Coping with Digital Wellbeing in a Multi-Device World

While Digital Self-Control Tools (DSCTs) mainly target smartphones, more effort should be put into evaluating multi-device ecosystems to enhance digital wellbeing as users typically use multiple devices at a time. In this paper, we first review more than 300 DSCTs by demonstrating that the majority of them implements a single-device conceptualization that poorly adapts to multi-device settings. Then, we report on the results from an interview and a sketching exercise (N=20) exploring how users make sense of their multi-device digital wellbeing. Findings show that digital wellbeing issues extend beyond smartphones, with the most problematic behaviors deriving from the simultaneous usage of different devices to perform uncorrelated tasks. While this suggests the need of DSCTs that can adapt to different and multiple devices, our work also highlights the importance of learning how to properly behave with technology, e.g., through educational courses, which may be more effective than any lock-out mechanism

Promoting reality awareness in virtual reality through proxemics

Head-Mounted Virtual reality (VR) systems provide full-immersive experiences to users and completely isolate them from the outside world, placing them in unsafe situations. Existing research proposed different alert-based solutions to address this. Our work builds on these studies on notification systems for VR environments from a different perspective. We focus on: (i) exploring alert systems to notify VR users about non-immersed bystanders' in socially related, non-critical interaction contexts; (ii) understanding how best to provide awareness of non-immersed bystanders while maintaining presence and immersion within the Virtual Environment(VE). To this end, we developed single and combined alert cues - leveraging proxemics, perception channels, and push/pull approaches and evaluated those via two user studies. Our findings indicate a strong preference towards maintaining immersion and combining audio and visual cues, push and pull notification techniques that evolve dynamically based on proximity

Agents for educational games and simulations

This book consists mainly of revised papers that were presented at the Agents for Educational Games and Simulation (AEGS) workshop held on May 2, 2011, as part of the Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems (AAMAS) conference in Taipei, Taiwan. The 12 full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from various submissions. The papers are organized topical sections on middleware applications, dialogues and learning, adaption and convergence, and agent applications