注目の論文一覧

When vibrations are synchronized with our actions, we experience them as material properties. This has been used to create virtual experiences like friction, counter-force, compliance, or torsion. Implementing such experiences is non-trivial, requiring high temporal resolution in sensing, high fidelity tactile output, and low latency. To make this style of haptic feedback more accessible to non-domain experts, we present Haptic Servos: self-contained haptic rendering devices which encapsulate all timing-critical elements. We characterize Haptic Servos’ real-time performance, showing the system latency is < 5 ms. We explore the subjective experiences they can evoke, highlighting that qualitatively distinct experiences can be created based on input mapping, even if stimulation parameters and algorithm remain unchanged. A workshop demonstrated that users new to Haptic Servos require approximately ten minutes to set up a basic haptic rendering system. Haptic Servos are open source, we invite others to copy and modify our design.

Virtual Reality (VR) has a noteworthy educational potential by providing immersive and collaborative environments. As an alternative but cost-effective way of delivering realistic environments in VR, using 360-degree videos in immersive VR (VR videos) received more attention. Although many studies reported positive learning experiences with VR videos, little is known about how collaborative learning performs on VR video viewing systems. In this study, we implemented two collaborative VR video viewing modes based on the way of group video control, synchronized or shared (Sync mode) and non-synchronized or individual (Non-sync mode) video control, against a conventional VR video viewing setting (Basic mode). We conducted a within-subject study (N = 54) in a lab-simulated remote learning environment. Our results show that collaborative VR video modes (Sync and Non-sync mode) improve users’ learning experiences and collaboration quality, especially with shared video control. Our findings provide directions for designing and employing collaborative VR video tools in online learning environments.

For gamers, high frame rates are important for a smooth visual display and good quality of experience (QoE). However, high frame rates alone are not enough as variations in the frame display times can degrade QoE even as the average frame rate remains high. While the impact of steady frame rates on player QoE is fairly well-studied, the effects of frame rate variation is not. This paper presents a 33-person user study that evaluates the impact of frame rate variation on users playing three different computer games. Analysis of the results shows average frame rate alone is a poor predictor of QoE, and frame rate variation has a significant impact on player QoE. While the standard deviation of frame times is promising as a general predictor for QoE, frame time standard deviation may not be accurate for all individual games. However, 95% frame rate floor -– the bottom 5% of frame rates the player experiences –- appears to be an effective predictor of both QoE overall and for the individual games tested.

While there has been rapid growth in smart home research from a technical perspective – focusing on home automation, devices, software, and protocols – few review papers examine the human-centered perspective. A human-centered focus is crucial for achieving the goals of providing natural, convenient, comfortable, friendly, and safe user experiences in the smart home. To understand key innovations in human-centered smart home research, we analyzed keyword changes over time via 19,091 papers from 2000 to 2022, then selected 55 papers from high-impact venues in the last five years, and summarized them through a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods. Our analysis revealed five research trends with unique characteristics and interdependence. Drawing on this review, we elaborate on the future of smart home design research with respect to multidisciplinary development, stakeholder involvement, and the shift of design implications.

Being a little more careful about the sound that people produce is difficult in shared houses because individuals can generate several unintended living noises and sounds. We designed Tunee to help each housemate better understand the others’ context and desired noise-level. It is an interactive speaker that allows people to share noise-level preferences through the position change of nodes. Our three-week in-field study with four groups of participants revealed that expressing noise-level preference through nodes reduced the burden of verbally delivering issues about the trivial noises of everyday life, and the intentions of the lowered preference were referred to and deemed significant. We also identified how participants figured out what behavior was acceptable for others according to each noise-level. Our findings imply considerations in designing interfaces to support coordinating behaviors and awareness of social contexts in shared spaces.

The rapid development of touchless systems has introduced many innovations in social interaction scenarios in recent years. People now can interact with touchless systems in social applications that are aimed to be used in everyday situations in the future. This accelerated development makes us ask, what will the next generation of touchless systems be like? How can we responsibly develop new touchless technologies in the future? To answer the first question, we brought together 20 experts to ideate, speculate, and evaluate possible touchless applications for social interactions. A total of 48 ideas were generated from two consecutive workshops. Then, to answer the second question, we critically analyzed those ideas through a thematic analysis using a responsible innovation (RI) framework, and identified key ethical considerations to guide developers, practitioners when designing future touchless systems. We argue that the social scenarios described, and the RI framework proposed in this paper are a useful starting point for responsibly designing the next generation of touchless systems

This paper investigates how a smartphone-controlled olfactory wearable might improve memory recall. We conducted a within-subjects experiment with 32 participants using the device and without (control). In the experimental condition, bursts of odor were released during visuo-spatial memory navigation tasks, and replayed during sleep the following night in the subjects' home. We found that compared to control, there was an improvement in memory performance when using the scent wearable in memory tasks that involved walking in a physical space. Furthermore, participants recalled more objects and translations when re-exposed to the same scent during the recall test, in addition to during sleep. These effects were statistically significant, and, in the object recall task, they also persisted for more than one week. This experiment demonstrates a potential practical application of olfactory interfaces that can interact with a user during wake as well as sleep to support memory.

