Collaboration meets interactive surfaces and spaces (CMIS): walls, tables, mobiles, and wearables

The CMIS workshop proposes to bring together researchers who are interested in improving collaborative experiences through the combination of multiple interaction surfaces with diverse sizes and formats, ranging from large-scale walls, to tables, mobiles, and wearables. The opportunities for innovation exist, but the ISS, CHI, CSCW, and other HCI communities have not yet thoroughly addressed the prob lem of bringing effective collaboration activities together using multiple interactive surfaces, especially in complex work domains. Of particular interest is the potential synergy that one can obtain by effectively combining different-sized surfaces and sharing information between devices.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Hybrid-Rendering Techniques in GPU

Ray tracing has long been the holy grail of real time rendering. This technique, commonly used for photo realism, simulates the physical behavior of light, at the cost of being computationally heavy. With the introduction of Nvidia RTX graphic card family, which provides hardware support for ray tracing, this technique started to look like a reality for real time. However, the same problems that afflicted the usage of this technique remain, and even with specialized hardware it is still extremely expensive. To account for these drawbacks, researchers and developers pair this technique with rasterization and denoising. This results in a hybrid system that tries to join the best of both worlds, having both photo realistic quality and real time performance. In this work we intend on further exploring hybrid render systems, offering a review of the state of the art with a special focus on real time ray tracing and our own hybrid implementation with photo realistic quality and real time performance (>30 fps), implemented using the Vulkan API. In this project, we highlight the detailed analysis of the impacts of History Rectification (Variance Color Clamping) on the temporal filter component of the denoising system and how to overcome the introduced artifacts. Additionally, we also highlight the analysis of the introduction of a separable blur on the spatial filter and the introduction of Reinhard Tone Mapping prior to denoising, consequently improving this procedure

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

Moodoo: Indoor positioning analytics for characterising classroom teaching

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020. This paper presents Moodoo, a system that models how teachers make use of classroom spaces by automatically analysing indoor positioning traces. We illustrate the potential of the system through an authentic study aimed at enabling the characterisation of teachers’ instructional behaviours in the classroom. Data were analysed from seven teachers delivering three distinct types of classes to +190 students in the context of physics education. Results show exemplars of how teaching positioning traces reflect the characteristics of the learning designs and can enable the differentiation of teaching strategies related to the use of classroom space. The contribution of the paper is a set of conceptual mappings from x − y positional data to meaningful constructs, grounded in the theory of Spatial Pedagogy, and its implementation as a composable library of open source algorithms. These are to our knowledge the first automated spatial metrics to map from low-level teacher’s positioning data to higher-order spatial constructs

Beyond the Screen: Reshaping the Workplace with Virtual and Augmented Reality

Although extended reality technologies have enjoyed an explosion in popularity in recent years, few applications are effectively used outside the entertainment or academic contexts. This work consists of a literature review regarding the effective integration of such technologies in the workplace. It aims to provide an updated view of how they are being used in that context. First, we examine existing research concerning virtual, augmented, and mixed-reality applications. We also analyze which have made their way to the workflows of companies and institutions. Furthermore, we circumscribe the aspects of extended reality technologies that determined this applicability

The social AR continuum : wearable AR for sharing social experiences.

The primary goal of the work reported in this thesis is to explore, develop and evaluate novel interaction techniques for Augmented Reality (AR) wearable head- sets, by focusing on how they can be used to share social experiences with family and friends. AR has the potential to provide an intuitive and natural approach to sharing our social experiences in life with others while being co-present. In order to better visualise and interact with social networks on wearable AR devices, we intro- duce the concept of the "Social AR Continuum", which describes the space of sharing experiences in AR across various axes. We discuss the advantages and limitations of various implementations and techniques of shared social experiences on wearable AR. Based on Human-Computer Interaction methodologies, we conducted user studies to evaluate user presences and system usability of our implementations for visualising, sharing and interacting with social experiences on AR headsets. The work focused on the essential Social AR Continuum dimensions of representing contacts, sharing data and interactions, developed user interfaces on these dimensions and evaluated them using user studies. Our results show that using AR to share social experiences can increase users’ social presence. The results are summarised as design recommendations to help interface designers better design shared social experiences on wearable AR systems

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

Miten virtuaalikokoukset ovat yhteydessä työhyvinvointiin ja tuottavuuteen? State-of-the-art-katsaus

Kokoustamisesta on tullut työelämämme uusi megatrendi, ja virtuaaliset kokoukset ovat yleistyneet, kuten myös niihin liittyvä tutkimus. Tässä kirjallisuuskatsauksessa jäsennetään virtuaalikokoustutkimuskenttää ja vedetään yhteen erityisesti koronapandemian aikana saatuja tutkimustuloksia virtuaalikokousten, työhyvinvoinnin ja tuottavuuden välisistä yhteyksistä. Katsauksen mukaan hallittu virtuaalikokousten käyttö on yhteydessä parempaan työhyvinvointiin. Tämä tarkoittaa esimerkiksi, että työntekijöiden on voitava vaikuttaa kokousten ajankohtaan. Myös kokousten kestoa, videokameran käyttöä ja mikrofonin käyttöä on rajoitettava. Virtuaalisuudesta johtuva kognitiivisen kuorman lisääntyminen aiheuttaa niin sanottua Zoom-väsymystä, mutta esimerkiksi osallistujien yhteenkuuluvuuden tunne vähentää väsymystä. Alustavasti virtuaalikokouksista on koettu olevan hyötyä henkilöstön pysyvyyden, työn tuottavuuden, innovatiivisuuden sekä ympäristörasituksen vähenemisen kannalta. Toisaalta virtuaalikokoukset vaikeuttavat työn koordinoimista, konfliktien käsittelyä, henkilöstön kehittämistä ja luottamuksen rakentamista. Organisaatioilta vaaditaankin kypsyyttä ja suunnitelmallisuutta virtuaalikokouksien mahdollisuuksien hyödyntämiseksi. Virtuaalikokouksien seurauksia koskeva tutkimus on vielä alkuvaiheessa, ja erityisesti voimavara- ja motivaatiopsykologiselle työhyvinvointitutkimukselle sekä tuottavuus tutkimukselle on tarvetta. Lisäksi vain harvat tutkimukset ovat käsitelleet kokouksia kiinteässä yhteydessä kulloiseenkin työkontekstiin tai pyrkineet määrittelemään virtuaalikokouksen luonnetta