Potential and effects of personalizing gameful fitness applications using behavior change intentions and Hexad user types

Personalizing gameful applications is essential to account for interpersonal differences in the perception of gameful design elements. Considering that an increasing number of people lead sedentary lifestyles, using personalized gameful applications to encourage physical activity is a particularly relevant domain. In this article, we investigate behavior change intentions and Hexad user types as factors to personalize gameful fitness applications. We first explored the potential of these two factors by analyzing differences in the perceived persuasiveness of gameful design elements using a storyboards-based online study (N=178). Our results show several significant effects regarding both factors and thus support the usefulness of them in explaining perceptual differences. Based on these findings, we implemented “Endless Universe,” a personalized gameful application encouraging physical activity on a treadmill. We used the system in a laboratory study (N=20) to study actual effects of personalization on the users’ performance, enjoyment and affective experiences. While we did not find effects on the immediate performance of users, positive effects on user experience-related measures were found. The results of this study support the relevance of behavior change intentions and Hexad user types for personalizing gameful fitness systems further

Technology and Mastery:Exploring Design Sensitivities for Technology in Mountaineering

The idea of man’s ’mastery over nature’ is ubiquitous in western philosophy and in western thinking and technology has been widely used in support of this end. Given the growing interaction design opportunities for personal digital technologies in supporting outdoor and recreational nature activities such as mountaineering it is timely to unpack the role that technology can play in such activities. In doing so it is important to consider the intrinsic and extrinsic motivations at play for the individual and the accepted social norms or ‘rules’ that are associated with the activity through its community and passed on through its community of practice. Technologies that may be considered as a form of ‘cheating’ when first introduced (such as handheld GPS) can later become accepted through common practice, although the rules are often nuanced. For example, it is widely regarded that GPS should not replace the skill of map reading and navigation. In this position paper we consider different forms of mastery over nature that technology can support and reflect on the design sensitivities that these provide

UbiMount: 2nd workshop on ubiquitous computing in the mountains

Mobile and wearable computing has great potential to support alpine outdoor sport activities. This includes, but is not limited to, rock climbing, hiking, mountain biking, paragliding, and skiing. Interestingly, technology for tracking, monitoring and supporting sport activities is broadly used in sports like running or cycling, but has not reached the top of the mountains yet. Nevertheless, such technologies could support people in many mountain scenarios such as activity tracking, navigation, or emergency support. Technologies and applications for mountaineers can learn from ubiquitous computing research in many ways to provide more joyful, motivating and safer outdoor experiences

HCI Outdoors:Understanding Human-Computer Interaction in Outdoor Recreation

HCI in outdoor recreation is a growing research area. While papers investigating systems in specific domains, such as biking, climbing, or skiing, are beginning to appear, the broader community is just beginning to form. The community still seems to lack a cohesive agenda for advancing our understanding of this application domain. The goal of this workshop is to bring together individuals interested in HCI outdoors to review past work, build a unifying research agenda, share ongoing work, encourage collaboration, and make plans for future meetings. The workshop will result in a report containing a research agenda, extensive annotated bibliography, an article about this topic and plans for unifying the community at future meeting

Combining touch and gaze for distant selection in a tabletop setting

This research project is partially supported by the Nuance Foundation. Date of Acceptance: 11/02/2013Tabletop interaction with objects in and out of reach is a common real world as well as virtual task. Gaze as additional input modality might support this interactions on tabletops in terms of search, selection and manipulation of distant objects. The aim of this work is to design and evaluate an interaction technique that relies on gaze and gestural touch input for the selection of distant objects. The proposed approach makes objects that are out of physical reach easily available to the user, and aims to provide an increased selection accuracy compared to single modality approaches. The paper contributes a setup that allows to track people with a static eye-tracker in front of a tabletop and investigates an interaction technique that makes use of the flicking gesture augmented by gaze information to select distant objects.PostprintNon peer reviewe

Touching the 3rd Dimension : Interaktion mit Stereoskopischen Daten auf und über interaktiven Oberflächen

In recent years, interaction with three-dimensional (3D) data has become more and more popular. However, current 3D user interfaces (3DUIs), as for example provided by virtual reality (VR) systems, are very often expert systems with complex user interfaces and high instrumentation. While stereoscopic displays allow users to perceive 3D content in an intuitive and natural way, interaction with stereoscopic data is still a challenging task, especially with objects that are displayed with different parallaxes. To overcome this interaction problem, multi-touch or depth sensing as commodity tracking technologies can be used. This thesis therefore investigates the challenges that occur when the flat world of surface computing meets the spatially complex 3D space. The thesis contributes a number of interactive research prototypes, interaction techniques and insights from the corresponding studies. 3D interaction techniques will be designed and studied in canonical 3DUI tasks, which leads to the conclusion that significant differences arise when interacting with objects that are stereoscopically displayed at different parallaxes. The results give implications for the design of usable 3D interaction techniques that might enable VR in the living room or at public places. To sum up, this work contributes to a better understanding of stereoscopic 3D applications for end users and can be seen as a step towards a ubiquitous distribution of interactive 3D technologies and applications.Die Interaktion mit dreidimensionalen (3D) Daten hat in den letzten Jahren an Bedeutung gewonnen. Allerdings handelt es sich bei heutigen 3D Benutzerschnittstellen meist um Expertensysteme mit komplexen Benutzeroberflächen und -instrumentierung. Während stereoskopische Displays die intuitive Wahrnehmung von 3D erlauben, ist die Interaktion mit diesen Displays immer noch wenig benutzerfreundlich, insbesondere wenn Objekte mit verschiedenen Parallaxen angezeigt werden. In der vorliegenden Arbeit wird deshalb der Bedarf erforscht, der sich aus den Herausforderungen ergibt, die auftreten, wenn die flache Welt der interaktiven Oberflächen auf den komplexen, virtuellen 3D Raum trifft. Der Beitrag dieser Arbeit liegt in der Entwicklung von interaktiven Forschungsprototypen, neuen Interaktionstechniken sowie Erkenntnissen aus Studien. Es werden 3D Interaktionstechniken entwickelt und in universellen 3D Interaktionsaufgaben evaluiert. Die Ergebnisse zeigen, dass signifikante Unterschiede bei der Interaktion mit Objekten bestehen, die mit unterschiedlichen Parallaxen angezeigt werden. Des Weiteren ergeben sich Implikationen für das Design von Interaktionstechniken, die einen intuitiven Zugang zu Virtueller Realität (VR) im Wohnzimmer oder an öffentlichen Orten ermöglichen. Die Arbeit bildet damit einen wichtigen Beitrag zum Verständnis von stereoskopischem 3D für den Endanwender und kann als Schritt zur Verbreitung von interaktiven 3D Technologien und Anwendungen betrachtet werden