We present a cross-cultural diary study with 64 transgender (trans) and non-binary adults in Mexico, the U.S., and India, to understand experiences keeping track of and managing aspects of personal health and well-being. Based on a reflexive thematic analysis of diary data, we highlight sociotechnical interactions that shape how trans and non-binary people track and manage aspects of their health and well-being. Specifically, we surface the ways in which trans and non-binary people infrastructure forms of care, by assembling together elements of informal social ecologies, formalized knowledge sources, and self-reflective media. We examine the forms of precarity that interact with care infrastructure and shape management of health and well-being, including management of gender identity transitions. We discuss the ways in which our findings extend knowledge at the intersection of technology and marginalized health needs, and conclude by arguing for the importance of a research agenda to move toward TGNB-inclusive design.

Multilingual speakers tend to interleave two or more languages when communicating. This communication strategy is called code-mixing, and it has surged with today’s ever-increasing linguistic and cultural diversity. Because of their communication style, multilinguals who use conversational agents have specific needs and expectations which are currently not being met by conversational systems. While research has been undertaken on code-mixing conversational systems, previous works have rarely focused on the code-mixing users themselves to discover their genuine needs. This work furthers our understanding of the challenges faced by code-mixing users in conversational agent interaction, unveils the key factors that users consider in code-mixing scenarios, and explores expectations that users have for future conversational agents capable of code-mixing. This study discusses the design implications of our findings and provides a guide on how to alleviate the challenges faced by multilingual users and how to improve the conversational agent user experience for multilingual users.

This paper analyses Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) literature reviews to provide a clear conceptual basis for authors, reviewers, and readers. HCI is multidisciplinary and various types of literature reviews exist, from systematic to critical reviews in the style of essays. Yet, there is insufficient consensus of what to expect of literature reviews in HCI. Thus, a shared understanding of literature reviews and clear terminology is needed to plan, evaluate, and use literature reviews, and to further improve review methodology. We analysed 189 literature reviews published at all SIGCHI conferences and ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI) up until August 2022. We report on the main dimensions of variation: (i) contribution types and topics; and (ii) structure and methodologies applied. We identify gaps and trends to inform future meta work in HCI and provide a starting point on how to move towards a more comprehensive terminology system of literature reviews in HCI.

Using biosignals through electromyography (EMG) and rendering them as feedback for hands-free interaction finally migrates to engaging virtual reality (VR) experiences for health and fitness-related applications. Previous work proposes various body locations as input sources and different output modalities for creating effective biofeedback loops. However, it is currently unknown which muscles and sensory modalities can provide optimal real-time interaction regarding the performance and perceived workload of the users. In two VR studies (N=18 and N=40) based on a Fitts' law target selection task, we explored sensor placement at different body locations and investigate auditory, tactile, and visual feedback modalities. Objective and subjective results indicate that input performance can be improved by presenting muscle tension as simultaneous tactile and visual feedback. We contribute with recommendations for registration of isometric muscle contraction at different body locations and conclude that reproducing physiological feedback through multimodal channels can assist users interacting with EMG devices.

Lifelogging is traditionally used for memory augmentation. However, recent research shows that users' trust in the completeness and accuracy of lifelogs might skew their memories. Privacy-protection alterations such as body blurring and content deletion are commonly applied to photos to circumvent capturing sensitive information. However, their impact on how users remember memories remain unclear. To this end, we conduct a white-hat memory attack and report on an iterative experiment (N=21) to compare the impact of viewing 1) unaltered lifelogs, 2) blurred lifelogs, and 3) a subset of the lifelogs after deleting private ones, on confidently remembering memories. Findings indicate that all the privacy methods impact memories' quality similarly and that users tend to change their answers in recognition more than recall scenarios. Results also show that users have high confidence in their remembered content across all privacy methods. Our work raises awareness about the mindful designing of technological interventions.

