Implementing a Wizard of Oz Tool for Augmented Reality

This thesis aims to explore Wizard of Oz testing in conjunction with Augmented Reality (AR) and focus has been put on testing AR with Head Mounted Displays. The recent increase of interest in HMDs with products such as MOD Live from Recon Instruments and Google's Project Glass puts new demands and possibilities on human-computer interaction. Since the commercial market for HMDs is still in its infancy the need to explore different design approaches is very much present. One way to conduct experiments on human-machine interaction is with the help of a Wizard of Oz tool. During the thesis we have developed such a tool to support designers in researching usability and interaction. The tool provides a user friendly framework to carry out user case studies focused on AR with HMDs. After input and feedback from stakeholders and experts we believe that, even though the tool is mainly meant to be used in conjunction with AR in HMDs, the tool can be applied to other areas as well

Affective learning: improving engagement and enhancing learning with affect-aware feedback

This paper describes the design and ecologically valid evaluation of a learner model that lies at the heart of an intelligent learning environment called iTalk2Learn. A core objective of the learner model is to adapt formative feedback based on students’ affective states. Types of adaptation include what type of formative feedback should be provided and how it should be presented. Two Bayesian networks trained with data gathered in a series of Wizard-of-Oz studies are used for the adaptation process. This paper reports results from a quasi-experimental evaluation, in authentic classroom settings, which compared a version of iTalk2Learn that adapted feedback based on students’ affective states as they were talking aloud with the system (the affect condition) with one that provided feedback based only on the students’ performance (the non-affect condition). Our results suggest that affect-aware support contributes to reducing boredom and off-task behavior, and may have an effect on learning. We discuss the internal and ecological validity of the study, in light of pedagogical considerations that informed the design of the two conditions. Overall, the results of the study have implications both for the design of educational technology and for classroom approaches to teaching, because they highlight the important role that affect-aware modelling plays in the adaptive delivery of formative feedback to support learning

Development and evaluation of a smartphone-based system for inspection of road maintenance work

Abstract. In the road construction industry, doing work inspection is a laborious and resource-consuming job because of the distributed work site. Contractors in Finland require to capture photos of every road fix they have done as proof of their work. It is well-established that with the help of smartphone technology, these kinds of manual work can be reduced. This thesis aims to develop and evaluate a smartphone-based system to capture video evidence of task completion. The system, designed and developed in this thesis, consists of an Android application named ’Road Recorder’ and a web tool for managing the content collected by Road Recorder. While mounted to a vehicle’s dashboard used in construction work, the Road Recorder can record the videos of road surface and geo-location information and some other metadata and send them to a remote server that is inspected using the web tool. Users of different backgrounds were given the system to accomplish some tasks and were observed closely. The users were interviewed at the end, and responses were analyzed to find the usability of the applications. The results indicate the high usability of the Road Recorder application and reveal possible improvements for the Road Recorder management web application. Overall, Road Recorder is a great step towards the automation of such construction work inspection. Though there were some limitations in the evaluation process, it demonstrates that Road Recorder is easy to use and can be a useful tool in the industry

How Can a Robot Signal Its Incapability to Perform a Certain Task to Humans in an Acceptable Manner?

In this paper, a robot that is using politeness to overcome its incapability to serve is presented. The mobile robot “Alex” is interacting with human office colleagues in their environment and delivers messages, phone calls, and companionship. The robot's battery capacity is not sufficient to survive a full working day. Thus, the robot needs to recharge during the day. By doing so it is unavailable for tasks that involve movement. The study presented in this paper supports the idea that an incapability of fullfiling an appointed task can be overcome by politeness and showing appropriate behaviour. The results, reveal that, even the simple adjustment of spoken utterances towards a more polite phrasing can change the human's perception of the robot companion. This change in the perception can be made visible by analysing the human's behaviour towards the robot

PhysioVR: a novel mobile virtual reality framework for physiological computing

Virtual Reality (VR) is morphing into a ubiquitous technology by leveraging of smartphones and screenless cases in order to provide highly immersive experiences at a low price point. The result of this shift in paradigm is now known as mobile VR (mVR). Although mVR offers numerous advantages over conventional immersive VR methods, one of the biggest limitations is related with the interaction pathways available for the mVR experiences. Using physiological computing principles, we created the PhysioVR framework, an Open-Source software tool developed to facilitate the integration of physiological signals measured through wearable devices in mVR applications. PhysioVR includes heart rate (HR) signals from Android wearables, electroencephalography (EEG) signals from a low cost brain computer interface and electromyography (EMG) signals from a wireless armband. The physiological sensors are connected with a smartphone via Bluetooth and the PhysioVR facilitates the streaming of the data using UDP communication protocol, thus allowing a multicast transmission for a third party application such as the Unity3D game engine. Furthermore, the framework provides a bidirectional communication with the VR content allowing an external event triggering using a real-time control as well as data recording options. We developed a demo game project called EmoCat Rescue which encourage players to modulate HR levels in order to successfully complete the in-game mission. EmoCat Rescue is included in the PhysioVR project which can be freely downloaded. This framework simplifies the acquisition, streaming and recording of multiple physiological signals and parameters from wearable consumer devices providing a single and efficient interface to create novel physiologically-responsive mVR applications.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio