Haptic Media Scenes

The aim of this thesis is to apply new media phenomenological and enactive embodied cognition approaches to explain the role of haptic sensitivity and communication in personal computer environments for productivity. Prior theory has given little attention to the role of haptic senses in influencing cognitive processes, and do not frame the richness of haptic communication in interaction design—as haptic interactivity in HCI has historically tended to be designed and analyzed from a perspective on communication as transmissions, sending and receiving haptic signals. The haptic sense may not only mediate contact confirmation and affirmation, but also rich semiotic and affective messages—yet this is a strong contrast between this inherent ability of haptic perception, and current day support for such haptic communication interfaces. I therefore ask: How do the haptic senses (touch and proprioception) impact our cognitive faculty when mediated through digital and sensor technologies? How may these insights be employed in interface design to facilitate rich haptic communication? To answer these questions, I use theoretical close readings that embrace two research fields, new media phenomenology and enactive embodied cognition. The theoretical discussion is supported by neuroscientific evidence, and tested empirically through case studies centered on digital art. I use these insights to develop the concept of the haptic figura, an analytical tool to frame the communicative qualities of haptic media. The concept gauges rich machine- mediated haptic interactivity and communication in systems with a material solution supporting active haptic perception, and the mediation of semiotic and affective messages that are understood and felt. As such the concept may function as a design tool for developers, but also for media critics evaluating haptic media. The tool is used to frame a discussion on opportunities and shortcomings of haptic interfaces for productivity, differentiating between media systems for the hand and the full body. The significance of this investigation is demonstrating that haptic communication is an underutilized element in personal computer environments for productivity and providing an analytical framework for a more nuanced understanding of haptic communication as enabling the mediation of a range of semiotic and affective messages, beyond notification and confirmation interactivity

Emotional Empathy as a Mechanism of Synchronisation in Child-Robot Interaction

Simulating emotional experience, emotional empathy is the fundamental ingredient of interpersonal communication. In the speaker-listener scenario, the speaker is always a child, the listener is a human or a toy robot. Two groups of neurotypical children aged 6 years on average composed the population: one Japanese (n = 20) and one French (n = 20). Revealing potential similarities in communicative exchanges in both groups when in contact with a human or a toy robot, the results might signify that emotional empathy requires the implication of an automatic identification. In this sense, emotional empathy might be considered a broad idiosyncrasy, a kind of synchronisation, offering the mind a peculiar form of communication. Our findings seem to be consistent with the assumption that children’s brains would be constructed to simulate the feelings of others in order to ensure interpersonal synchronisation

The screen as boundary object in the realm of imagination

As an object at the boundary between virtual and physical reality, the screen exists both as a displayer and as a thing displayed, thus functioning as a mediator. The screen's virtual imagery produces a sense of immersion in its viewer, yet at the same time the materiality of the screen produces a sense of rejection from the viewer's complete involvement in the virtual world. The experience of the screen is thus an oscillation between these two states of immersion and rejection. Nowadays, as interactivity becomes a central component of the relationship between viewers and many artworks, the viewer experience of the screen is changing. Unlike the screen experience in non-interactive artworks, such as the traditional static screen of painting or the moving screen of video art in the 1970s, interactive media screen experiences can provide viewers with a more immersive, immediate, and therefore, more intense experience. For example, many digital media artworks provide an interactive experience for viewers by capturing their face or body though real-time computer vision techniques. In this situation, as the camera and the monitor in the artwork encapsulate the interactor's body in an instant feedback loop, the interactor becomes a part of the interface mechanism and responds to the artwork as the system leads or even provokes them. This thesis claims that this kind of direct mirroring in interactive screen-based media artworks does not allow the viewer the critical distance or time needed for self-reflection. The thesis examines the previous aesthetics of spatial and temporal perception, such as presentness and instantaneousness, and the notions of passage and of psychological perception such as reflection, reflexiveness and auratic experience, looking at how these aesthetics can be integrated into new media screen experiences. Based on this theoretical research, the thesis claims that interactive screen spaces can act as a site for expression and representation, both through a doubling effect between the physical and virtual worlds, and through manifold spatial and temporal mappings with the screen experience. These claims are further supported through exploration of screen-based media installations created by the author since 2003.Ph.D.Committee Chair: Mazalek, Ali; Committee Member: Bolter, Jay David; Committee Member: Do, Ellen Yi-Luen; Committee Member: Nitsche, Michael; Committee Member: Winegarden, Claudia R

Robotic Faces: Exploring Dynamical Patterns of Social Interaction between Humans and Robots

