Territoriality and Behaviour On and Around Large Vertical Publicly-Shared Displays

Large displays and information kiosks are becoming increasingly common installations in public venues to provide an efficient self-serve means for patrons to access information and/or services. They have evolved over a relatively short period of time from non-digital, non-interactive static displays to more elaborate media-rich digital interactive systems. While the content and purposes of kiosks have changed, they are still largely based on the traditional single-user-driven design paradigm despite the fact that people often venture to these venues in small social groups, i.e., with family and/or friends. This often limits how groups collaborate and forces transactions to be serialized. This thesis explores design constraints for interaction by multiple social groups in parallel on shared large vertical displays. To better understand design requirements for these systems, this research is separated into two parts: a preliminary observational field study and a follow-up controlled study. Using an observational field study, fundamental patterns of how people use existing public displays are studied: their orientation, positioning, group identification, and behaviour within and between social groups just-before, during, and just-after usage. These results are then used to motivate a controlled experiment where two individuals or two pairs of individuals complete tasks concurrently on a low-fidelity large vertical display. Results from the studies demonstrate that vertical surface territories are similar to those found in horizontal tabletops in function, but their definitions and social conventions are different. In addition, the nature of use-while-standing systems results in more complex and dynamic physical territories around the display. We show that the anthropological notion of personal space must be slightly refined for application to vertical displays

Creating Your Bubble: Personal Space On and Around Large Public Displays

We describe an empirical study that explores how users establish and use personal space around large public displays (LPDs). Our study complements field studies in this space by more fully characterizing interpersonal distances based on coupling and confirms the use of on-screen territories on vertical displays. Finally, we discuss implications for future research: limitations of proxemics and territoriality, how user range can augment existing theory, and the influence of display size on personal space

GlobalFestival: Evaluating Real World Interaction on a Spherical Display

Spherical displays present compelling opportunities for interaction in public spaces. However, there is little research into how touch interaction should control a spherical surface or how these displays are used in real world settings. This paper presents an in the wild deployment of an application for a spherical display called GlobalFestival that utilises two different touch interaction techniques. The first version of the application allows users to spin and tilt content on the display, while the second version only allows spinning the content. During the 4-day deployment, we collected overhead video data and on-display interaction logs. The analysis brings together quantitative and qualitative methods to understand how users approach and move around the display, how on screen interaction compares in the two versions of the application, and how the display supports social interaction given its novel form factor

Pac-many: Movement behavior when playing collaborative and competitive games on large displays

Peer reviewe

Improving the robustness to input errors on touch-based self-service kiosks and transportation apps

acceptedVersio

Behavioral patterns of individuals and groups during co-located collaboration on large, high-resolution displays

Collaboration among multiple users on large screens leads to complicated behavior patterns and group dynamics. To gain a deeper understanding of collaboration on vertical, large, high-resolution screens, this dissertation builds on previous research and gains novel insights through new observational studies. Among other things, the collected results reveal new patterns of collaborative coupling, suggest that territorial behavior is less critical than shown in previous research, and demonstrate that workspace awareness can also negatively affect the effectiveness of individual users

Investigating Data Exploration Techniques Involving Map Based Geotagged Data in a Collaborative Sensemaking Environment

The recent advancement in Global Positioning Systems (GPS) using satellite and geotagging has opened many opportunities for data-driven decision-making in fields such as emergency response, military intelligence, oil exploration and urban planning. The enormity and explosion of geospatial data necessitates the development of improved tools to support analysis and decision-making around this complex data – a process often known as sensemaking. A typical geotagged map can have hundreds of data points that are multi-dimensional, with each point having meaningful information associated with its location, as well as project specific information e.g., photographs, graphs, charts, bulletin data among many other information parameters. Sensemaking activities involving such complex data often involve a team of trained professionals who aim to make sense of this data to answer specific sets of questions, and make key decisions. Researchers are currently exploring the use of surface computing technology, such as, interactive digital tabletops and touch-based tablets to form methodologies to enhance collaborative sensemaking. This thesis examined the impact of two multi-surface interaction techniques that allowed individual group members to explore detailed geotagged data on separate peripheral tablets while sharing a large geographical overview on a digital tabletop. The two interaction techniques differed in the type of user input needed to control the location on the tabletop overview of a bounded “region of interest” (ROI) corresponding to the geotagged data displayed on the personal tablets. One technique (TOUCH) required the ROI to be positioned on the tabletop using direct touch interaction. The other technique (TILT) required the ROI to be positioned via 3-dimensional (up-down, left-right) tilt-gesture made with the personal tablet. Findings from the study revealed that the effectiveness of the respective interaction techniques depended on the stage of sensemaking process, and on which collaboration strategy groups employed during collaborative sensemaking

Designing Persuasively using Playful Elements

Alongside productivity and communication, computers are a valuable tool for diversion and amusement. Game Designers leverage the multifaceted world of computing to create applications that can be developed persuasively; designs can be formulated to compel users towards actions and behaviours which range from engaging in the game’s mechanics, micro-transactions, or in more complex manifestations such as encouraging reflection via the evaluation of the moral argument presented in the gameplay narrative. In my dissertation, I explore how to create compelling experiences during playful interactions. Particularly, I explore how design decisions affect users’ behaviours, and evaluations of the gaming experience to learn more about crafting persuasive mechanics in games. First, I present research on calibrating aspects of difficulty and character behaviour in the design of simple games to create more immersive experiences. My work on calibration of game difficulty, and enemy behaviour contribute insight regarding the potential of games to create engaging activities, which inspire prolonged play sessions. Further work in my dissertation explores how players interact with in-game entities they perceive as human and explores the boundaries of acceptable player interaction during co-located gaming situations. My early work gives rise to deeper questions regarding perspectives on co-players during gaming experiences. Specifically, I probe the question of how players perceive human versus computer-controlled teammates during a shared gaming experience. Additionally, I explore how game design factors in the context of a tightly-coupled shared multi-touch large display gaming experience can influence the way that people interact and, in turn, their perspectives on one another to ask: ‘how can games be used persuasively to inspire positive behaviours and social interaction?’. Issues of perspectives are a theme I carry forward in my work by exploring how game dynamics – in particular the use of territoriality – can be used to foster collaborative behaviours. Further, I discuss how my work contributes to the study of persuasive game design, games with purpose, and cement my findings in relation to the games studies and computer science literature. Last, I discuss future work, in which I discuss my ambitions for using persuasive design for social good via Games4Change

Evaluation of the influence of personality types on performance of shared tasks in a collaborative environment

Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) is an area of computing that has been receiving much attention in recent years. Developments in groupware technology, such as MERL’s Diamondtouch and Microsoft’s Surface, have presented us with new, challenging and exciting ways to carry out group tasks. However, these groupware technologies present us with a novel area of research in the field of computing – that being multi-user Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). With multi-user HCI, we no longer have to cater for one person working on their own PC. We must now consider multiple users and their preferences as a group in order to design groupware applications that best suit the needs of that group. In this thesis, we aim to identify how groups of two people (dyads), given their various personality types and preferences, work together on groupware technologies. We propose interface variants to both competitive and collaborative systems in an attempt to identify what aspects of an interface or task best suit the needs of the different dyads, maximising their performance and producing high levels of user satisfaction. In order to determine this, we introduce a series of user experiments that we carried out with 18 dyads and analyse their performance, behaviour and responses to each of 5 systems and their respective variants. Our research and user experiments were facilitated by the DiamondTouch – a collaborative, multi-user tabletop device