Haptic rules! augmenting the gaming experience in traditional games: the case of Foosball

Haptic sensations are a crucial aspect of everyday interaction. We touch, lift, move, and probe objects in our everyday activities. However, whilst the importance of haptic feedback has often been emphasized in gaming, haptics has been rarely used to enhance the experience in traditional (non-digital) games. In the last 50 years, technological advancement has allowed an easier access to haptic feedback. Digital games have exploited such access mainly (1) to enhance visual and acoustic feedback, and (2) to reproduce realistic feedbacks in augmented and virtual environments. Here, we re-think haptic feedback by focusing on game augmentation to enrich the gaming experience and gameplay in non-technological games. We describe the design process that led us to define the concept of “haptic rules” as haptic-based enhancement in interference play, where haptic feedback is delivered by users to users within the game as a further mode of interaction. We apply the idea of haptic rules to the game of foosball, evaluating the effect on the gameplay and user experience

Defining Haptic Experience: Foundations for Understanding, Communicating, and Evaluating HX

Haptic technology is maturing, with expectations and evidence that it will contribute to user experience (UX). However, we have very little understanding about how haptic technology can influence people’s experience. Researchers and designers need a way to understand, communicate, and evaluate haptic technology’s effect on UX. From a literature review and two studies – one with haptics novices, the other with expert hapticians – we developed a theoretical model of the factors that constitute a good haptic experience (HX). We define HX and propose its constituent factors: design parameters of Timeliness, Density, Intensity, and Timbre; the cross-cutting concern of Personalization; usability requirements of Utility, Causality, Consistency, and Saliency; and experiential factors of Harmony, Expressivity, Autotelics, Immersion, and Realism as guiding constructs important for haptic experience. This model will help guide design and research of haptic systems, inform language around haptics, and provide the basis for evaluative instruments, such as checklists, heuristics, or questionnaires.We acknowledge the support of the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), [funding reference number 2019-06589

A tutorial for olfaction-based multisensorial media application design and evaluation

© ACM, 2017. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of ACM for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in PUBLICATION, {VOL50, ISS5, September 2017} https://doi.org/10.1145/310824

Measuring Haptic Experience: Evidence for the HX model through scale development

Haptic technology allows one to receive tactile information through the sense of touch. Increasingly, designers and researchers are employing haptic feedback with the aim to improve user experience (UX). While they see the importance and significance of including haptic feedback in everyday applications, there is a lack of standardized tools to assess the quality of these experiences. They currently use qualitative methods or demos for obtaining user feedback; neither approach scales to large studies or remote work. We aim to bridge this gap and complement the existing approaches by developing an instrument that comprehensively measures haptic user experience. We follow a systematic scale development framework to build, evaluate and establish a first draft of the haptic user experience scale - the Haptic eXperience Index (HXI), which has the potential to measure the effectiveness of haptic experiences. This scale is built upon the recent Haptic Experience (HX) model and it contributes a novel instrument that measures the five foundational constructs for designing haptic experiences: Harmony, Expressivity, Autotelics, Immersion, and Realism. We iteratively developed a set of 20 questions through a series of studies: expert reviews (N=6), face validity (N=8), cognitive interviews (N=9), and exploratory factor analysis (N=261). Our results provide evidence for the HX model’s five factors, with an enriched description of each factor, and implications for how to measure HX, including a first proposed draft of the HXI. In this process, we gained an in-depth understanding of the factors we considered for developing HXI; what applications can be chosen for representing a rather diverse set of experiences; understand the limitations, and define future work. This HXI is a steppingstone towards a generalized evaluation tool to measure haptic experience

Empirical studies of Quality of Experience (QoE) : A Systematic Literature Survey

Quality of Experience (QoE) is a relatively new phenomenon. The main focus of this thesis has been to conduct a systematic literature survey of research done in the field of QoE over a ten year period. The method, developed by A. Fink, has been used to survey empirical studies. A framework of QoE has been developed, which created the possibility of grouping together and analysing all the studies in a common framework. In total, 44 studies were analysed. 66 per cent of them were studies with human participants and 34 per cent of them were studies without human participants. The majority of the selected empirical studies have analysed the sub-aspect ‘satisfaction’. Among other vital sub-aspects, which were of interest to researches, were ‘usefulness’, ‘ease of use’, ‘communication’, ‘loss/packet loss’, ‘delay’, ‘bandwidth’, and ‘jitter’. The results of this survey show that different sub-aspects depend on different services. It is not enough that one sub-aspect functions very well, because most of sub-aspects are closely related to each other. Therefore, it is very important that sub-aspects, which are dependent on each other, are functioning as one group to achieve higher QoE on user experience. This thesis may contribute to deeper understanding of the phenomenon QoE. Knowledge of QoE can bring in new ideas and new possibilities for developing a new system or products for achieving satisfaction of user experience

Network monitoring in public clouds: issues, methodologies, and applications

Cloud computing adoption is rapidly growing thanks to the carried large technical and economical advantages. Its effects can be observed also looking at the fast increase of cloud traffic: in accordance with recent forecasts, more than 75\% of the overall datacenter traffic will be cloud traffic by 2018. Accordingly, huge investments have been made by providers in network infrastructures. Networks of geographically distributed datacenters have been built, which require efficient and accurate monitoring activities to be operated. However, providers rarely expose information about the state of cloud networks or their design, and seldom make promises about their performance. In this scenario, cloud customers therefore have to cope with performance unpredictability in spite of the primary role played by the network. Indeed, according to the deployment practices adopted and the functional separation of the application layers often implemented, the network heavily influences the performance of the cloud services, also impacting costs and revenues. In this thesis cloud networks are investigated enforcing non-cooperative approaches, i.e.~that do not require access to any information restricted to entities involved in the cloud service provision. A platform to monitor cloud networks from the point of view of the customer is presented. Such a platform enables general customers---even those with limited expertise in the configuration and the management of cloud resources---to obtain valuable information about the state of the cloud network, according to a set of factors under their control. A detailed characterization of the cloud network and of its performance is provided, thanks to extensive experimentations performed during the last years on the infrastructures of the two leading cloud providers (Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure). The information base gathered by enforcing the proposed approaches allows customers to better understand the characteristics of these complex network infrastructures. Moreover, experimental results are also useful to the provider for understanding the quality of service perceived by customers. By properly interpreting the obtained results, usage guidelines can be devised which allow to enhance the achievable performance and reduce costs. As a particular case study, the thesis also shows how monitoring information can be leveraged by the customer to implement convenient mechanisms to scale cloud resources without any a priori knowledge. More in general, we believe that this thesis provides a better-defined picture of the characteristics of the complex cloud network infrastructures, also providing the scientific community with useful tools for characterizing them in the future