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Transmedia Stories are becoming an increasingly important technique for the tourism industry. They are successful tools to engage, inspire and gather audiences online and offline. In this article, we describe the design, implementation and evaluation of Fragments of Laura, a bespoke Transmedia Storytelling (TS) experience designed to involve visitors in developing knowledge and awareness about the cultural and natural heritage of Madeira Island. Fragments of Laura (FoL) is composed of two interconnected components: a Location-Aware Multimedia Story, and a Hypermedia Platform populated with locally collected testimonies and interviews. Results from the extensive evaluation of Fragments of Laura, highlights the potential of interactive multimedia, TS in particular, in engaging tourists with the destination values and community. Our contribution is twofold, on one hand we extend on the state of the art of multimedia interactive storytelling, with the description of the Fragments of Laura TS artifact. On the other hand, results from FoL evaluation highlight how the artifact impacts on the tourism experience its implications for the design of future tourism driven TS experiences.

We describe the work behind a privacy-preserving, crowdsensing approach that promotes social distancing upon the return of students to University. Our main motivation is enabling visualizations that predict room occupancy based on the number of connected devices to particular access points, via anonymous reports about these predictions, and via an unenforced booking system that allows users to communicate their intents about room use.

Climate change is one of the most urgent issues of our time, and the HCI community has shown a growing interest and application in this topic. Considering the communication and interaction challenges it poses, now is an opportune time to analyse how the academic community has explored interaction addressing climate change. Following this premise, we present a visual analysis of the past decade, focusing on HCI research projects that target the general public. For this survey we used the grounded theory review method, resulting in a final corpus of 40 projects, with data visualization as a key step in our investigation.

In this article, we report on findings from an empirical study designed to assess factors determining the experience of immersion in desktop-based web-browsing, which is identified as occurring when a user reports a deep sense of cognitive and perceptual absorption in the content and/or the interaction with a website. A within-subjects study was designed and administered to participants (N = 29) who interacted with three different websites. Results of the self-report measure have been factor analyzed by Principal Component Analysis (PCA). The PCA yielded three factors (media form and content; control and continuity; consistency), which appear to influence the determinants of an immersive experience, namely vividness and interactivity, in different ways. Directions for further research are briefly discussed.

In this paper, we present design implications for the creation of digital maps in the context of wayfinding systems for children. In the process, we engaged 70 children in drawing the cognitive maps of their journey from home to school. Conducted in 2017, the study involved fifth-grade students (9-12 years old), at three different public schools in Funchal, Portugal. This paper offers reflections on their drawings and the resulting implications for the design of geographic technologies for children. Our contribution consists in highlighting ten types of landmarks extracted from children's 'maps' clustered into four categories, namely: Newness, Cultural personalization, Infrastructure, and Natural Landscapes.

Teenagers' engagement in museums is much talked about but little research has been done to understand their behavior and inform design. Findings from co-design sessions with teenagers suggested they value games and stories when thinking about enjoyable museum tours. Informed by these findings and working with a natural history museum, we designed: a story-based tour (Turning Point) and a game-based tour (Haunted Encounters), informed by similar content. The two strategies were evaluated with 78 teenagers (15-19 years old) visiting the museum as part of an educational school trip. We assessed teenagers' personality in class; qualitative and quantitative data on their engagement, experience, and usability of the apps were collected at the museum. The triangulation of quantitative and qualitative data show personality traits mapping into different behaviors. We offer implications for the design of museum apps targeted to teenagers, a group known as difficult to reach.

Museums are increasingly turning to technology to improve their offerings. This presents an opportunity to surrounding neighborhoods to take advantage of the museum in order to connect with visitors and offer them a glimpse into their community. The work presented in this article contributes to advancing the state of the art in designing Mixed Reality (MR) entertainment experiences by presenting and discussing Yasmine’s Adventures (YA), a mobile application aiming to extend the museum visitor’s experience into the surrounding neighborhood. YA demonstrates the potential of MR in engaging visitors to explore neglected urban areas. This is achieved by incorporating the opinions of community members, and other contextual information, into a fictional storytelling journey, delivered through a MR entertainment experience distributed in real space. Consequently, users are provided with opportunity to connect with enriched portraits of these spaces. Results from a quantitative and qualitative evaluation showed that participants’ perception of the neighborhood was positively affected by the experience, which fostered curiosity and willingness to explore the neighborhood both at the spatial and social levels. By taking the tour, participants increased their interest in interacting with locals and fostered greater knowledge of the area, which they were willing to share after experiencing it.

