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In contrast to conventional retail stores, online shopping comes with many advantages, like unrestricted opening hours and is more focused on functionality. However, these pros often come at a cost of complex search and limited product visualization. Virtual Reality (VR) has the potential to create novel shopping experiences that combine the advantages of e-commerce sites and conventional stores. In this work, we propose a VR shop concept where product placement is not organized in shelves but through spatial placement in appropriate locations in an apartment environment. We thus investigated how the spatial arrangement of products in a non-retail environment affects the user, and how the actual shopping task can be supported in VR. In order to answer these questions, we designed two product selection and manipulation techniques (grabbing and pointing) and two VR shopping cart concepts (a realistic basket and an abstract one) and evaluated them in a user study. The results indicate that product interaction using pointing in combination with the abstract cart concept performs best with regard to error rate, user experience and workload. Overall, the proposed apartment metaphor provides excellent customer satisfaction, as well as a particularly high level of immersion and user experience, and it opens up new possibilities for VR shopping experiences that go far beyond mimicking real shop environments in VR.

In this paper we present the VR Motion Tracker: a widget that informs users of VR applications of the movements of nonparticipants. The design of the widget is inspired by the the motion tracker used in the Alien film franchise. It uses a Kinect to detect other people in the room, besides the user of the VR application. Our system maps this information to a sphere placed within a triangular plane representing the Kinect's field of view. When these non-participants move, the position of the sphere is updated, allowing the user to be aware of nearby movements. We performed a preliminary study where we presented nine participants with our widget design. We found that they considered the widget to be useful and not distracting. We discuss which features they found interesting, and other information and features they considered useful for a future version of this widget. ispartof: pages:1-4 ispartof: 2016 IEEE 2ND WORKSHOP ON EVERYDAY VIRTUAL REALITY (WEVR) pages:1-4 ispartof: 2nd IEEE Workshop on Everyday Virtual Reality (WEVR) location:Greenville: SC date:20 Mar - 20 Mar 2016 status: published

Research on 3D interaction has explored the application of multi-touch technologies to 3D stereoscopic displays. However, the ability to perceive 3D objects at different depths (in front or behind the screen surface) conflicts with the necessity of expressing inputs on the screen surface. Touching the screen increases the risk of causing the vergence-accommodation conflict which can lead to the loss of the stereoscopic effect or cause discomfort. In this work, we present two studies evaluating a novel approach based on the concept of indirect touch interaction via an external multi-touch device. We compare indirect touch techniques to two state-of-the-art 3D interaction techniques: DS3 and the Triangle Cursor. The first study offers a quantitative and qualitative study of direct and indirect interaction on a 4 DOF docking task. The second presents a follow-up experiment focusing on a 6 DOF docking task. Results show that indirect touch interaction techniques provide a more comfortable viewing experience than both techniques. It also shows that there are no drawbacks when switching to indirect touch, as their performances in terms of net manipulation times are comparable. ispartof: pages:13-22 ispartof: 2016 IEEE Symposium on 3D User Interfaces (3DUI) pages:13-22 ispartof: IEEE Symposium on 3D User Interfaces (3DUI) location:Greenville: SC date:19 Mar - 20 Mar 2016 status: published

Experiencing Virtual Reality in domestic and other uncontrolled settings is challenging due to the presence of physical objects and furniture that are not usually defined in the Virtual Environment. To address this challenge, we explore the concept of Substitutional Reality in the context of Virtual Reality: a class of Virtual Environments where every physical object surrounding a user is paired, with some degree of discrepancy, to a virtual counterpart. We present a model of potential substitutions and validate it in two user studies. In the first study we investigated factors that affect participants' suspension of disbelief and ease of use. We systematically altered the virtual representation of a physical object and recorded responses from 20 participants. The second study investigated users' levels of engagement as the physical proxy for a virtual object varied. From the results, we derive a set of guidelines for the design of future Substitutional Reality experiences.

In this paper we studied the impact that the directedness of touch interaction has on a path following task performed on a stereoscopic display. The richness of direct touch interaction comes with the potential risk of occluding parts of the display area, in order to express one's interaction intent. In scenarios where attention to detail is of critical importance, such as browsing a 3D dataset or navigating a 3D environment, important details might be missed. We designed a user study in which participants were asked to move an object within a 3D environment while avoiding a set of static distractor objects. Participants used an indirect touch interaction technique on a tablet and a direct touch technique on the screen. Results of the study show that in the indirect touch condition, participants made 30% less collisions with the distractor objects.

In this paper we present an exploratory work on the use of foot movements to support fundamental 3D interaction tasks. Depth cameras such as the Microsoft Kinect are now able to track users' motion unobtrusively, making it possible to draw on the spatial context of gestures and movements to control 3D UIs. Whereas multitouch and mid-air hand gestures have been explored extensively for this purpose, little work has looked at how the same can be accomplished with the feet. We describe the interaction space of foot movements in a seated position and propose applications for such techniques in three-dimensional navigation, selection, manipulation and system control tasks in a 3D modelling context. We explore these applications in a user study and discuss the advantages and disadvantages of this modality for 3D UIs. ispartof: pages:71-74 ispartof: 2014 IEEE Symposium on 3D User Interfaces (3DUI) pages:71-74 ispartof: IEEE Symposium on 3D User Interfaces (3DUI) location:Minneapolis: MN date:29 Mar - 30 Mar 2014 status: published

We present the technical framework supporting a cross-device Drag-and-Drop technique designed to facilitate interactions involving multiple touchscreen devices. This technique supports users that need to transfer information received or produced on one device to another device which might be more suited to process it. Furthermore, it does not require any additional instrumentation. The technique is a two-handed gesture where one hand is used to suitably align the mobile phone with the larger screen, while the other is used to select and drag an object from one device to the other where it can be applied directly onto a target application. We describe the implementation of the framework that enables spontaneous data-transfer between a mobile device and a desktop computer.

