496 research outputs found

    Blending the Material and Digital World for Hybrid Interfaces

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    The development of digital technologies in the 21st century is progressing continuously and new device classes such as tablets, smartphones or smartwatches are finding their way into our everyday lives. However, this development also poses problems, as these prevailing touch and gestural interfaces often lack tangibility, take little account of haptic qualities and therefore require full attention from their users. Compared to traditional tools and analog interfaces, the human skills to experience and manipulate material in its natural environment and context remain unexploited. To combine the best of both, a key question is how it is possible to blend the material world and digital world to design and realize novel hybrid interfaces in a meaningful way. Research on Tangible User Interfaces (TUIs) investigates the coupling between physical objects and virtual data. In contrast, hybrid interfaces, which specifically aim to digitally enrich analog artifacts of everyday work, have not yet been sufficiently researched and systematically discussed. Therefore, this doctoral thesis rethinks how user interfaces can provide useful digital functionality while maintaining their physical properties and familiar patterns of use in the real world. However, the development of such hybrid interfaces raises overarching research questions about the design: Which kind of physical interfaces are worth exploring? What type of digital enhancement will improve existing interfaces? How can hybrid interfaces retain their physical properties while enabling new digital functions? What are suitable methods to explore different design? And how to support technology-enthusiast users in prototyping? For a systematic investigation, the thesis builds on a design-oriented, exploratory and iterative development process using digital fabrication methods and novel materials. As a main contribution, four specific research projects are presented that apply and discuss different visual and interactive augmentation principles along real-world applications. The applications range from digitally-enhanced paper, interactive cords over visual watch strap extensions to novel prototyping tools for smart garments. While almost all of them integrate visual feedback and haptic input, none of them are built on rigid, rectangular pixel screens or use standard input modalities, as they all aim to reveal new design approaches. The dissertation shows how valuable it can be to rethink familiar, analog applications while thoughtfully extending them digitally. Finally, this thesis’ extensive work of engineering versatile research platforms is accompanied by overarching conceptual work, user evaluations and technical experiments, as well as literature reviews.Die Durchdringung digitaler Technologien im 21. Jahrhundert schreitet stetig voran und neue GerĂ€teklassen wie Tablets, Smartphones oder Smartwatches erobern unseren Alltag. Diese Entwicklung birgt aber auch Probleme, denn die vorherrschenden berĂŒhrungsempfindlichen OberflĂ€chen berĂŒcksichtigen kaum haptische QualitĂ€ten und erfordern daher die volle Aufmerksamkeit ihrer Nutzer:innen. Im Vergleich zu traditionellen Werkzeugen und analogen Schnittstellen bleiben die menschlichen FĂ€higkeiten ungenutzt, die Umwelt mit allen Sinnen zu begreifen und wahrzunehmen. Um das Beste aus beiden Welten zu vereinen, stellt sich daher die Frage, wie neuartige hybride Schnittstellen sinnvoll gestaltet und realisiert werden können, um die materielle und die digitale Welt zu verschmelzen. In der Forschung zu Tangible User Interfaces (TUIs) wird die Verbindung zwischen physischen Objekten und virtuellen Daten untersucht. Noch nicht ausreichend erforscht wurden hingegen hybride Schnittstellen, die speziell darauf abzielen, physische GegenstĂ€nde des Alltags digital zu erweitern und anhand geeigneter Designparameter und EntwurfsrĂ€ume systematisch zu untersuchen. In dieser Dissertation wird daher untersucht, wie MaterialitĂ€t und DigitalitĂ€t nahtlos ineinander ĂŒbergehen können. Es soll erforscht werden, wie kĂŒnftige Benutzungsschnittstellen nĂŒtzliche digitale Funktionen bereitstellen können, ohne ihre physischen Eigenschaften und vertrauten Nutzungsmuster in der realen Welt zu verlieren. Die Entwicklung solcher hybriden AnsĂ€tze wirft jedoch ĂŒbergreifende Forschungsfragen zum Design auf: Welche Arten von physischen Schnittstellen sind es wert, betrachtet zu werden? Welche Art von digitaler Erweiterung verbessert das Bestehende? Wie können hybride Konzepte ihre physischen Eigenschaften beibehalten und gleichzeitig neue digitale Funktionen ermöglichen? Was sind geeignete Methoden, um verschiedene Designs zu erforschen? Wie kann man Technologiebegeisterte bei der Erstellung von Prototypen unterstĂŒtzen? FĂŒr eine systematische Untersuchung stĂŒtzt sich die Arbeit auf einen designorientierten, explorativen und iterativen Entwicklungsprozess unter Verwendung digitaler Fabrikationsmethoden und neuartiger Materialien. Im Hauptteil werden vier Forschungsprojekte vorgestellt, die verschiedene visuelle und interaktive Prinzipien entlang realer Anwendungen diskutieren. Die Szenarien reichen von digital angereichertem Papier, interaktiven Kordeln ĂŒber visuelle Erweiterungen von UhrarmbĂ€ndern bis hin zu neuartigen Prototyping-Tools fĂŒr intelligente KleidungsstĂŒcke. Um neue DesignansĂ€tze aufzuzeigen, integrieren nahezu alle visuelles Feedback und haptische Eingaben, um Alternativen zu Standard-EingabemodalitĂ€ten auf starren Pixelbildschirmen zu schaffen. Die Dissertation hat gezeigt, wie wertvoll es sein kann, bekannte, analoge Anwendungen zu ĂŒberdenken und sie dabei gleichzeitig mit Bedacht digital zu erweitern. Dabei umfasst die vorliegende Arbeit sowohl realisierte technische Forschungsplattformen als auch ĂŒbergreifende konzeptionelle Arbeiten, Nutzerstudien und technische Experimente sowie die Analyse existierender Forschungsarbeiten

