Piloting Multimodal Learning Analytics using Mobile Mixed Reality in Health Education

© 2019 IEEE. Mobile mixed reality has been shown to increase higher achievement and lower cognitive load within spatial disciplines. However, traditional methods of assessment restrict examiners ability to holistically assess spatial understanding. Multimodal learning analytics seeks to investigate how combinations of data types such as spatial data and traditional assessment can be combined to better understand both the learner and learning environment. This paper explores the pedagogical possibilities of a smartphone enabled mixed reality multimodal learning analytics case study for health education, focused on learning the anatomy of the heart. The context for this study is the first loop of a design based research study exploring the acquisition and retention of knowledge by piloting the proposed system with practicing health experts. Outcomes from the pilot study showed engagement and enthusiasm of the method among the experts, but also demonstrated problems to overcome in the pedagogical method before deployment with learners

PainDroid: An android-based virtual reality application for pain assessment

Earlier studies in the field of pain research suggest that little efficient intervention currently exists in response to the exponential increase in the prevalence of pain. In this paper, we present an Android application (PainDroid) with multimodal functionality that could be enhanced with Virtual Reality (VR) technology, which has been designed for the purpose of improving the assessment of this notoriously difficult medical concern. Pain- Droid has been evaluated for its usability and acceptability with a pilot group of potential users and clinicians, with initial results suggesting that it can be an effective and usable tool for improving the assessment of pain. Participant experiences indicated that the application was easy to use and the potential of the application was similarly appreciated by the clinicians involved in the evaluation. Our findings may be of considerable interest to healthcare providers, policy makers, and other parties that might be actively involved in the area of pain and VR research

Seamless and Secure VR: Adapting and Evaluating Established Authentication Systems for Virtual Reality

Virtual reality (VR) headsets are enabling a wide range of new opportunities for the user. For example, in the near future users may be able to visit virtual shopping malls and virtually join international conferences. These and many other scenarios pose new questions with regards to privacy and security, in particular authentication of users within the virtual environment. As a first step towards seamless VR authentication, this paper investigates the direct transfer of well-established concepts (PIN, Android unlock patterns) into VR. In a pilot study (N = 5) and a lab study (N = 25), we adapted existing mechanisms and evaluated their usability and security for VR. The results indicate that both PINs and patterns are well suited for authentication in VR. We found that the usability of both methods matched the performance known from the physical world. In addition, the private visual channel makes authentication harder to observe, indicating that authentication in VR using traditional concepts already achieves a good balance in the trade-off between usability and security. The paper contributes to a better understanding of authentication within VR environments, by providing the first investigation of established authentication methods within VR, and presents the base layer for the design of future authentication schemes, which are used in VR environments only

Leveraging Multimodal Interaction and Adaptive Interfaces for Location-based Augmented Reality Islamic Tourism Application

A Location-based Augmented Reality (LBAR) application leveraging multimodal interaction and adaptive interface based on Islamic tourism information was proposed to enhance user experience while travelling. LBAR has the potential to improve tourist experience and help tourists to access relevant information, thus improving their knowledge regarding touristic destination while increasing levels of their entertainment throughout the process. In LBAR application, Point of Interest (POI) displayed are exposed to the “occlusion problem” where the AR contents are visually redundant and overlapping with one another causing the users to loose valuable information. Previous research have suggested the design of AR POI which help user to see the augmented POI clearly. The user can click on the desired POI but it still displays a large amount of POI. From our best study, there is limitation of research studying on how to minimize the amount of displayed POI based on user’s current needs. Therefore, in this paper we suggest to use an adaptive user interface and multimodal interaction to solve this problem. We discussed the process of analysing and designing the user interfaces of previous studies. The proposed mobile solution was presented by explaining the application contents, the combination of adaptive multimodal inputs, system’s flow chart and multimodal task definition. Then the user evaluation was conducted to measure the level of satisfaction in terms of the usability of the application. A total of 24 Islamic tourists have participated in this study. The findings revealed that the average SUS score of 75.83 of respondents agree in terms of satisfaction of the LBAR application to be utilized while traveling. Finally, we conclude this paper by providing the suggestion of future works