Teenagers are a large pool of potential museum audiences. This age group is identified as an audience group that is often excluded from a museum’s curatorial strategies [1] and appears to be generally disinterested in what museums might offer [2]. Without some degree of digital interactivity, it is challenging for a museum to remain interesting and relevant to a young tech-savvy audience [2]. Our application is a location-specific gamified narrative deployed at the Natural History Museum of Funchal (Madeira island, Portugal) which embraces the potential of mobile interactive technologies and digital storytelling to promote engaging tours for teenage visitors, encouraging more active, enriching and tailored experiences. Through our interactive story app, the audience is challenged to explore the museum to unlock fragments of a narrative that relates to the main story.

Immersive technologies aligned with storytelling can create novel and powerful tools to inform and ponder on social issues. This demo paper describes a cinematic virtual reality project, Tell a Tail 360\(^{\circ }\), on the rescue of abandoned companion animals. Tell a Tail 360\(^{\circ }\) was designed targeting teens (13–19 years old) and its inclusion in a classroom setting. By using 360\(^{\circ }\) videos of a rescue kennel, animal hospital and the field work of non-governmental organizations, we intend for the target audience to be exposed to different animal welfare issues relevant to their context.

The paper presents a participatory platform designed and implemented with the aim of fostering dialogue between locals and tourists. The platform exploits the crowd-sourcing paradigm to collect the voice of the locals in order to provide tourists with authentic experiences. The system was designed as an immersive visual storytelling experience, to let the user discover the locals' story in an interactive rich environment. The insights that emerged during a preliminary evaluation with users point out that the system is able to deepen the relationship between locals and tourists while interacting with the platform.

Chemistry is often regarded as a complex and demanding subject for youth to learn, partly because of abstract concepts that are challenging to depict. These areas require spatial reasoning, defined as the ability to retain, generate and manipulate abstract visual images in space, either physically or mentally. By allowing the superimposition of virtual objects in the real world, Augmented Reality (AR) facilitates students’ understanding of difficult concepts through spatial reasoning by making them visible and allowing for multidimensional perspectives. “Periodic Fable” is an AR serious game targeting 8 to 11-year-old children, designed to teach them basic chemistry concepts of the Periodic Table of Elements in non-formal settings. After designing and implementing the game, we conducted an exploratory study with 36 young participants, using a mixed-method approach. A comparative study between pre- and post-intervention questionnaires and observation results shows a positive learning outcome, demonstrating the potential of this tool in a non-formal context.

Playful interactions and storytelling become a powerful conduit for educational-entertainment experiences aimed at informing and critiquing social issues. In this paper, we describe the design of a transmedia experience, which uses its separate channels to deconstruct a complex social issue, while maintaining a coordinated and consistent story experience. Tell a Tail explores the welfare issues of companion animals through (1) a branching comic book extended with Augmented Reality scenes, and (2) an immersive 360\(^{\circ }\) documentary about the rescue of abandoned companion animals. Our contribution is the rationale and design of an initial working prototype of the transmedia experience. Initial pilot evaluations revealed that the prototypes were well received, with participants praising the content and the medium used to deliver it. Through reflection on findings of the pilot studies and design decisions of the prototypes, we delineate how the affordances of different XR technologies can be used to inform and raise awareness of a social issue.

As climate change and biodiversity loss are threatening the natural world’s equilibrium and survival, people’s concerns about these topics have increased significantly. The work presented in this paper lies at the cross-section between the areas of education, biodiversity and technologies. More specifically, this project builds on research in virtual agents in educational settings to promote young children’s engagement with a biodiversity curriculum. In this context, we conducted an observational study with 105 primary school’s children with the goal of evaluating the effectiveness of a virtual robotic agent (presented through a multimedia application), in providing an effective and engaging learning experience about local biodiversity to children. Our results suggested that a) older children (8 to 10 years) knowledge about certain animals and plants from their local biodiversity is well matured; b) younger children (6 to 7 years) present more faithful conceptualisations about nature-related scenarios compared to older children and c) both young and older children exhibited a preference for nature-related scenarios when compared to human-made ones. Our findings provide useful information in favour of the usefulness of implementing user-adaptive learning systems, by considering factors like the children’s previous level of knowledge. Besides, this personalised and interactive type of system might provide an essential advantage in learning scenarios, compared to “static” systems, in enhancing children’s learning outcomes.

The growth of Internet-distributed TV services has transformed video consumption, enhancing the level of control that viewers have over what they watch. Along with the release of entire seasons of programming at once, this has led to the phenomenon of ‘binge-watching’, in which several episodes of a program are viewed in one sitting. This article presents the results of a novel exploratory study focused on 40 Netflix viewing sessions from 11 millennials in their homes. Methodologically, we employed a novel mixed-methods approach that combines objective data (collected through a browser extension) and subjective data (collected via questionnaires completed before and after viewing). This novel approach allowed us to describe the binge-watcher’s experience in a holistic fashion. Results suggest that binge-watching is an individual activity mainly performed at the end of the day to relax, for boredom relief purposes, or for escapism. Furthermore, a binge-watching session lasts for an average of 2 h and 10 min, and variations on binge-watchers’ affective states were identified after Netflix exposure. Participants’ levels of valence (unhappy–happy) significantly decreased after binge-watching; their positive affect values increased primarily after watching sci-fi, while their negative affect values decreased after watching comedy and slightly increased after watching drama. However, the levels of arousal (relaxed–stimulated) remained the same. This study extends our current understanding of binge-watching in terms of viewer motivations, how it affects their viewing experiences, and participants’ subjective affective states. The investigation contributes, thus, to a relatively new domain of research concerned with the understanding of binge-watching behavior of serialized TV fiction.

Part 9: Interaction Design for Culture and Development I; International audience; More people are traveling than ever before. This intense and disproportionate growth in tourism may, however, generate negative environmental and social effects, especially on islands. In order to address this issue, this article presents the design and evaluation of Há-Vita, an interactive web platform, whose goal is to foster awareness of local nature and folk knowledge and create connections between locals and visitors. We explored these design goals through different research methods, such as user studies with tourists in hotel lobbies, as well as focus groups consisting of two different groups of local residents and a group of visitors. Theoretically, Há-Vita is grounded in the concept of “community-based tourism ventures,” which is concerned with environmental preservation via ecotourism practices and, at the same time, the empowerment of local communities. Furthermore, the design rationale of the platform is also inspired by the authenticity theory, which examines tourists’ pursuit of meaningful interactions with locals. Our results indicate that, despite time constraints (for visitors), locals and visitors were willing to interact with each other as they acknowledged authentic benefits in such interaction. Furthermore, our focus groups with locals have shown the potential to stimulate different levels of local empowerment based on the community-based tourism framework in the design iterations of Há-Vita.

Part 10: Interactive Posters; International audience; This submission describes the analysis of an evaluation of 155 teenagers (15–19 years old) who took part in a co-design session centred around how mobile technology might enhance their own experiences in a natural history museum. At the end, participants were required to make a word association to evaluate the session. An analysis of how teen participants responded to the design session was conducted using thematic analysis to show the different categories of adjectives used by participants in their evaluations. The goal for the evaluation was mainly to pilot the design session process and if teens enjoyed participating in it. We believe this is of interest to designers and cultural heritage professionals.

Inspired by HCI research advocating for the inclusion of children in the design process, this pictorial provides a qualitative case study on children's perceptions of urban landscapes. Our goal is to create digital maps in the context of locative systems and wayfinding for children. For this purpose, we engaged 70 students from the city of Funchal (Portugal) in the drawing of a cognitive map of their journey from home to school in the Fall of 2017. These children (9-12 years old) also replied to a brief survey, and 31 out of 70 responded to a face-to-face interview in the Spring of 2018. This pictorial offers an analysis of the drawings as well as providing highlights of the children's own account of their maps. Our work generates a set of 10 themes related to landmarks and design ideas for the creation of digital maps for children.

Orientation is an emerging issue in cinematic Virtual Reality (VR), as viewers may fail in locating points of interest. Recent strategies to tackle this research problem have investigated the role of cues, specifically diegetic sound effects. In this paper, we examine the use of sound spatialization for orientation purposes, namely by studying different spatialization conditions ("none", "partial", and "full" spatial manipulation) of multitrack soundtracks. We performed a between-subject mixed-methods study with 36 participants, aided by Cue Control, a tool we developed for dynamic spatial sound editing and data collection/analysis. Based on existing literature on orientation cues in 360o and theories on human listening, we discuss situations in which the spatialization was more effective (namely, "full" spatial manipulation both when using only music and when combining music and diegetic effects), and how this can be used by creators of 360o videos.

In the light of the increasing adoption of participatory culture means by general consumers, this paper describes the design process, evaluations and discussion on four studies on public interactive storytelling system addressing findings and limitations in regards of its participatory nature. Previous bodies of work within interactive artworks and public displays cite difficulty in attracting passersby attention. Through an iterative design process and refinements to the storytelling concept, we advanced our experience of the mechanics of digital storytelling’ and passersby engagement within each space studied. This paper aims to share our research highlights, encountered difficulties and how the applied evaluation methods stood up to the task within public spaces that aren’t as easily accessible for research, such as airport terminals. Our findings further seek to go beyond a traditional technology-centered approach while examining the relationship between individual, object, and public spaces.

This pictorial summarizes a qualitative study of children's perceptions of mobility through their own cognitive map drawings of the journey from home to school. We engaged 27 sixth-grade students (11 to 12 year-old) from Lisbon, Portugal, and analyze their drawings extracting 12 different design recommendations. We use these recommendations to provide design suggestions in terms of i) existing functionalities of mapping applications (that can be re-used); ii) improvements for existing map and wayfinding systems; iii) children's original design suggestions. The qualitative study reported here provides contributions that could help promote sustainable mobility for children in particular, with regards to innovation but also autonomy and supervision by caregivers.

Memories of Carvalhal’s Palace – Haunted Encounters is an Augmented Reality (AR) location-based game which involves players in uncovering the mystery behind the haunted aspects of a museum premises. The game deployed at the Natural History Museum of Funchal makes use of mobile interactive AR and gaming strategies to promote the engagement of teenage visitors (digital natives) in museum experiences. Through this game, the audience embarks in a journey through the museum spaces, collecting scientific information about selected exhibits, while interacting with their tridimensional (3D) AR models. The audience’s interactions with the museum exhibits are rewarded with pieces of a map, which will guide them to a hidden location, the scientific library of the museum. There participants can finally unlock the mysteries they have been summoned to solve. The game’s goal stems from the fact that digital native teenagers are identified as an audience group that is often excluded from a museum’s curatorial strategies [1] and as consequence, they appears to be generally disinterested in what museums might offer [2]. In this article, we present the description and rational behind Memories of Carvalhal’s Palace: Haunted Encounters mobile gaming application and then discuss the results of first empirical tests performed to evaluate the usefulness and usability of the game.

Part 8: Demonstrations and Installations; International audience; While museums are making great efforts in updating their communication and engagement strategies to include a wide variety of publics, teenagers (15–19) are still identified as an audience group that is often excluded from a museum’s curatorial strategies. As consequence, this audience appears to be generally disinterested in what museums might offer. Our installation, deployed at the Natural History Museum of Funchal (NHMF), in Portugal, makes use of mobile interactive technologies and gaming strategies to promote more engaging museum experiences for teenage visitors. Memories of Carvalhal’s Palace: Haunted Encounters is a location-based game that prompts teenagers to uncover the science in the museum, through investigating the site, which is presented as haunted. In order to complete the quest, the audience needs to find and collect scientific information about specific exhibits while interacting with their Augmented Reality (AR) three-dimensional (3D) models. The audience’s interactions with the museum exhibits are rewarded with pieces of a map, which when completed, will guide them to the hidden scientific library where they can finally unlock the mysteries they have been trying to solve.

As head mounted displays (HMDs) become everyday consumer items, the potential of immersive Virtual Reality (VR) as a design space becomes ever more promising. However, their usage is impeded by human factors inherent to the technology itself, such as visually induced motion sickness (VIMS), caused by the disconnect between what is visually and physically perceived. Previous work on VIMS reduction has explored techniques targeting HMDs, while others explored techniques that target the multimedia content itself through visual optimization. The latter are often studied individually and cannot be applied to certain VR content such as 360° video. Consequently, this paper describes an exploratory study comparing and combining such techniques (independent visual background and restricted field of view) in 360° video. The work provides constructive insights for VR designers, while also exploring how analytics of VR content and user experience can be used for VIMS prevention and evaluation.