Thesis (Ph.D.) - Indiana University, Informatics, 2015The purpose of this dissertation is two-fold: 1) to develop an empirically-based design for an interactive robotic face, and 2) to understand how dynamical aspects of social interaction may be leveraged to design better interactive technologies and/or further our understanding of social cognition. Understanding the role that dynamics plays in social cognition is a challenging problem. This is particularly true in studying cognition via human-robot interaction, which entails both the natural social cognition of the human and the “artificial intelligence” of the robot. Clearly, humans who are interacting with other humans (or even other mammals such as dogs) are cognizant of the social nature of the interaction – their behavior in those cases differs from that when interacting with inanimate objects such as tools. Humans (and many other animals) have some awareness of “social”, some sense of other agents. However, it is not clear how or why. Social interaction patterns vary across culture, context, and individual characteristics of the human interactor. These factors are subsumed into the larger interaction system, influencing the unfolding of the system over time (i.e. the dynamics). The overarching question is whether we can figure out how to utilize factors that influence the dynamics of the social interaction in order to imbue our interactive technologies (robots, clinical AI, decision support systems, etc.) with some "awareness of social", and potentially create more natural interaction paradigms for those technologies. In this work, we explore the above questions across a range of studies, including lab-based experiments, field observations, and placing autonomous, interactive robotic faces in public spaces. We also discuss future work, how this research relates to making sense of what a robot "sees", creating data-driven models of robot social behavior, and development of robotic face personalities

Interactive Fiction in Cinematic Virtual Reality: Epistemology, Creation and Evaluation

This dissertation presents the Interactive Fiction in Cinematic Virtual Reality (IFcVR), an interactive digital narrative (IDN) that brings together the cinematic virtual reality (cVR) and the creation of virtual environments through 360\ub0 video within an interactive fiction (IF) structure. This work is structured in three components: an epistemological approach to this kind of narrative and media hybrid; the creation process of IFcVR, from development to postproduction; and user evaluation of IFcVR. In order to set the foundations for the creation of interactive VR fiction films, I dissect the IFcVR by investigating the aesthetics, narratological and interactive notions that converge and diverge in it, proposing a medium-conscious narratology for this kind of artefact. This analysis led to the production of an IFcVR functional prototype: \u201cZENA\u201d, the first interactive VR film shot in Genoa. ZENA\u2019s creation process is reported proposing some guidelines for interactive and immersive film-makers. In order to evaluate the effectiveness of the IFcVR as an entertaining narrative form and a vehicle for diverse types of messages, this study also proposes a methodology to measure User Experience (UX) on IFcVR. The full evaluation protocol gathers both qualitative and quantitative data through ad hoc instruments. The proposed protocol is illustrated through its pilot application on ZENA. Findings show interactors' positive acceptance of IFcVR as an entertaining experience

Genre, technology and embodied interaction: The evolution of digital game genres and motion gaming

Technology has been given relatively little attention in genre theory, but this article argues that material technologies can be important components in genre development. The argument is based on a historically informed analysis of digital games, with special attention paid to home console video games and recent genre developments within this domain commonly referred to as motion gaming. The main point is that digital game genres imply structured embodied activity. A constitutive element of digital game mediation is a control interface geared to player embodiment, and I propose the concept of ‘interaction modes’ to describe the coupling of technology and player embodiment and show how this can be integrated with genre theory. The resulting framework allows for increased attention to continuity and change in game and communication genres, material and digital technologies, and the related interaction modes

Gesture Assessment of Teachers in an Immersive Rehearsal Environment

Interactive training environments typically include feedback mechanisms designed to help trainees improve their performance through either guided- or self-reflection. When the training system deals with human-to-human communications, as one would find in a teacher, counselor, enterprise culture or cross-cultural trainer, such feedback needs to focus on all aspects of human communication. This means that, in addition to verbal communication, nonverbal messages must be captured and analyzed for semantic meaning. The goal of this dissertation is to employ machine-learning algorithms that semi-automate and, where supported, automate event tagging in training systems developed to improve human-to-human interaction. The specific context in which we prototype and validate these models is the TeachLivE teacher rehearsal environment developed at the University of Central Florida. The choice of this environment was governed by its availability, large user population, extensibility and existing reflection tools found within the AMITIES framework underlying the TeachLivE system. Our contribution includes accuracy improvement of the existing data-driven gesture recognition utility from Microsoft; called Visual Gesture Builder. Using this proposed methodology and tracking sensors, we created a gesture database and used it for the implementation of our proposed online gesture recognition and feedback application. We also investigated multiple methods of feedback provision, including visual and haptics. The results from the conducted user studies indicate the positive impact of the proposed feedback applications and informed body language in teaching competency. In this dissertation, we describe the context in which the algorithms have been developed, the importance of recognizing nonverbal communication in this context, the means of providing semi- and fully-automated feedback associated with nonverbal messaging, and a series of preliminary studies developed to inform the research. Furthermore, we outline future research directions on new case studies, and multimodal annotation and analysis, in order to understand the synchrony of acoustic features and gestures in teaching context