    An “other” experience of videogames: analyzing the connections between videogames and the lived experience of chronic pain

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    In this dissertation I argue for the connections between the lived experience of chronic pain and videogames, exploring what interacts with and influences them. To answer this, I draw on cripistemology as I engage in autoethnography, close-reading and close-gameplay, restorying, mixed methods design, formal interviews, surveys, and inductive coding. I further argue for pushing back against the unhelpful binaries that define the “human” and a false idea of “universal” experience or ability, instead pointing to the intersectionality that better reflects the biopolitics of disability, including both debility and capacity. I engage with these methods in three specific projects that consider additional sub-questions to further tease out why videogames disability, chronic pain, game design, lived experience, human centered design, embodiment in video games have impacted me so deeply and how this ties to my identity as a disabled woman. I further offer this dissertation to highlight the growing research of lived experience and disability in the field of game studies, providing empirical data that offers a foundational look of how I as a member of the chronic pain community think and feel about videogames, as well as how a small portion of the chronic pain community discusses videogames and the range of experiences this encompasses. In doing so, I unpack and argue on the relationship that exists between chronic pain and videogames, and further articulate why this matters. In Chapter 1 I provide necessary history and information regarding my research to better articulate the findings as presented in the following chapters. In Chapter 2, I analyze my connection to Animal Crossing: New Leaf (AC:NL) (Nintendo EAD, 2012) and explore opportunities about genre and mechanics as reflections of my own daily lived experience with chronic pain, especially including my experience in a 2014 pain rehabilitation program. Through this process, I define the “slice of life” genre and argue that AC:NL is exemplary of its markers. In Chapter 3 I provide a deep reading and analysis of Nintendo’s GameCube release Chibi-Robo! (Skip Ltd. et al., 2005) to “restory” the titular main character to have chronic pain like my own. Through the lens of debility and capacitation machines, I map these ideas onto the biopsychosocial model to organize a thorough analysis of his restoried identity. In modding the game’s narrative to reflect a lived experience of chronic pain like my own, I interweave fanfiction with deep reading and deep gameplay to unpack what representation I am looking for in videogames both narratively and mechanically. In this I further argue how this practice can be used to inform future game design. Finally, in Chapter 4, I interview members of the chronic pain community to understand their perspective on the connections between their lived experience with chronic pain and videogames, as well as how additional factors of their identity impact those experiences. For this I engage in a mixed methods design to conduct a survey and formal interviews to offer foundational work on how the chronic pain community interacts with videogames. I offer this project to intersect current research in chronic pain and videogames (and its related technology) that focuses on games as tools for “curing” pain, and argue the importance of considering what embodiment people with chronic pain already have in videogames instead. Ultimately, I argue for the necessity to complicate current design practices in human centered design (HCD) and game design. To do so, I highlight the lived experience of Othered identities to combat misguided notions of “universal” intent. In this, I analyze the inherent connections between videogames and disability, in this case chronic pain, through embodiment and lived experience. I center in on how my experience of chronic pain has impacted the way in which I engage and think about with videogames, and further, how my experiences align with that of the chronic pain community

    Current issues of the Russian language teaching XIV

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    Collection of papers “Current issues of the Russian language teaching XIV” is devoted to issues of methodology of teaching Russian as a foreign language, to issues of linguistics and literary science and includes papers related to the use of online tools and resources in teaching Russian. This collection of papers is a result of the international scientific conference “Current issues of the Russian language teaching XIV”, which was scheduled for 8–10 May 2020, but due to the pandemic COVID-19 took place remotely

    TRANSEUNTIS MUNDI, A NOMADIC ARTISTIC PRACTICE

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    In this practice-led Ph.D. research, I investigate how an artistic practice can respond to the migration phenomena performed by human beings across the planet over millennia ¬– what I refer to as the millennial global human journey. Based on the idea of mobility, I chose to frame this research in the articulation of concepts deriving from the prefix trans: transculture, transhumance and transmediality. This research contributes to studies in art composition by developing the processes and concept of transmedial composition, mainly contributing to the field of New Media Art. This investigation resulted in the work Transeuntis Mundi (TM) Project – a nomadic artistic practice that encompasses: the TM Derive and manual, the TM Archive, the TM VR work Derive 01 and two forms for its notation. Transeuntis mundi (TM), from the Latin language, means the ‘passersby of the world’ and metaphorically personify in this work the millennial migrants and their global journeys. Based on proposals from the Realism art movement and the walking-based methodologies of Walkscapes and DĂ©rive, the TM Derive was created as a nomadic methodology of composition in response to the ideas of migration and ancestry. It is framed by the minimal stories ¬– the form of narrative of this work, captured from field recordings with 3D technology of everyday life worldwide. This material formed the TM Archive, presented in the TM VR work. The TM VR work Transeuntis Mundi Derive 01 is an immersive and interactive performative experience for virtual reality, that artistically brings together stories, sounds, images, people, and places worldwide, ÂŹas a metaphor of the millennial global human migration. This work happens as a VR application using 3D technology with 360Âș image and ambisonic sound, in order to promote an engaged experience through the immersion and interactivity of the participant. This thesis presents and contextualizes these creations: the scope, references, concepts, origin, collaborations, methodology, technologies, and results of this work. It is informed and accompanied by reflexive and critical writing, including an articulation with references of works across different artistic media and fields.UNIRIO Federal University of the State of Rio de Janeir

    Mixed Reality Images: Trilogy of Synthetic Realities III

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    The interplay of physical reality and digital media technologies is getting enhanced by new interfaces. The age of hyper-reality turns into the age of hyper-aesthetics and immersive image technologies - like mixed reality - enable a completely novel form of interaction and user relation with the virtual image structures, the different screen technologies, and embedded physical artefacts for interaction. "Mixed Reality Images" contributes to the wide range of the hyper-aesthetic image discourse to connect the concept of mixed reality images with the approaches in modern media theory, philosophy, perceptual theory, aesthetics, computer graphics and art theory as well as the complex range of image science. This volume monitors and discusses the relation of images and technological evolution in the context of mixed reality within the perspective of an autonomous image science

