image resolution. A comprehensive repertoire of 3D manipulation operations is proposed to manipulate single objects, perform fast constrained rotation, and pack/align multiple objects along a line. Three user studies were devised to demonstrate the efficacy and intuitiveness of the proposed interaction techniques on different virtual manipulation scenarios.

The application of digital technologies, which is continually breaking into new spheres of use, presents a challenging development. Business environments are rapidly evolving; new markers, new market players, new types of products, new user groups. All these changes raise different issues from those previously confronted in the computer industry. As the &quot;usability issue&quot; is applied to many product areas beyond traditional HCI we were interested to find our how far state of practice companies are adapting the UCD principles commonly advocated. We were also interested to see how these principles were being applied in business areas nor usually associated with the computer industry.

As a result of the limitations of human cognitive skills, judgment, decision-making, and tactical understanding in the use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV), there is a need to redesign the current human-computer interface (HCI) for Autopilot control to improve the interaction and communication links between operators and the UAVs. This system displays the information to increase situational awareness; the operator will see everything, interpret it, make appropriate decisions, and have the ability to implement the decision. Multiple interfaces are developed using C’s Graphical User Interface (GUI) capabilities as a simulation environment. Both alternatives will combine buttons and place them in sequential order according to the steps needed to initialize UAVs and flight paths. Usability tests with participants are conducted to measure their performance based on previously determined metrics: the time it takes to train a participant on how to use the interface, the time to complete a...