Virtual Field Studies: Conducting Studies on Public Displays in Virtual Reality

Field studies on public displays can be difficult, expensive, and time-consuming. We investigate the feasibility of using virtual reality (VR) as a test-bed to evaluate deployments of public displays. Specifically, we investigate whether results from virtual field studies, conducted in a virtual public space, would match the results from a corresponding real-world setting. We report on two empirical user studies where we compared audience behavior around a virtual public display in the virtual world to audience behavior around a real public display. We found that virtual field studies can be a powerful research tool, as in both studies we observed largely similar behavior between the settings. We discuss the opportunities, challenges, and limitations of using virtual reality to conduct field studies, and provide lessons learned from our work that can help researchers decide whether to employ VR in their research and what factors to account for if doing so

Yüz analizine dayalı derin öğrenme tabanlı bir ilgi tespit sisteminin gerçekleştirilmesi

06.03.2018 tarihli ve 30352 sayılı Resmi Gazetede yayımlanan “Yükseköğretim Kanunu İle Bazı Kanun Ve Kanun Hükmünde Kararnamelerde Değişiklik Yapılması Hakkında Kanun” ile 18.06.2018 tarihli “Lisansüstü Tezlerin Elektronik Ortamda Toplanması, Düzenlenmesi ve Erişime Açılmasına İlişkin Yönerge” gereğince tam metin erişime açılmıştır.Pazarlama alanında, en heyecan verici, yenilikçi ve gelecek vaat eden konulardan biri müşteri ilgisinin ölçülmesidir. Müşteri ilgisini ölçmek için geleneksel bir yaklaşım olan müşteri memnuniyet anketleri, günümüzde müşteriyi rahatsız edici bir yöntem olarak değerlendirilmektedir. Diğer bir müşteri ilgisi ölçme yöntemi de bir insan gözlemcinin müşteri davranışlarını izleyip kaydetmesi şeklinde olabilir ancak bu da deneyimli ve yetenekli insan gerektirir. Ayrıca her gözlemci, insan davranışlarını farklı yorumlayabileceğinden, sonuçlar tarafsız olamayabilir. Bu nedenle müşteri davranışlarını izlemek için, rahatsız edici olmayan, nicel, tarafsız ve otomatik sonuçlar üretebilen sistemlere ihtiyaç vardır. Bu tez çalışması ile müşteri davranışının bilgisayar aracılığı ile izlenmesi ve bir ürüne ya da reklama ilgi duyan müşterilerin belirlenmesi için derin öğrenme tabanlı bir sistem önerilmektedir. Bu sistem ilk olarak müşterinin dikkatini baş yönelimi tahminiyle ölçer. Baş pozisyonları reklama veya ilgilenilen ürüne yönelik olan müşteriler için, sistem yüz ifadelerini analiz eder ve yüz ifadesine dayalı olarak müşterilerin ürünlere veya reklamlara olan ilgisini tahmin eder. Sistem ön yüz görüntülerinin algılanmasıyla çalışmaya başlar, ardından yüz ifadesi tespiti için önemli olan ağız, göz ve kaş bileşenleri tespit edilip yüz üzerinde bölütlenir ve bölütlenmiş bir yüz görüntüsü oluşturulur. Son olarak, ham yüz görüntüleri ile birlikte, elde edilen bölütlenmiş yüz görüntülerine ait güven değerleri kullanılarak yüz ifadeleri tespit edilir. İki aşamalı olan bu yüz ifadesi tespit yöntemi, parça tabanlı özellikler ile bütünsel yüz özelliklerini birleştirerek daha güçlü bir yüz ifadesi sistemi sunar. Sistemde ayrıca müşteri yüzleri etiketlenerek video çerçevesi boyunca takip edilir. Her müşteriye ait yüz ifadeleri belirli bir süre boyunca depolanır ve bu süre sonunda müşterinin ürüne ilgili olup olmadığı ile ilgili sonuç bildirilir. Önerilen sistem müşteri davranışlarının izlenmesine ek olarak, farklı odak gruplarının çeşitli fikirlere, resimlere, seslere, kelimelere ve diğer uyaranlara duygusal tepkisini izlemek için de kullanılabilir.In the marketing research, one of the most exciting, innovative, and promising trends is quantification of customer interest. The customer satisfaction survey, which is a traditional approach to quantify customer interest, has come to be considered as an invasive method in recent years. Recording customer interest by a salesperson who observes customers' behavior during the advertisement watching or shopping phase is another approach. However, this task requires specific skills for every salesperson, and each observer may interpret customer behaviors differently. Consequently, there is a critical need to develop non-invasive, objective, and quantitative tools for monitoring customer interest. This study presents a deep learning-based system for monitoring customer behavior specifically for detection of interest. The proposed system first measures customer attention through head pose estimation. For those customers whose heads are oriented toward the advertisement or the product of interest, the system further analyzes the facial expressions and reports customers' interest. The proposed system starts by detecting frontal face poses; facial components important for facial expression recognition are then segmented and an iconized face image is generated; finally, facial expressions are analyzed using the confidence values of obtained iconized face image combined with the raw facial images. This approach fuses local part-based features with holistic facial information for robust facial expression recognition. The system is also tracked human faces along the video frame by labeling the faces. The facial expressions of each customer are stored for a certain period of time; at the end of this period, the result of whether the customer is related to the product or advirtesement is notified. With the proposed processing pipeline, using a basic imaging device, such as a webcam, head pose estimation and facial expression recognition is possible. The proposed pipeline can be used to monitor emotional response of focus groups to various ideas, pictures, sounds, words, and other stimuli