    International Academic Symposium of Social Science 2022

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    This conference proceedings gathers work and research presented at the International Academic Symposium of Social Science 2022 (IASSC2022) held on July 3, 2022, in Kota Bharu, Kelantan, Malaysia. The conference was jointly organized by the Faculty of Information Management of Universiti Teknologi MARA Kelantan Branch, Malaysia; University of Malaya, Malaysia; Universitas Pembangunan Nasional Veteran Jakarta, Indonesia; Universitas Ngudi Waluyo, Indonesia; Camarines Sur Polytechnic Colleges, Philippines; and UCSI University, Malaysia. Featuring experienced keynote speakers from Malaysia, Australia, and England, this proceeding provides an opportunity for researchers, postgraduate students, and industry practitioners to gain knowledge and understanding of advanced topics concerning digital transformations in the perspective of the social sciences and information systems, focusing on issues, challenges, impacts, and theoretical foundations. This conference proceedings will assist in shaping the future of the academy and industry by compiling state-of-the-art works and future trends in the digital transformation of the social sciences and the field of information systems. It is also considered an interactive platform that enables academicians, practitioners and students from various institutions and industries to collaborate

    Using Crowd-Based Software Repositories to Better Understand Developer-User Interactions

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    Software development is a complex process. To serve the final software product to the end user, developers need to rely on a variety of software artifacts throughout the development process. The term software repository used to denote only containers of source code such as version control systems; more recent usage has generalized the concept to include a plethora of software development artifact kinds and their related meta-data. Broadly speaking, software repositories include version control systems, technical documentation, issue trackers, question and answer sites, distribution information, etc. The software repositories can be based on a specific project (e.g., bug tracker for Firefox), or be crowd-sourced (e.g., questions and answers on technical Q&A websites). Crowd-based software artifacts are created as by-products of developer-user interactions which are sometimes referred to as communication channels. In this thesis, we investigate three distinct crowd-based software repositories that follow different models of developer-user interactions. We believe through a better understanding of the crowd-based software repositories, we can identify challenges in software development and provide insights to improve the software development process. In our first study, we investigate Stack Overflow. It is the largest collection of programming related questions and answers. On Stack Overflow, developers interact with other developers to create crowd-sourced knowledge in the form of questions and answers. The results of the interactions (i.e., the question threads) become valuable information to the entire developer community. Prior research on Stack Overflow tacitly assume that questions receives answers directly on the platform and no need of interaction is required during the process. Meanwhile, the platform allows attaching comments to questions which forms discussions of the question. Our study found that question discussions occur for 59.2% of questions on Stack Overflow. For discussed and solved questions on Stack Overflow, 80.6% of the questions have the discussion begin before the accepted answer is submitted. The results of our study show the importance and nuances of interactions in technical Q&A. We then study dotfiles, a set of publicly shared user-specific configuration files for software tools. There is a culture of sharing dotfiles within the developer community, where the idea is to learn from other developers’ dotfiles and share your variants. The interaction of dotfiles sharing can be viewed as developers sources information from other developers, adapt the information to their own needs, and share their adaptations back to the community. Our study on dotfiles suggests that is a common practice among developers to share dotfiles where 25.8% of the most stared users on GitHub have a dotfiles repository. We provide a taxonomy of the commonly tracked dotfiles and a qualitative study on the commits in dotfiles repositories. We also leveraged the state-of-the-art time-series clustering technique (K-shape) to identify code churn pattern for dotfile edits. This study is the first step towards understanding the practices of maintaining and sharing dotfiles. Finally, we study app stores, the platforms that distribute software products and contain many non-technical attributes (e.g., ratings and reviews) of software products. Three major stakeholders interacts with each other in app stores: the app store owner who governs the operation of the app store; developers who publish applications on the app store; and users who browse and download applications in the app store. App stores often provide means of interaction between all three actors (e.g., app reviews, store policy) and sometimes interactions with in the same actor (e.g., developer forum). We surveyed existing app stores to extract key features from app store operation. We then labeled a representative set of app store collected by web queries. K-means is applied to the labeled app stores to detect natural groupings of app stores. We observed a diverse set of app stores through the process. Instead of a single model that describes all app stores, fundamentally, our observations show that app stores operates differently. This study provide insights in understanding how app stores can affect software development. In summary, we investigated software repositories containing software artifacts created from different developer-user interactions. These software repositories are essential for software development in providing referencing information (i.e., Stack Overflow), improving development productivity (i.e., dotfiles), and help distributing the software products to end users (i.e., app stores)

