Virtual conference design: features and obstacles

The Covid-19 pandemic has forced a change in the way people work, and the location that they work from. The impact has caused significant disruption to education, the work environment and how social interactions take place. Online user habits have also changed due to lockdown restrictions and virtual conferencing software has become a vital cog in team communication. In result, a spate in software solutions have emerged in order to support the challenges of remote learning and working. The conferencing software landscape is now a core communication solution for company-wide interaction, team discussions, screen sharing and face-to-face contact. Yet the number of existing platforms is diverse. In this article, a systematic literature review investigation on virtual conferencing is presented. As output from the analysis, 67 key features and 74 obstacles users experience when interacting with virtual conferencing technologies are identified from 60 related open-source journal articles from 5 digital library repositories

Analysis of the hands in egocentric vision: A survey

Egocentric vision (a.k.a. first-person vision - FPV) applications have thrived over the past few years, thanks to the availability of affordable wearable cameras and large annotated datasets. The position of the wearable camera (usually mounted on the head) allows recording exactly what the camera wearers have in front of them, in particular hands and manipulated objects. This intrinsic advantage enables the study of the hands from multiple perspectives: localizing hands and their parts within the images; understanding what actions and activities the hands are involved in; and developing human-computer interfaces that rely on hand gestures. In this survey, we review the literature that focuses on the hands using egocentric vision, categorizing the existing approaches into: localization (where are the hands or parts of them?); interpretation (what are the hands doing?); and application (e.g., systems that used egocentric hand cues for solving a specific problem). Moreover, a list of the most prominent datasets with hand-based annotations is provided

Lógica de swipe em smartphones no consumo de conteúdos por parte dos jovens

Numa sociedade de rápido desenvolvimento tecnológico, associado ao crescente uso do smartphone, surgem novos hábitos específicos de interação e consumo de conteúdos, nomeadamente, através de gestos baseados no toque. Um destes novos hábitos de interação é o swipe - movimento rápido efetuado com o polegar. Este gesto permite aos seus utilizadores tomar decisões de forma rápida, espontânea e decisiva, o que pode não remeter a lógica de swipe somente para uma vertente técnica de interação, mas também associar a mesma a possíveis mudanças comportamentais na interação com os conteúdos. Este estudo tem como propósito perceber se esta lógica de interação está implícita nos jovens, se fazem uso dela regularmente, e se terá implicações no consumo de conteúdos por parte dos mesmos. De forma a atingir este objetivo, foi solicitado a 34 estudantes do Departamento de Comunicação e Arte da Universidade de Aveiro que efetuassem um teste, com recurso a eye tracker, onde tiveram que completar as tarefas propostas, sendo que as mesmas podiam ser efetuadas com, ou sem recurso à lógica de swipe. Os resultados obtidos levam a concluir que os participantes com sistema operativo android não estão familiarizados com a lógica de swipe. Por outro lado, os participantes com sistema operativo iOS estão familiarizados e utilizaram esta lógica para completar as tarefas que lhes foram propostas. Por fim, os resultados também mostram que os participantes conseguiram efetuar as tarefas de forma mais eficiente recorrendo a esta lógica de interação.In a society of quick technological development, coupled with the growing use of smartphones, new habits of interaction and consumption of contents arise, namely, through gestures based on touch. One of these new habits of interaction is the swipe - quick movement done with the thumb. This gesture allows users to make decisions quickly, spontaneously and decisively, which may not only refer to the swipe logic as a technical aspect of interaction, but also to associate it with possible behavioral changes in the interaction with contents. The aim of this study was to understand if this interaction logic is implicit in the young, if they use it regularly, and if it has implications in the way they interact with them. In order to reach this goal, 34 students from the Department of Communication and Art of the University of Aveiro were asked to take a test using the eye tracker, where they had to complete the proposed tasks, which could be solved with or without the swipe logic. The results obtained lead to the conclusion that participants with android operating system are not familiar with the swipe logic. On the other hand, the participants with the iOS operating system showed to be familiar with this logic and have used it to complete the tasks that have been proposed. Finally, the results also showed that participants were able to perform tasks more efficiently using this interaction logic.Mestrado em Comunicação Multimédi