How can people’s spatial behaviour be used to dynamically lay out content on multi-user, interactive screens, and how does this dynamic layout affect people’s spatial behaviour?

This thesis aims to explore the influencing factors of layout and presentation changes of large interactive and adaptive displays in multi-user interactions and social organisation. While significant bodies of work have considered the interactivity of digital displays to identify phenomena of use, these have been conducted in localised isolation, and do not address the wider ecological impacts for the influences of emergent organisations of simultaneous use where a system or display may support this. Through considerations of how display presentation and layout can influence the emergence of social organisations, a series of iterative lab-based studies have been carried out to assess and inform a number of interaction modalities. This leads to a series of design recommendations around a system-led approach in presenting a mechanism to support approach behaviours and the maximised utility of a large display, whilst mitigating conflict between social boundaries and impact to user experience. This has identified a range of factors in both the mechanisms of natural social organisation and supporting layout changes and adaptations in maintaining user experience leading towards wider use, scaffolding features of the environment, on-going use, and adaptation within a novel system-led approach. This has presented clear implications to the field, and identified significant areas for further research to refine the subtle factors of interaction which have been identified here

How can people’s spatial behaviour be used to dynamically lay out content on multi-user, interactive screens, and how does this dynamic layout affect people’s spatial behaviour?

This thesis aims to explore the influencing factors of layout and presentation changes of large interactive and adaptive displays in multi-user interactions and social organisation. While significant bodies of work have considered the interactivity of digital displays to identify phenomena of use, these have been conducted in localised isolation, and do not address the wider ecological impacts for the influences of emergent organisations of simultaneous use where a system or display may support this. Through considerations of how display presentation and layout can influence the emergence of social organisations, a series of iterative lab-based studies have been carried out to assess and inform a number of interaction modalities. This leads to a series of design recommendations around a system-led approach in presenting a mechanism to support approach behaviours and the maximised utility of a large display, whilst mitigating conflict between social boundaries and impact to user experience. This has identified a range of factors in both the mechanisms of natural social organisation and supporting layout changes and adaptations in maintaining user experience leading towards wider use, scaffolding features of the environment, on-going use, and adaptation within a novel system-led approach. This has presented clear implications to the field, and identified significant areas for further research to refine the subtle factors of interaction which have been identified here