34 research outputs found
The Matter of Future Heritage
In 2018, for the first time, the University of Bologna’s Board of PhD in Architecture and Design Culture assigned second-year PhD students the task of developing and managing an international conference and publishing its works. The organisers of the first edition of this initiative – Giacomo Corda, Pamela Lama, Viviana Lorenzo, Sara Maldina, Lia Marchi, Martina Massari and Giulia Custodi – have chosen to leverage the solid relationship between the Department of Architecture and the Municipality of Bologna to publish a call having to do with the European Year of Cultural Heritage 2018, in which the Municipality was involved.
The theme chosen for the call, The Matter of Future Heritage, set itself the ambitious goal of questioning the future of a field of research – Cultural Heritage (CH) – that is constantly being redefined. A work that was made particularly complex in Europe by the development of the H2020 programme, where the topic entered, surprisingly, not as a protagonist but rather as an articulation of other subjects that in the vision of the programme seemed evidently more urgent and, one might say, dominant. The resulting tensions have been considerable and with both negative and positive implications, all the more evident if we refer to the issues that are closest to us namely the city and the landscape
New HCI techniques for better living through technology
In the Human Computer Interaction community, researchers work on many
projects that investigate the efficacy of new technologies for better living,
but unlike other research fields, these researchers must have an approach
that is typically multi-disciplinary.
Technology is always developing thus improving our lives in many ways
like education, health and communication. This due to the fact that it is
supposed to make life easier.
This dissertation explores three main aspects: the first is learning with
new technologies, the second is the improvement of real life by using innovative
devices while the third is the usage of mobile devices in combination
with image processing algorithms and computer graphics techniques.
We firstly describe the progress on the state of the art and related work
that have been necessary to implement such tools on commodity hardware
and deploy them in both mobile and desktop settings.
We propose the usage of different technologies in different settings, comparing
these solutions for enhancing the interaction experience by introducing
virtual/augmented reality tools for supporting this kind of activities.
We also applied well-known gamification techniques coming from different
mobile applications for demonstrating how users can be entertained and
motivated in their working out.
We describe our design and prototype of several integrated systems created
to improve the educational process, to enhance the shopping experience,
to provide new experiences for travellers and even to improve fitness
and wellness activities.
Finally, we discuss our findings and frame them in the broader context
of better living thanks to technology, drawing the lessons learnt from each
work while also proposing relative future work
Assessing User Experience in A Virtual Reality Crowd Simulation
Agent-based crowd simulations are used for modelling building and space usage,
allowing designers to explore hypothetical real-world scenarios, including extraordinary
events such as evacuations. Existing work which engages Virtual Reality (VR) as a platform
for crowd simulations has been primarily focussed on the validation of simulation models
through observation; that is the use of embellishments to enhance a sense of immersion or
constrained studies of proxemics. However, human participation in crowd simulations also
has the potential to provide richer and more informative simulation outcomes. This issue
has not yet been widely considered by researchers and warrants further study of user
experience and behaviour.
This work examines VR crowd simulation through the lens of user experience and
simulation outcomes. A task-based simulation scenario has been created in which a
participant walks freely, and interacts with agents using the same social-force model which
mediates agent-to-agent interactions. It examines and reports the effects of crowd density
on both the users affective state and behaviour, also comparing it with that of simulated
agents. The results gained from this study indicate a significant increase in negative affect
with density, measured using a self-report scale, it also shows significant differences in
some aspects of user behaviour, such as increased instinctive reactions during high-density
situations. This work then discusses how the results relate to VR simulation design for mixed
human-agent scenarios