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Virtual Reality (VR) allows simulation of machine control panels without physical access to the machine, enabling easier and faster initial exploration, testing, and validation of machine panel designs. However, haptic feedback is indispensable if we want to interact with these simulated panels in a realistic manner. We present HapticPanel, an encountered-type haptic system that provides realistic haptic feedback for machine control panels in VR. To ensure a realistic manipulation of input elements, the user’s hand is continuously tracked during interaction with the virtual interface. Based on which virtual element the user intends to manipulate, a motorized panel with stepper motors moves a corresponding physical input element in front of the user’s hand, enabling realistic physical interaction.

Feedback and feedforward are two fundamental mechanisms that support users’ activities while interacting with computing devices. While feedback can be easily solved by providing information to the users following the triggering of an action, feedforward is much more complex as it must provide information before an action is performed. For interactive applications where making a mistake has more impact than just reduced user comfort, correct feedforward is an essential step toward correctly informed, and thus safe, usage. Our approach, Fortunettes, is a generic mechanism providing a systematic way of designing feedforward addressing both action and presentation problems. Including a feedforward mechanism significantly increases the complexity of the interactive application hardening developers’ tasks to detect and correct defects. We build upon an existing formal notation based on Petri Nets for describing the behavior of interactive applications and present an approach that allows for adding correct and consistent feedforward.

When new things, such as buildings or physical products, are designed, the design process typically explores multiple design alternatives and undergoes several iterations. The associated artefacts typically grow from low-fidelity prototypes, such as paper sketches, to high-fidelity prototypes, such as 3D scale models. While previous work has focused on capturing the design rationale behind the decisions that happen during such a design process, this information typically remains secluded and is not easily accessible for the stakeholders. In this paper, we explore how to augment both physical and digital designs with their associated design rationale and decisions. Our exploratory inquiry with three experts in architecture provides qualitative feedback on our augmented reality tool and concepts. We expect that these preliminary results are valuable for future traceability tools for physical and digital designs, even beyond the domain of architecture.

Fig. 1. Based on self-sustaining predictions (e.g. the sun will set), FORTNIoT can deduce when trigger-condition-action rules (e.g. IF sun set AND anyone home THEN lower the rolling shutter) will trigger in the near future and what effects they will cause (e.g. the rolling shutter will lower). Ubiquitous environments, such as smart homes, are becoming more intelligent and autonomous. As a result, their behavior becomes harder to grasp and unintended behavior becomes more likely. Researchers have contributed tools to better understand and validate an environments' past behavior (e.g. logs, end-user debugging), and to prevent unintended behavior. There is, however, a lack of tools that help users understand the future behavior of such an environment. Information about the actions it will perform, and why it will perform them, remains concealed. In this paper, we contribute FORTNIoT, a well-defined approach that combines self-sustaining predictions (e.g. weather forecasts) and simulations of trigger-condition-action rules to deduce when these rules will trigger in the future and what state changes they will cause to connected smart home entities. We implemented a proof-of-concept of this approach, as well as a visual demonstrator that shows such predictions, including causes and effects, in an overview of a smart home's behavior. A between-subject evaluation with 42 participants indicates that FORTNIoT predictions lead to a more accurate understanding of the future behavior, more confidence in that understanding, and more appropriate trust in what the system will (not) do. We envision a wide variety of situations where predictions about the future are beneficial to inhabitants of smart homes, such as debugging unintended behavior and managing conflicts by exception, and hope to spark a new generation of intelligible tools for ubiquitous environments.

Feedback and feedforward are two fundamental mechanisms that supports users’ activities while interacting with computing devices. While feedback can be easily solved by providing information to the users following the triggering of an action, feedforward is much more complex as it must provide information before an action is performed. Fortunettes is a generic mechanism providing a systematic way of designing feedforward addressing both action and presentation problems. Including a feedforward mechanism significantly increases the complexity of the interactive application hardening developers’ tasks to detect and correct defects. This paper proposes the use of an existing formal notation for describing the behavior of interactive applications and how to exploit that formal model to extend the behavior to offer feedforward. We use a small login example to demonstrate the process and the results.