Asthma is a complex disease caused by genetic and environmental factors, affecting 235 million people worldwide. The effects of chronic respiratory diseases, such as asthma and respiratory ailments, can be particularly aggressive in islands, due to the optimal climate conditions and the rich nature and flora. Conceived as a case study on Madeira island, we applied user-driven innovation strategy to inform the design of a mobile app able to assist the users in tracking asthma symptoms through an intuitive interface and a smart analog button, providing real-time personalized recommendations. The app is the result of a workshop conducted with 28 17-year-old students from Madeira. The workshop goal was to involve users in thinking about how to exploit data about air quality and weather conditions collected by a pervasive low-cost infrastructure spreads across the island.

Recent years demonstrate an increased interest in Passive Acoustic Monitoring (PAM) applications when studying cetaceans. However, they remain expensive underwater systems and targeted for industrial and military purposes. While the usage of smartphones as acoustic sensors has been observed in terrestrial environments, ocean and nautical PAM applications remain greatly unexplored. This paper presents the design, deployment and testing of a POSEIDON system, used for real-time augmentation of whale-watching experiences. We collect and use cetaceans' vocal call acoustic samples (clicks, moans and whistles) and apply machine learning for offline model training and prediction. When discriminating the calls, we find that Extra Trees and Gradient Boosting outperform other classifiers (>0.95 confidence threshold). Collected samples are at disposal to citizen scientists and marine biologists. Future studies involve real-time on-boat user testing.

The availability of depth sensing technology in smartphones and tablets adds spatial awareness as an interaction modality to mobile entertainment experiences and showcases the potential of Mixed Reality (MR) for creating immersive and engaging experiences in real world contexts. However, the lack of design knowledge about interactions within MR represents a barrier to creating effective entertainment experiences. Faced with this challenge, we contribute a study of three navigation styles (NS) for MR experiences shown on a handheld device. The navigation styles range from fully virtual, through a mixed style that involves both on-screen and in-world activity, to fully real navigation. Our findings suggest that when designing an MR experience, the navigation style deployed should reflect the context, content and required interactions. For our MR experience, “The Old Pharmacy”, with its specific content, context and required interactions, results show that navigation styles relying on in-world activity leads to higher levels of Presence, Immersion and Flow.

Stories are increasingly becoming an important technique to engage, inspire and gather audiences online and offline. Interactive technologies provide the tools to empower audiences to participate in new interactive storytelling experiences applied to tourism. We envisage that in this context transmedia entertainment-education experiences combining a compelling story with engaging technologies can expose tourists towards local pressing issues and social good while providing them with a rich entertaining and educating experience. We describe the research approach that leads to design and implementation of a bespoke transmedia entertainment education experience: Fragments of Laura. The experience was designed to encourage visitors to learn about Madeira’s rich natural heritage and develop knowledge and awareness about its history and biodiversity.

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In the 360\(^\circ \) videos, the role of sound became crucial as it not only contributes to the participant’s level of Presence (the feeling of being in the virtual environment) but can also provide viewers with a periodical awareness of their surroundings; therefore, audio can guide user attention toward desired points. In this sense, the sonic elements of a 360\(^\circ \) video assume an interactive role, as sounds become notifying elements or icons. In the paper, we describe Cue Control, an audio editor that facilitates the creation of soundtracks for 360\(^\circ \) videos. The user can control the location of the sonic elements by positioning the sounds in the virtual 3D space following the desired timeline; Cue Control automatically creates a cue list of the spatial soundtrack events for playback. The software also allows for different interactive modalities of playback, adapting the cue list to the viewpoint of the user. We conducted a small pilot study where Cue Control was used to assemble the soundtrack of two 360\(^\circ \) videos. According to the data gathered, we present some preliminary reflections about the use of sound to guide users’ attention in 360\(^\circ \) videos towards points of interest.

