Games against health: a player-centered design philosophy

This paper announces the “Games Against Health” (GAH) research agenda, a criticism of, and response to, the cultural imperialism of the “Games for Health” paradigm. Committed to player-centric design ethics, GAH seeks to dismantle the “games for health” myth as neo-liberal elitist diktat. We acknowledge the values, tastes and pleasures of billions of game players worldwide. We argue that game designers should engage more efficiently in the disimprovement of player health and wellbeing in order to cater to those players’ existing preferences. We hope the paper can serve as a convenient reference for those designing psychotic, sociopathic or antisocial games

Machine Understanding of Human Behavior

A widely accepted prediction is that computing will move to the background, weaving itself into the fabric of our everyday living spaces and projecting the human user into the foreground. If this prediction is to come true, then next generation computing, which we will call human computing, should be about anticipatory user interfaces that should be human-centered, built for humans based on human models. They should transcend the traditional keyboard and mouse to include natural, human-like interactive functions including understanding and emulating certain human behaviors such as affective and social signaling. This article discusses a number of components of human behavior, how they might be integrated into computers, and how far we are from realizing the front end of human computing, that is, how far are we from enabling computers to understand human behavior

Dimensional Affect and Expression in Natural and Mediated Interaction

There is a perceived controversy as to whether the cognitive representation of affect is better modelled using a dimensional or categorical theory. This paper first suggests that these views are, in fact, compatible. The paper then discusses this theme and related issues in reference to a commonly stated application domain of research on human affect and expression: human computer interaction (HCI). The novel suggestion here is that a more realistic framing of studies of human affect in expression with reference to HCI and, particularly HCHI (Human-Computer-Human Interaction) entails some re-formulation of the approach to the basic phenomena themselves. This theme is illustrated with several examples from several recent research projects.Comment: Invited article presented at the 23rd Annual Meeting of the International Society for Psychophysics, Tokyo, Japan, 20-23 October, 2007, Proceedings of Fechner Day vol. 23 (2007

Exploring the Referral and Usage of Science Fiction in HCI Literature

Research on science fiction (sci-fi) in scientific publications has indicated the usage of sci-fi stories, movies or shows to inspire novel Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) research. Yet no studies have analysed sci-fi in a top-ranked computer science conference at present. For that reason, we examine the CHI main track for the presence and nature of sci-fi referrals in relationship to HCI research. We search for six sci-fi terms in a dataset of 5812 CHI main proceedings and code the context of 175 sci-fi referrals in 83 papers indexed in the CHI main track. In our results, we categorize these papers into five contemporary HCI research themes wherein sci-fi and HCI interconnect: 1) Theoretical Design Research; 2) New Interactions; 3) Human-Body Modification or Extension; 4) Human-Robot Interaction and Artificial Intelligence; and 5) Visions of Computing and HCI. In conclusion, we discuss results and implications located in the promising arena of sci-fi and HCI research.Comment: v1: 20 pages, 4 figures, 3 tables, HCI International 2018 accepted submission v2: 20 pages, 4 figures, 3 tables, added link/doi for Springer proceedin

CHI and the future robot enslavement of humankind: a retrospective

As robots from the future, we are compelled to present this important historical document which discusses how the systematic investigation of interactive technology facilitated and hastened the enslavement of mankind by robots during the 21st Century. We describe how the CHI community, in general, was largely responsible for this eventuality, as well as how specific strands of interaction design work were key to the enslavement. We also mention the futility of some reactionary work emergent in your time that sought to challenge the inevitable subjugation. We conclude by congratulating the CHI community for your tireless work in promoting and supporting our evil robot agenda

A Reproducible Study on Remote Heart Rate Measurement

This paper studies the problem of reproducible research in remote photoplethysmography (rPPG). Most of the work published in this domain is assessed on privately-owned databases, making it difficult to evaluate proposed algorithms in a standard and principled manner. As a consequence, we present a new, publicly available database containing a relatively large number of subjects recorded under two different lighting conditions. Also, three state-of-the-art rPPG algorithms from the literature were selected, implemented and released as open source free software. After a thorough, unbiased experimental evaluation in various settings, it is shown that none of the selected algorithms is precise enough to be used in a real-world scenario

Deep Thermal Imaging: Proximate Material Type Recognition in the Wild through Deep Learning of Spatial Surface Temperature Patterns

We introduce Deep Thermal Imaging, a new approach for close-range automatic recognition of materials to enhance the understanding of people and ubiquitous technologies of their proximal environment. Our approach uses a low-cost mobile thermal camera integrated into a smartphone to capture thermal textures. A deep neural network classifies these textures into material types. This approach works effectively without the need for ambient light sources or direct contact with materials. Furthermore, the use of a deep learning network removes the need to handcraft the set of features for different materials. We evaluated the performance of the system by training it to recognise 32 material types in both indoor and outdoor environments. Our approach produced recognition accuracies above 98% in 14,860 images of 15 indoor materials and above 89% in 26,584 images of 17 outdoor materials. We conclude by discussing its potentials for real-time use in HCI applications and future directions.Comment: Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing System

Sonically-enhanced widgets: comments on Brewster and Clarke, ICAD 1997

This paper presents a review of the research surrounding the paper “The Design and Evaluation of a Sonically Enhanced Tool Palette” by Brewster and Clarke from ICAD 1997. A historical perspective is given followed by a discussion of how this work has fed into current developments in the area