International audience; Feedback is commonly used to explain what happened in an interface. What if questions, on the other hand, remain mostly unanswered. In this paper, we present the concept of enhanced widgets capable of visualizing their future state, which helps users to understand what will happen without committing to an action. We describe two approaches to extend GUI toolkits to support widget-level feedforward, and illustrate the usefulness of widget-level feedforward in a standardized interface to control the weather radar in commercial aircraft. In our evaluation, we found that users require less clicks to achieve tasks and are more confident about their actions when feedforward information was available. These findings suggest that widget-level feedforward is highly suitable in applications the user is unfamiliar with, or when high confidence is desirable.

Design meetings with multidisciplinary stakeholders are instrumental for design projects. However, design teams face the challenges of synthetizing large amounts of information, often in a limited time, and with minimal common ground. We investigate these challenges through in-the-wild observations of six design meetings in three different projects, with professional design teams that follow a user-centered design methodology. We found that all the observed design meetings had a similar structure consisting of particular phases, in which design activities were organized around artefacts. These artefacts were used as input to disseminate and gather feedback of previous design outcomes, or as output to collect and process a variety of perspectives. From these findings, we synthetize practical guidelines to optimize artefact-based interactions during design meetings.

In this paper, we set out to find what encompasses an appropriate visual language for information presented on near-eye out-of-focus displays. These displays are positioned in a user's peripheral view, very near to the user's eyes, for example on the inside of the temples of a pair of glasses. We explored the usable display area, the role of spatial and retinal variables, and the influence of motion and interaction for such a language. Our findings show that a usable visual language can be accomplished by limiting the possible shapes and by making clever use of orientation and meaningful motion. We found that especially motion is very important to improve perception and comprehension of what is being displayed on near-eye out-of-focus displays, and that perception is further improved if direct interaction with the content is allowed.

Design artefacts are vital to communicate design outcomes, both in remote and co-located settings. However, it is unclear how artefacts are used to mediate interactions between designers and stakeholders of the design process. The purpose of this paper is exploring how professional design teams use artefacts to guide and capture discussions involving multidisciplinary stakeholders while they work in a co-located setting. An earlier draft of this paper was paper published in the Proceedings of the European Conference on Cognitive Ergonomics (ECCE 2017). This work adds substantial clarification of the methodology followed, further details and photographs of the case studies, and an extended discussion about our findings and their relevance for designing interactive systems. We report the observations of six design meetings in three different projects, involving professional design teams that follow a user-centered design approach. Meetings with stakeholders are instrumental for design projects. However, design teams face the challenge of synthesizing large amounts of information, often in a limited time, and with minimal common ground between meeting attendees. We found that all the observed design meetings had a similar structure consisting of a series of particular phases, in which design activities were organized around artefacts. These artefacts were used as input to disseminate and gather feedback of previous design outcomes, or as output to collect and process a variety of perspectives. We discuss the challenges faced by design teams during design meetings, and propose three design directions for interactive systems to coordinate design meetings revolving around artefacts The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) / ERC grant agreement n° 610725 (COnCEPT project)

Design, and in particular user-centered design processes for interactive systems, typically involve multidisciplinary teams. The different and complementary perspectives of the team members enrich the design ideas and decisions, and the involvement of all team members is needed to achieve a user interface for a system that carefully considers all aspects, ranging from user needs to technical requirements. The difficulty is getting all team members involved in the early stages of design and communicating design ideas and decisions in a way that all team members can understand them and use them in an appropriate way in later stages of the process. This chapter describes the COMuICSer storyboarding technique, which presents the scenario of use of a future system in a way that is understandable for each team member, regardless of their background. Based on an observational study in which multidisciplinary teams collaboratively created storyboards during a co-located session, we present recommendations for the facilitation of co-located collaborative storyboarding sessions for multidisciplinary teams and digital tool support for this type of group work.

Omni-directional video (ODV) is a novel medium that offers viewers a 360o panoramic recording. This type of content will become more common within our living rooms in the near future, seeing that immersive displaying technologies such as 3D television are on the rise. However, little attention has been given to how to interact with ODV content. We present a gesture elicitation study in which we asked users to perform mid-air gestures that they consider to be appropriate for ODV interaction, both for individual as well as collocated settings. We are interested in the gesture variations and adaptations that come forth from individual and collocated usage. To this end, we gathered quantitative and qualitative data by means of observations, motion capture, questionnaires and interviews. This data resulted in a user-defined gesture set for ODV, alongside an in-depth analysis of the variation in gestures we observed during the study.