An Introduction to 3D User Interface Design

3D user interface design is a critical component of any virtual environment (VE) application. In this paper, we present a broad overview of three-dimensional (3D) interaction and user interfaces. We discuss the effect of common VE hardware devices on user interaction, as well as interaction techniques for generic 3D tasks and the use of traditional two-dimensional interaction styles in 3D environments. We divide most user interaction tasks into three categories: navigation, selection/manipulation, and system control. Throughout the paper, our focus is on presenting not only the available techniques, but also practical guidelines for 3D interaction design and widely held myths. Finally, we briefly discuss two approaches to 3D interaction design, and some example applications with complex 3D interaction requirements. We also present an annotated online bibliography as a reference companion to this article

Toward future 'mixed reality' learning spaces for STEAM education

Digital technology is becoming more integrated and part of modern society. As this begins to happen, technologies including augmented reality, virtual reality, 3d printing and user supplied mobile devices (collectively referred to as mixed reality) are often being touted as likely to become more a part of the classroom and learning environment. In the discipline areas of STEAM education, experts are expected to be at the forefront of technology and how it might fit into their classroom. This is especially important because increasingly, educators are finding themselves surrounded by new learners that expect to be engaged with participatory, interactive, sensory-rich, experimental activities with greater opportunities for student input and creativity. This paper will explore learner and academic perspectives on mixed reality case studies in 3d spatial design (multimedia and architecture), paramedic science and information technology, through the use of existing data as well as additional one-on-one interviews around the use of mixed reality in the classroom. Results show that mixed reality can provide engagement, critical thinking and problem solving benefits for students in line with this new generation of learners, but also demonstrates that more work needs to be done to refine mixed reality solutions for the classroom

Digital interaction: where are we going?

In the framework of the AVI 2018 Conference, the interuniversity center ECONA has organized a thematic workshop on "Digital Interaction: where are we going?". Six contributions from the ECONA members investigate different perspectives around this thematic

Vision systems with the human in the loop

The emerging cognitive vision paradigm deals with vision systems that apply machine learning and automatic reasoning in order to learn from what they perceive. Cognitive vision systems can rate the relevance and consistency of newly acquired knowledge, they can adapt to their environment and thus will exhibit high robustness. This contribution presents vision systems that aim at flexibility and robustness. One is tailored for content-based image retrieval, the others are cognitive vision systems that constitute prototypes of visual active memories which evaluate, gather, and integrate contextual knowledge for visual analysis. All three systems are designed to interact with human users. After we will have discussed adaptive content-based image retrieval and object and action recognition in an office environment, the issue of assessing cognitive systems will be raised. Experiences from psychologically evaluated human-machine interactions will be reported and the promising potential of psychologically-based usability experiments will be stressed

An Augmented Interaction Strategy For Designing Human-Machine Interfaces For Hydraulic Excavators

Lack of adequate information feedback and work visibility, and fatigue due to repetition have been identified as the major usability gaps in the human-machine interface (HMI) design of modern hydraulic excavators that subject operators to undue mental and physical workload, resulting in poor performance. To address these gaps, this work proposed an innovative interaction strategy, termed “augmented interaction”, for enhancing the usability of the hydraulic excavator. Augmented interaction involves the embodiment of heads-up display and coordinated control schemes into an efficient, effective and safe HMI. Augmented interaction was demonstrated using a framework consisting of three phases: Design, Implementation/Visualization, and Evaluation (D.IV.E). Guided by this framework, two alternative HMI design concepts (Design A: featuring heads-up display and coordinated control; and Design B: featuring heads-up display and joystick controls) in addition to the existing HMI design (Design C: featuring monitor display and joystick controls) were prototyped. A mixed reality seating buck simulator, named the Hydraulic Excavator Augmented Reality Simulator (H.E.A.R.S), was used to implement the designs and simulate a work environment along with a rock excavation task scenario. A usability evaluation was conducted with twenty participants to characterize the impact of the new HMI types using quantitative (task completion time, TCT; and operating error, OER) and qualitative (subjective workload and user preference) metrics. The results indicated that participants had a shorter TCT with Design A. For OER, there was a lower error probability due to collisions (PER1) with Design A, and lower error probability due to misses (PER2)with Design B. The subjective measures showed a lower overall workload and a high preference for Design B. It was concluded that augmented interaction provides a viable solution for enhancing the usability of the HMI of a hydraulic excavator