We aim to understand how people assess human likeness in navigation produced by people and artificially intelligent (AI) agents in a video game. To this end, we propose a novel AI agent with the goal of generating more human-like behavior. We collect hundreds of crowd-sourced assessments comparing the human-likeness of navigation behavior generated by our agent and baseline AI agents with human-generated behavior. Our proposed agent passes a Turing Test, while the baseline agents do not. By passing a Turing Test, we mean that human judges could not quantitatively distinguish between videos of a person and an AI agent navigating. To understand what people believe constitutes human-like navigation, we extensively analyze the justifications of these assessments. This work provides insights into the characteristics that people consider human-like in the context of goal-directed video game navigation, which is a key step for further improving human interactions with AI agents.

Getting from A to B has never been easier. Mobile navigation systems allow universal access to spatial information. However, following detailed route instructions leads to a decrease in spatial exploration behaviour and therefore a reduction of spatial knowledge acquisition. Facilitating spatial exploration has the potential to counteract this negative effect. This paper investigates how we can support people in re-discovering their surroundings. We designed and evaluated a mobile application to promote spatial exploration through gamification. The app requires active exploration behaviour to uncover a map. Gamification elements such as quests, statistics, and social competition are used to encourage exploration. We conducted an exploratory field study (n = 22). Our results show a significant increase in familiarity with the environment and a variety of exploration patterns. Based on our findings, we propose modifications to current mapping applications by limiting the visible cartographic elements and alternating routes to improve spatial knowledge acquisition.

As the world becomes more interconnected, physical separation between people increases. Existing collaborative Virtual Reality (VR) applications, designed to bridge this distance, are not yet sufficient in providing a sense of social connection comparable to face-to-face interactions. Possible reasons are the limited multimodality of VR systems and the lack of non-verbal cues in VR avatars. We systematically investigated how facial expressions influence Social Presence in two collaborative VR tasks. We explored four types of facial expressions: eyes and mouth movements, their combination, and no expressions, for two types of explanations: verbal and graphical. To examine how these expressions influence Social Presence, we conducted a controlled VR experiment (N = 48), in which participants had to explain a specific term to their counterpart. Our results demonstrate that eye and mouth movements positively influence Social Presence in VR. Particularly, combining verbal explanations and eye movements induces the highest feeling of co-presence.

Redirected walking (RDW) is a technology that enables users to walk seamlessly in an enormous virtual space within a narrow real space while avoiding collisions with physical elements. Although RDW provides accurate proprioceptive sensations, redirection performance is limited by visual-vestibular inconsistencies. This study aims to support seamless walking in a VR environment by alleviating inconsistencies using four vestibular stimulations: noisy and directional galvanic vestibular stimulation, bone-conduction vibration, and caloric vestibular stimulation. The user study demonstrated that the stimulations successfully enable spatial expansion without impairing immersion and presence. Non-electrical stimulations (bone-conduction vibration and caloric vestibular stimulation) expanded the detection threshold, making them alternatives to electrical stimulations, and direction-based stimulation (directional galvanic vestibular stimulation) improved the user's gait stability in RDW. Finally, the findings suggested improving the user experience for vestibular stimulation RDW either by lowering audio interference or increasing the synchronization between the RDW gain and the stimulation intensity.

For decades, research around emerging technologies has been inspired by science fiction and vice versa. While so far almost only the technologies themselves have been considered, we explore the underlying software development and programming approaches. We therefore conduct a detailed media content analysis of twenty-seven movies that examines the role of software development in science fiction by identifying and investigating new approaches to programming and how software development is conceptualized portrayed within science fiction scenes. With the additional analysis of eighteen design fiction stories exploring the scenario “What if everyone is able to program?”, we envision potential impacts of the democratization of software development on business and society. Our study opens new discussions and perspectives, by investigating the current vision of the future of programming and uncovers new approaches to software development which can serve as a starting point for further research in the HCI community.

Despite irreversibility being omnipresent in the lifeworld, research on interactions making use of irreversibility in computing systems is still in the early stages. User freedom – provided by the undo functionality – is considered to be a pillar of "usable" computer systems, overcoming irreversibility. Within this paper, we set up a thought experiment, challenging the "undo feature" and instead take advantage of irreversibility in the interaction with physical computing systems (tangibles, robots, etc). First, we present three material speculations, each inherently utilizing irreversibility. Second, we elaborate on the concept of irreversible interactions by contextualizing our work with critical HCI discourses and deducing three design strategies. Finally, we discuss irreversibility as a design element for self-reflection, meaningful acting, and a sustainable relationship with technology. While previously individual aspects of irreversibility have been explored, we contribute a comprehensive discussion of irreversible interactions in HCI presenting artifacts, a conceptualization, design strategies, and application purposes.