Many interactions naturally extend across smart-phones and devices with larger screens. Indeed, data might be received on the mobile but more conveniently processed with an application on a larger device, or vice versa. Such interactions require spontaneous data transfer from a source location on one screen to a target location on the other device. We introduce a cross-device Drag-and-Drop technique to facilitate these interactions involving multiple touchscreen devices, with minimal effort for the user. The technique is a two-handed gesture, where one hand is used to suitably align the mobile phone with the larger screen, while the other is used to select and drag an object between devices and choose which application should receive the data. ispartof: MUM ispartof: International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Multimedia ispartof: International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Multimedia location:Luleå date:2 Dec - 5 Dec 2013 status: published

Informing caregivers by providing them with contextual medical information can significantly improve the quality of patient care activities. However, information flow in hospitals is still tied to traditional manual or digitised lengthy patient record files that are often not accessible while caregivers are attending to patients. Leveraging the proliferation of pervasive awareness technologies (sensors, actuators and mobile displays), recent studies have explored this information presentation aspect borrowing theories from context-aware computing, i.e., presenting subtle information contextually to support the activity at hand. However, the understanding of the information space (i.e., what information should be presented) is still fairly abstruse, which inhibits the deployment of such real-time activity support systems. To this end, this paper first presents situated glyphs, a graphical entity to encode situation specific information, and then presents our findings from an in-situ qualitative study addressing the information space tailored to such glyphs. Applying technology probes using situated glyphs and different glyph display form factors, the study aimed at uncovering the information space pertained to both primary and secondary medical care. Our analysis has resulted in a large set of information types as well as given us deeper insight on the principles for designing future situated glyphs. We report our findings in this paper that we expect would provide a solid foundation for designing future assistive systems to support patient care activities.

This paper describes the prototype of a framework for designing interactive applications for cultural heritage sites by following an end-user development approach. The framework is devoted to all design stakeholders, i.e. software engineers, HCI experts, cultural heritage experts and visitors, and provides them with tailored design environments for contributing their expertise to shaping the final applications. The design is guided by application templates, which provide the rules for assembling the basic components, called building blocks, whose result is the final application.

Cultural heritage assets keep alive the history of a territory and of its inhabitants. Several systems have been developed to support people during their visits to historical sites and museums, with the goal of improving the overall user experience. In many cases, people travelling together would appreciate the possibility of collaborating in gathering information and planning a personalized itinerary. Large sharable multitouch screens may offer this possibility. This paper is about ongoing research that is investigating possible applications of large multitouch screens in cultural heritage and tourism. In particular, an application is described, which aims at allowing tourists to get information about a territory and create itineraries for their visits by interacting together on a large screen.

Scheduling staff shift work in a hospital ward is a well-known problem in the operation research field but, as such, it is very often studied from the algorithmic point of view and seldom from the human-computer interaction perspective. In most cases, the automatic solutions that operations research may provide do not satisfy the involved people. After discussing the inconveniences of an automatic approach with physicians, we have designed a staff scheduling system that combines an expert system with an information visualization (IV) system; in this way the schedule generated by the expert system is presented through the IV system to the schedule manager, who can modify the results if last minute changes are necessary, by directly manipulating the visualized data and obtaining immediate feedback about the changes made.

This paper describes the experience in designing and developing the CET system according to user-centred and participatory approaches. CET is a web-based system used by industries and experts of the regional government that monitor air quality. With CET, industries can officially declare their pollutant emissions in the atmosphere, while air quality experts can easily visualize how the industries are distributed in the regional territory, the type and quantity of emissions coming from their production processes and other important information to support their decision-making process. The experience provides hints about proper user involvement for designing successful systems.

Time series analysis is a process whose goal is to understand phenomena. The analysis often involves the search for a specific pattern. Finding patterns is one of the fundamental steps for time series observation or forecasting. The way in which users are able to specify a pattern to use for querying the time series database is still a challenge. We hereby propose an enhancement of the SearchBox, a widget used in TimeSearcher, a well known tool developed at the University of Maryland that allows users to find patterns similar to the one of interest.

Time-series forecasting has a large number of applications. Users with a partial time series for auctions, new stock offerings, or industrial processes desire estimates of the future behavior. We present a data driven forecasting method and interface called similarity-based forecasting (SBF). A pattern matching search in an historical time series dataset produces a subset of curves similar to the partial time series. The forecast is displayed graphically as a river plot showing statistical information about the SBF subset. A forecasting preview interface allows users to interactively explore alternative pattern matching parameters and see multiple forecasts simultaneously. User testing with 8 users demonstrated advantages and led to improvements.