Mixed Reality Human Media for Social and Physical Interaction

Abstract: This paper outlines new facilities within ubiquitous human media spaces supporting embodied interaction between humans and computation both socially and physically. We believe that the current approach to developing electronic based design environments is lacking with regard to support for multi-person multi-modal design interactions. In this paper, we present an alternative ubiquitous computing environment based on an integrated design of real and virtual worlds. We implement three different research prototype systems: the Virtual Kyoto Garden, Touchy Internet, and the Human Pacman. The functional capabilities implemented in these systems include spatially-aware 3D navigation, tangible interaction, and ubiquitous human media spaces. Some of its details, benefits, and issues regarding design support are discussed

Touch, taste, & smell user interfaces: the future of multisensory HCI

The senses we call upon when interacting with technology are very restricted. We mostly rely on vision and audition, increasingly harnessing touch, whilst taste and smell remain largely underexploited. In spite of our current knowledge about sensory systems and sensory devices, the biggest stumbling block for progress concerns the need for a deeper understanding of people’s multisensory experiences in HCI. It is essential to determine what tactile, gustatory, and olfactory experiences we can design for, and how we can meaningfully stimulate such experiences when interacting with technology. Importantly, we need to determine the contribution of the different senses along with their interactions in order to design more effective and engaging digital multisensory experiences. Finally, it is vital to understand what the limitations are that come into play when users need to monitor more than one sense at a time. The aim of this workshop is to deepen and expand the discussion on touch, taste, and smell within the CHI community and promote the relevance of multisensory experience design and research in HCI

Confucius computer: a philosophical digital agent for intergenerational philosophical play

Confucianism is commonly defined as “... a system of philosophical, ethical and political thought based on the teachings of Confucius,” which originated through the teachings of Confucius during the sixth-century BCE. It is a way of life or a philosophy of human nature that considers human relationships as the foundation of the society. Confucius teachings had highly influenced the development of several cultures in Asia, making Confucianism an intangible cultural heritage. In this paper, we are re-acquainting users with an intangible heritage that is part of their everyday, by developing a system that permits experiencing Confucius teachings virtually and interactively. The system can measure philosophical intent of the human and generate meaningful philosophical answers. It is also aimed for intergenerational sharing of Confucius heritage through a simple interactive process with the virtual sage making the experience enjoyable and entertaining. Previous research in natural language processing (NLP) mainly focused on the understanding and delivering of human natural language accurately. In this research, we explored how to apply NLP to model the knowledge and teachings of Confucius, through the natural conversation between human and computer. This virtual Confucius, a chat agent that generates outputs based on Confucius teachings, using a series of algorithms and techniques to improve the matching accuracy between user input and computer output, introduces a novel way of interacting with intangible cultures. Our user evaluation results revealed that there is a positive correlation between relevance and enjoyment, finding their experiences interacting with virtual Confucius very encouraging. Adults who participated in experiencing the virtual Confucius together with their children believed that this system has the potential to improve intergenerational interactions through shared play

Health and Pleasure in Consumers' Dietary Food Choices: Individual Differences in the Brain's Value System

Taking into account how people value the healthiness and tastiness of food at both the behavioral and brain levels may help to better understand and address overweight and obesity-related issues. Here, we investigate whether brain activity in those areas involved in self-control may increase significantly when individuals with a high body-mass index (BMI) focus their attention on the taste rather than on the health benefits related to healthy food choices. Under such conditions, BMI is positively correlated with both the neural responses to healthy food choices in those brain areas associated with gustation (insula), reward value (orbitofrontal cortex), and self-control (inferior frontal gyrus), and with the percent of healthy food choices. By contrast, when attention is directed towards health benefits, BMI is negatively correlated with neural activity in gustatory and reward-related brain areas (insula, inferior frontal operculum). Taken together, these findings suggest that those individuals with a high BMI do not necessarily have reduced capacities for self-control but that they may be facilitated by external cues that direct their attention toward the tastiness of healthy food. Thus, promoting the taste of healthy food in communication campaigns and/or food packaging may lead to more successful self-control and healthy food behaviors for consumers with a higher BMI, an issue which needs to be further researched

Why Not Robot Teachers: Artificial Intelligence for Addressing Teacher Shortage

Global teacher shortage is a serious concern with grave implications for the future of education. This calls for novel ways of addressing teacher roles. The economic benefits of tireless labor inspires the need for teachers who are unlimited by natural human demands, highlighting consideration for the affordances of robotics and Artificial Intelligence in Education (AIED) as currently obtainable in other areas of human life. This however demands designing robotic personalities that can take on independent teacher roles despite strong opinions that robots will not be able to fully replace humans in the classroom of the future. In this article, we argue for a future classroom with independent robot teachers, highlighting the minimum capabilities required of such personalities in terms of personality, instructional delivery, social interaction, and affect. We describe our project on the design of a robot teacher based on these. Possible directions for future system development and studies are highlighted

Animal-Computer Interaction: Animal-Centred, Participatory, and Playful Design

In recent years there has been growing interest in developing technology to improve animal's wellbeing and to support the interaction of animals within the digital world. The field of Animal-Computer Interaction (ACI) considers animals as the end-users of the technology being developed, orienting this process by the needs and characteristics of its non-human stakeholders. Although animals have interacted with technology long before the emergence of the ACI field, usually their behaviors were typically anthropomorphized with their needs not being fully understood. Instead, ACI research adopts an animal-centred approach and aims to understand technologically mediated interaction of animals from their perspective. In this way, the technology and systems being developed could be adapted properly towards the non-human animal user. This is similar to what Human Computer Interaction (HCI) has done with human-being users

Online 6 DOF Augmented Reality Registration from Natural Features

We present a complete scalable system for 6 d.o.f. camera tracking based on natural features. Crucially, the calculation is based only on pre-captured reference images and previous estimates of the camera pose and is hence suitable for online applications. We match natural features in the current frame to two spatially separated reference images. We overcome the wide baseline matching problem by matching to the previous frame and transferring point positions to the reference images. We then minimize deviations from the two-view and three-view constraints between the reference images and the current frame as a function of the camera position parameters. We stabilize this calculation using a recursive form of temporal regularization that is similar in spirit to the Kalman filter. We can track camera pose over hundreds of frames and realistically integrate virtual objects with only slight jitter