In this paper we present a low-cost infrastructure to collect a variety of location-based multi-sourced data with the aim of providing personalized services and raising awareness for sustainable mobility solutions. The gathered data can be used to provide: (i) citizens and tourists with personalized location-based services to increase sustainability awareness; (ii) local authorities and tourism boards with a tool to identify and prevent mobility issues; and (iii) transport companies with an instrument to support urban mobility planning decisions. To collect data, we exploited a low-cost Wi-Fi passive tracking system and we augmented this infrastructure using sensors for detecting environmental conditions. To achieve this, we provided 60 points of interest and 20 buses with our solution, to spread out the sensors over the entire Madeira Island. Using the gathered data, we developed different scenarios to prove that in a world where sensing data is becoming inexpensive, there are opportunities to use our approach to deliver data back to the citizens, empowering local communities, with the goal of promoting sustainable mobility and tourism.

In this exhibition, we present “Ha-Vita”, a transmedia platform conceived to foster awareness and communication among locals and tourists regarding Madeira natural wealth. This work takes an artistic approach to the appropriation of a transmedia tool. We take into consideration graphic design aesthetics and interaction design principles in order to promote environmental sustainability and raise awareness in tourists about the biodiversity of Madeira Island, Portugal.

This paper investigates whether location and medium affect the experience of interactive storytelling in the context of mobile Virtual Reality systems. For this purpose, we discuss the development of Fragments of Laura, a location-aware multimedia application in a larger interactive transmedia story, where users can view a 360° narrative in a 3D environment. We conducted a user study with the intention of measuring Presence, Flow and Narrative Transportation and evaluate four scenarios resulting from the combination of two independent variables - location (existence and absence of links between the test location and the narrative location) and medium (tablet and mobile virtual reality with smartphones). Our results show that the user experience while watching a narrative fluctuates depending on the location where is viewed and the device in which is viewed. Locations linked with the content lead to a significantly increased Flow, Presence, and Narrative Transportation.

As 360° immersive Mobile Virtual Reality (MVR) experiences are reaching a wider public, thanks to inexpensive and more powerful mobile technology available on the shelves, it is also rapidly growing as a research arena to investigate how to best design such VR experiences. Adding to this research direction, in this paper we report on an exploratory study designed to evaluate users perception in "Fragments of Laura", a mobile location-aware storytelling experience that uses MVR in a public setting. Results from the study encourage us to pursuit investigation as the experience was well received by the participants and provided an enjoyable experience, however, we discovered that there are still design challenges to overcome in order for MVR to be widely adopted within a public setting. Such as, finding the balance between multimedia and immersive multimedia, providing an "onboarding" time for such media and proper locations for the content consumption.

The widespread affordability of digital technologies is encouraging artists to experiment and make use of them in their artworks. This paper describes the design and in-the-wild evaluation of DreamScope, a bespoke 360° mobile virtual reality (VR) interface designed for immersive interaction in the Lucid Peninsula physical narrative art installation. We evaluated the VR interface by means of a questionnaire based on the Positive and Negative Affect Scale (PANAS) and individual items related with the interaction within the exhibition. Results extracted from 53 subjects highlight how the interface supported engagement, positive affect and reflections on the narrated scenario of the art installation. The study reported in this paper provides evidence of the positive role of 360° mobile VR in strengthening the narrative and the artist's intent in the Lucid Peninsula artistic installation.

This paper explores motivations and strategies for fostering the production of locative storytelling among underserved communities, specifically the demographic group of Latinos facing the legacy of racial segregation in central Texas. We report on the findings from ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the context of a community computer training program provided by a non-profit organization that partnered with us. We trained a group of adults in locative and mobile media and asked them to choose meaningful locations in the neighborhood in which they live and produce related written stories. Results from the study shed light on the motivations (or lack of) for participating in locative media practices, highlighting in particular that individual mentorship and rapport-building through the sharing of personal content are key strategies in engaging these communities in locative media in general and content sharing specifically.