Choosing an appropriate toolkit for creating a multimodal interface is a cumbersome task. Several specialized toolkits include fusion and fission engines that allow developers to combine and decompose modalities to capture multimodal input and provide multimodal output. Unfortunately, the extent to which these toolkits can facilitate the creation of a multimodal interface is hard or impossible to estimate, due to the absence of a scale where the toolkit's capabilities can be measured on. In this paper, we propose a measurement scale, which allows the assessment of specialized toolkits without need for time-consuming testing or source code analysis. This scale is used to measure and compare the capabilities of three toolkits: CoGenIVE, HephaisTK and ICon.

Multi-touch gained a lot of interest in the last couple of years and the increased availability of multi-touch enabled hardware boosted its development. However, the current diversity of hardware, toolkits, and tools for creating multi-touch interfaces has its downsides: there is only little reusable material and no generally accepted body of knowledge when it comes to the development of multi-touch interfaces. This workshop is the second workshop on this topic and the workshop goal remains unchanged: to seek a consensus on methods, approaches, toolkits, and tools that aid in the engineering of multi-touch interfaces and transcend the differences in available platforms. The patterns mentioned in the title indicate that we are aiming to create a reusable body of knowledge.

Multi-touch gained a lot of interest in the last couple of years and the increased availability of multi-touch enabled hardware boosted its development. However, the current diversity of hardware, toolkits, and tools for creating multi-touch interfaces has its downsides: there is only little reusable material and no generally accepted body of knowledge when it comes to the development of multi-touch interfaces. This workshop seeks a consensus on methods, approaches, toolkits, and tools that aid in the engineering of multi-touch interfaces and transcend the differences in available platforms. The patterns mentioned in the title indicate that we are aiming to create a reusable body of knowledge.

Multi-touch large display interfaces are becoming increasingly popular in public spaces. These spaces impose specific requirements on the accessibility of the user interfaces: most users are not familiar with the interface and expectations with regard to user experience are very high. Multi-touch interaction beyond the traditional move-rotate-scale interactions is often unknown to the public and can become exceedingly complex. We introduce TouchGhosts: visual guides that are embedded in the multi-touch user interface and that demonstrate the available interactions to the user. TouchGhosts are activated while using an interface, providing guidance on the fly and within the context-of-use. Our approach allows to define reconfigurable strategies to decide how or when a TouchGhost should be activated and which particular visualization will be presented to the user.

Collaborative workspaces are in dire need of elegant floor control policies, resolving and preventing conflicts without interrupting the dynamic workflow. Our approach employs the user's roles and focus to extend existing solutions. Roles define a user's responsibilities and privileges during a particular activity; tracking the users' focus provides a means of improving mutual awareness within a multi-user setting. Furthermore, in combination with document properties such as content type and sensitivity, roles make up an effective access control system. We apply the approach to a co-located group of users, interacting simultaneously on a collaborative shared display, which results in graceful (e.g. correct in a socio-organizational context) conflict handling and access to shared data.

Despite increased presence of gestural and multimodal user interfaces in research as well as daily life, development of such systems still mostly relies on programming concepts which have emerged from classic WIMP user interfaces. This workshop proposes to explore the gap between attempts to formalize and structure development for multimodal inter- faces in the research community on the one hand and the lack of adoption of these formal languages and frameworks by practitioners and other researchers on the other hand.

International audience; Representing the behavior of multi-touch interactive systems in a complete, concise and non-ambiguous way is still a challenge for formal description techniques. Indeed, multi-touch interactive systems embed specific constraints that are either cumbersome or impossible to capture with classical formal description techniques. This is due to both the idiosyncratic nature of multi-touch technology (e.g. the fact that each finger represents an input device and that gestures are directly performed on the surface without an additional instrument) and the high dynamicity of interactions usually encountered in this kind of systems. This paper presents a formal description technique able to model multi-touch interactive systems. A layered architecture is also proposed that proposes a generic structure for organizing models of multi-touch systems. We focus the presentation on how to represent the dynamic instantiation of input devices (i.e. finger) and how they can then be exploited dynamically to offer a multiplicity of interaction techniques which are also dynamically instantiated.