Designing a Topic-Based Literature Exploration Tool in AR — An exploratory study for neuroscience

The large and increasing amount of scientific literature makes it difficult for researchers to analyse and understand relations between topics even in their specific sub-field. Neuroscience researchers are interested in relations between, for example, anatomical regions of the brain and the diseases that affect them. To explore relations in the extensive body of literature, using the topics themselves rather than individual articles, can provide a higher-level approach. We have created a prototype interactive AR environment to learn more about how topic-based literature browsing might aid researchers in analysing and understanding relations between topics. Given the three-dimensional nature of the brain, we postulate that visualizing neuroscience topics in Augmented Reality would support the exploration of relations between them and thus improve and extend existing literature exploration workflows. We follow a usercentered approach to identify visualization and interaction design requirements. Using an existing analysis of tens of thousands of neuroscience papers, we designed an interactive AR environment to support researchers in finding relations between brain regions and brain diseases that integrates with existing literature review practices. We carried out two qualitative evaluations to verify our design, first with eight neuroscience students as domain experts and then with seven experienced researchers as literature exploration experts. Our analysis of participants’ feedback shows that visualizing topics and their relations in the immersive AR environment is clear, understandable and helpful for topic-based literature exploration, specifically, between brain regions and brain diseases. Our AR literature exploration tool has the potential to be used by neuroscientists in their routine literature review

DatAR: An immersive literature exploration environment for neuroscientists

Maintaining an overview of publications in the neuroscientific field is challenging, especially with an eye to finding relations at scale; for example, between brain regions and diseases. This is true for well-studied as well as nascent relationships. To support neuroscientists in this challenge, we developed an Immersive Analytics (IA) prototype for the analysis of relationships in large collections of scientific papers. In our video demonstration we showcase the system’s design and capabilities using a walkthrough and mock user scenario. This companion paper relates our prototype to previous IA work and offers implementation details

Exploring relations in neuroscientific literature using Augmented Reality: A design study

To support scientists in maintaining an overview of disciplinary concepts and their interrelations, we investigate whether Augmented Reality can serve as a platform to make automated methods more accessible and integrated into current literature exploration practices. Building on insights from text and immersive analytics, we identify information and design requirements. We embody these in DatAR, a system design and implementation focussed on analysis of co-occurrences in neuroscientific text collections. We conducted a scenario-based video survey with a sample of neuroscientists and other domain experts, focusing on participants’ willingness to adopt such an AR system in their regular literature review practices. The AR-tailored epistemic and representational designs of our system were generally perceived as suitable for performing complex analytics.We also discuss several fundamental issues with our chosen 3D visualisations, making steps towards understanding in which ways AR is a suitable medium for high-level conceptual literature exploration

Drawing Outside the Lines: Tracking-based Gesture Interaction in Mobile Augmented Entertainment

We present a proof-of-concept study for tracking- based gesture interaction in an augmented reality setting using tablets. By tracking a pen in front of a tablet using it’s integrated camera, we are able to map certain motions to gestures, which in turn are used to interact with the application. A comparative user study investigates the feasibility and usefulness of our approach with a simple augmented reality board game allowing translation and drawing gestures to move and create virtual board pieces, respectively. In particular, we demonstrate that users can handle it (and to what degree) and that they enjoy it (and what they potentially dislike). The results from the 25 participants of our experiment provide both subjective and objective evidence of the potential of tracking-based gesture interaction for augmented reality gaming

Delivering unprecedented access to learning through podcasting as OER, but who's listening? A profile of the external iTunes U user

Little is known about the learners who download iTunes U resources but do not belong to the Higher Education institutions that provide them. This paper presents the first full profile of the external iTunes U learner and their practices and opinions of the materials they download. The data was gathered through a large survey (over 2000 responses) carried out over two years using the iTunes U site from The Open University. It shows that external iTunes U learners are very different from the internal users and practices described in the literature so far: there are more men than women, mostly middle-aged, and they use the resources mostly for personal reasons. Despite the fact that respondents used the iTunes U site from a distance university, the paper argues that the respondents are comparable to external learners who use resources from other iTunes U sites. This profile of the iTunes U user provides a clearer picture of the target listener and can help inform and improve the materials design and delivery strategies for iTunes U as an independent learning tool and Open Educational Resources (OER) in general. The article also proposes areas for further research and argues for more studies into external learners' use of podcasting resources

Introduction to the Sixth Annual Lifelog Search Challenge, LSC’23

For the sixth time since 2018, the Lifelog Search Challenge (LSC) was organized as a comparative benchmarking exercise for various interactive lifelog search systems. The goal of this international competition is to test system capabilities to access large multimodal lifelogs. LSC’23 attracted twelve participanting teams, each of whom had developed a competitive interactive lifelog retrieval system. The benchmark was organized in front of live audience at the LSC workshop at ACM ICMR’23. As in previous editions, this introductory paper presents the LSC workshop and introduces the participating lifelog search systems