The widespread popularity of Pok\'emon GO presents the first opportunity to observe the geographic effects of location-based gaming at scale. This paper reports the results of a mixed methods study of the geography of Pok\'emon GO that includes a five-country field survey of 375 Pok\'emon GO players and a large scale geostatistical analysis of game elements. Focusing on the key geographic themes of places and movement, we find that the design of Pok\'emon GO reinforces existing geographically-linked biases (e.g. the game advantages urban areas and neighborhoods with smaller minority populations), that Pok\'emon GO may have instigated a relatively rare large-scale shift in global human mobility patterns, and that Pok\'emon GO has geographically-linked safety risks, but not those typically emphasized by the media. Our results point to geographic design implications for future systems in this space such as a means through which the geographic biases present in Pok\'emon GO may be counteracted., Comment: This version of the paper contains a fix for a reference issue that appeared in the original version. Proceedings of the 35th Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2017)

Part 8: Interactive Posters; International audience; In this poster, we are addressing the topic of “system’s evaluation” from the point of view of assessing the usability of a gamified experience with 20 teenagers aged 15–17 years. The currently tested experience was ideally designed for children 9–10 years. In order to adapt the application to teenagers, we tested it with 20 targeted users. In this poster, we share the results and encourage a discussion among the researchers about how to adapt the gamified experience designed for children to a teenage audience.

While gaming and storytelling are considered to be common approaches to engage audiences with a museum’s collections, a formal comparison of the two has not been found in literature. While gaming and storytelling are considered to be common approaches to engage audiences with a museum’s collections, a formal comparison of the two has not been found in literature. In this paper, we present the design and comparative study of two distinct interventions, namely a mobile game and a mobile story that were designed to engage a young audience with the exhibit of the local natural history museum. Focusing on the same scientific content derived from the museum’s collection, we compare the effects of both interactive experiences on a group of children. When comparing engagement, enjoyment and learning outcomes, we correlate results with data derived from observations and skin conductance biofeedback. The data collected so far suggest that children are 27% more excited when using the game application compared with the story driven one. Moreover, we find that children’s excitement peaks when encountering selected artefacts presented in the museum exhibit. Finally, children’s learning nearly doubled (44%) when using the game based experience versus the story. We conclude the paper by discussing the implications of our findings and by proposing potential future improvements.

This research project proposes the use of Child-Robot Interaction principles to boost the interest and engagement of young children in the biodiversity curriculum. We propose an architecture where a robot learns from children through an Interactive Story, while at the same time teaches them previous knowledge acquired in past interactions.

Museums promote cultural experiences through the exhibits and the stories behind them. Nevertheless, museums are not always designed to engage and interest young audiences, particularly teenagers. This Ph.D. proposal in Digital Media explores how digital technologies can facilitate Natural History and Science Museums in fostering and creating immersive museum experiences for teenagers. Especially by using digital storytelling along with location-based gaming. The overall objectives of the work are to establish guidelines, design, develop and study interactive storytelling and gamification experiences in those type of museums focusing in particular on delivering pleasurable and engaging experiences for teens of 15–17 years old.

The active involvement of teenagers in the design of interactive technologies for museums is lacking further development. Adopting a user-driven innovation framework along with cooperative inquiry, we report and discuss a case study that has been designed to involve users in the ideation of interpretive experiences for a local museum. Working in collaboration with the Natural History Museum of Funchal, this contribution will present and discuss co-design sessions that were aimed at participants with ages 15 to 17 and where they were asked to ideate an interactive museum experience. As a result of the co-design sessions, we have found several design patterns. We have grouped these patterns into four categories that express the interests of a teenage audience; these categories are: “interactions”, “gaming”, “localization” and “social media”. Our findings suggest that teenagers value interactive technologies when visiting museums and that user-driven innovation plays an important role when involving this specific audience in the design of user experiences for museums.

Bus stops are key touchpoints to improve the quality and engagement of citizens with public transports. Despite their ubiquity in modern urban landscapes they are seldom considered a key design/technology element in improving the public transport experience. This paper describes a design case study where different teams attempted to improve bus stops using interactive technologies. The resulting concept prototypes were designed to provide citizens and tourists with (i) safe, attractive and accessible public spaces, (ii) attractive, accessible and efficient public transport; and, (iii) smart traveller information tools and services for sustainable mobility. Our case was set in Madeira, a medium sized European island, where tourism widely contribute to the local economy and buses represent the only available public mean of transport. We present the research insights and the design concepts leading to improve engagement and use of public transport.