    A Discourse-Analytic Approach to the Study of Information Disorders: How Online Communities Legitimate Social Bonds When Communing Around Misinformation and Disinformation

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    Information disorders have become prevalent concerns in current social media research. This thesis is focused on the interpersonal dimension of information disorders, in other words, how we can trace, through linguistic and multimodal analysis, the social bonding that occurs when online communities commune around misinformation and disinformation, and how these social bonds are legitimated to enhance perceived credibility. Social bonding in this thesis refers to a social semiotic perspective on the shared values that communities use to construe alignment with others. False information can spread when groups have a shared vested interest, and so information disorders need to be elucidated through an investigation of sociality and bonding, rather than via logical points alone. The term ‘information disorder’ encompasses the spectrum of false information ranging from misinformation (misleading content) to disinformation (deliberately false content), and it is within this landscape of information disorders that this thesis emerges. Two key forms of social semiotic discourse analysis were applied to a dataset of YouTube videos (n=30) and comments (n=1500): affiliation (analysis of social bonding) and legitimation (analysis of resources used to construct legitimacy). The dataset constituted two contrasting case studies. The first was non-politically motivated misinformation in the form of an internet hoax leveraging moral panic about children using technologies. The second was politically motivated conspiracy theories relating to the Notre Dame Cathedral fire. The key findings of this thesis include the multimodal congruence of affiliation and legitimation across YouTube videos, the emergence of technological authority as a key legitimation strategy in online discourse, and the notion of textual personae investigating the complex array of identities that engage with information disorders in comment threads. Additionally, six macro-categories were identified regarding communicative strategies derived from comment threads: scepticism, criticism, education and expertise, nationalism, hate speech, and storytelling and conspiracy. This shows not only how information disorders are spread, but also how they can be countered. The method outlined in this thesis can be applied to future interdisciplinary analyses of political propaganda and current global concerns to develop linguistic and multimodal profiles of various communities engaging with information disorders

    An Analysis of a Public Health Media Campaign in Switzerland

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    This multidisciplinary, grounded theory study analyses public health media communication for Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) and Sexually Transmitted Infections (STI) prevention in Switzerland. Health communication researchers measure the effects of media campaigns on populations to improve prevention. However, such effects may evade measurement due to complex interactions between audiences, media channels and ecology, message content, and targeting strategies. Competing theories explain media effects on health behaviours but there is a dearth of research examining upstream planning and stakeholder perceptions of media campaigns. In effect, interactions between communities, health officials, practitioners, and communication/media stakeholders are politically sensitive, and inaccessible to researchers. Whereas national HIV and STI prevalence was relatively low, the Swiss government aimed to raise general public awareness about risks and prevention. LOVE LIFE 2019 was a multimedia public health campaign centred on a video series promoting male condom use as well as a Safer Sex Check questionnaire providing tailored recommendations. This case study utilises innovative triangulation of media analysis methods including content analysis; digital ecosystem analysis; Goffmann’s theatrical frame and gender display; grammar of visual design and social semiotics; intervention theoretical indicators; and social marketing and extended social marketing, to retroactively understand encoded values and underlying mechanics of the media strategy. Concurrently, international and national authorities and practitioners with diverse stakeholder viewpoints were interviewed regarding media campaign planning in general and LOVE LIFE 2019 specifically. As a complement to grounded theory, thematic analysis elucidated interview and media themes, leading to insights into stakeholder environments and media effects. Grounded theory methodology resulted in a substantive theory comprising four testable propositions to guide further research, identifying relationships between culture, ideology, and values, with implications for public health media communication. Based on the substantive theory, practical recommendations were formulated to address contextual issues: (a) a content strategy for HIV and STI prevention targeting the general public; (b) HIV and STI federal policies; (c) inclusive design processes for human-centered planning; and (d) ethical considerations for public health utilisation of digital media
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