Location-based services, narratives and interactive experiences have a substantial tradition in human–computer interaction. Building on this background, we report the iterative design process, prototyping and evaluation of Seven Stories, a location-based narrative experience. The design includes two novel features that aim to link the user experience more closely to its physical context: visual markers scanning and a narrator. We have evaluated Seven Stories with two studies. Study 1, with 12 participants, was conducted using qualitative methods to assess the overall user experience. Study 2, with 21 participants, was conducted using quantitative methods, to evaluate the role of the markers and narrator as specific design features. Our contribution is to illustrate, through both qualitative and quantitative findings, how these two novel features influence the user experience, and what implications they have for design.

In this paper we present a study through which we intended to understand children's preference towards book formats, in particular digital or paper ones. To accomplish this, we created an original story (Ritinha) illustrated by two children. The traditional book format was composed by static images and text. The digital format had animated images, hyperlinks to navigate to different parts of the story and static text complemented by an audio narrative. We conducted a field study with 105 children in order to observe in which format children would prefer to read a book: if in paper or in digital format. The method used to accomplish this task was direct observation.

Crescendo is an ongoing project aimed to provide children with High Functioning Autism, their teachers and carers with a communication tool that bridges them. Crescendo guides carers in teaching and immersing their child in a virtual environment that mimics the real world, helping them to make sense of it and interact with objects and places in order to become self-reliant in atomized, step-by-step routines. Crescendo is a two-sided app design, one for carers and another for children. It provides both with tool for monitoring and incremental step-by-step learning.

This paper describes a tangible visualization that explores the link between the impact of energy feedback on household consumers and the resource demand impact on energy production. Specifically, it positions a novel perspective attempting to move beyond the known limitations of current eco-feedback systems and contributes to enhance our understanding of how consumers comprehend energy production. The work is informed by a comprehensive study of an installation that displays the ratio of current power generation sources and the percentage of grid renewables. The paper provides design insights for creating novel eco-feedback visualizations that leverage the balance between user lifestyles and the desire to influence consumption behaviors and practices. Evaluation results show an increase in energy literacy and awareness as well as identifies high consumer preferences towards simple, representative interfaces and ubiquitous immediate feedback. Our study shows potential in terms of future scenarios for eco-feedback in distributed energy micro-generation and other inevitable disruptive changes for the energy utility.

In this paper we describe the goals and challenges posed by the development of beEco an interactive game aiming to increasing environmental awareness. Here we recount the HCI based process and design strategy for an interactive game aiming at promoting a new and more positive dialogue between the local population and a Nature Reserve Park. Recognizing the power of relationships and the creative potential and emotional impact of children, the team ended up involving local schools in the visual design of the interactive game. Here, we present and discuss our field research, design decisions and the results from several iterative prototype testing. We conclude with a discussion about our results compared to the aims of the project. The project targeted an increase of environmental awareness of the local professionals and the creation of a new and more positive dialogue between the local population and the Nature Park.

Humanity benefits from natural ecosystems in a multitude of ways; collectively, these are known as ecosystem services. Our project investigates how storytelling, coupled with mobile interactive technologies, can be used to design interventions that bring awareness and engage people in understanding the benefits of ecosystems and their underlying biodiversity. “Fragments of Laura” a technology mediated transmedia story, reveals to its audience (mostly tourists) information related to the local natural capital and ecosystem services of a UNESCO-protected forest, and embodies many aspects of its history, culture and ecotourism potential. In this paper, we present the overall interaction and story design, together with the results from the “Fragments of Laura” experience prototype. We conclude with a description of the future work and how the results from the experience prototype will affect the final working prototype.

This paper describes IVRUX, a tool for the analysis of 360o Immersive Virtual Reality (IVR) story-driven experiences. Traditional cinema offers an immersive experience through surround sound technology and high definition screens. However, in 360o IVR the audience is in the middle of the action, everything is happening around them. The immersiveness and freedom of choice brings new challenges into narrative creation, hence the need for a tool to help the process of evaluating user experience. Starting from “The Old Pharmacy”, a 360o Virtual Reality scene, we developed IVRUX, a tool that records users’ experience while visualizing the narrative. In this way, we are able to reconstruct the user’s experience and understand where their attention is focused. In this paper, we present results from a study done using 32 participants and, through analyzing the results, provide insights that help creators to understand how to enhance 360o Immersive Virtual Reality story driven experiences.