Using mobile technology to facilitate the user experience of group holiday decision-making

With the increasing expenditure of international tourism around the world, the topic of studying group holiday decision-makings has drawn attentions in the fields of tourism research and business management (Mottiar & Quinn, 2004; Wang et al., 2004; Carr, 2005; Jacobsen & Munar, 2012; Assayer et al., 2011). Yet, the user experience of tourists in groups has been reported to be in need of improvements (Garcia et al., 2009). For example, such user experience lacks effective information sharing among group members, a convenient communication environment, and an efficient decision-making support (Decrop, 2005). A possible solution is technology, such as smart phones, that this technology has evolved from single-purpose communication devices into dynamic tools that support users in a wide variety of tasks (Böhmer et al., 2011). This thesis is devoted to studying the user experience related to technology-supported group holiday decision-making. It aims to investigate how mobile technology can help a group of people to make holiday decisions with a view to enhance the user experience. This thesis reviews theoretical approaches to help understand the concepts and related works (Chapter 2). Research methods are also discussed, including the framework of user-centred design employed in this research, and the challenges of exploring user experience in this context (Chapter 3). This thesis investigates the user experience of how tourist groups plan their trips, including an understanding of user behaviour and requirements. It proposes a model of group trip planning process to describe the core elements of group holiday planning (Chapter 4). Then, it explores a number of factors that influence the group holiday planning process (Chapter 5). Next, tourism information presentation is examined in terms of exploring the characteristics of different types of textual tourism information on the Internet and how the perceptions of tourists are affected by these different types of information accordingly (Chapter 6). Design implications are derived and discussed to guide the design of technology, for the purposes of facilitating group holiday planning process. Chapter 7 describes the three key elements considered in this design of mobile technology: usability, personalisation, and enjoyable user experience. The development of a prototype of this technology, #GT-Planner, is also elaborated (Chapter 7). Finally, this thesis investigates the user experience of this prototype (#GT-Planner), in which both subjective approaches (i.e., questionnaires and interviews) and objective approach (i.e., physiological measurement) are employed (Chapter 8). #GT-Planner is shown to facilitate the group holiday decision-making process and result in an enriched user experience. The thesis primarily discusses the understandings of the user experience of group holiday decision-making, the design implications for group holiday decision-making, the framework of user-centred design, and methods for examining the users in a group and evaluating the technology. Finally, findings and conclusions are specified and highlighted, along with a discussion of the contributions derived from this thesis and the avenues for future work

Deep3DSketch+: Rapid 3D Modeling from Single Free-hand Sketches

The rapid development of AR/VR brings tremendous demands for 3D content. While the widely-used Computer-Aided Design (CAD) method requires a time-consuming and labor-intensive modeling process, sketch-based 3D modeling offers a potential solution as a natural form of computer-human interaction. However, the sparsity and ambiguity of sketches make it challenging to generate high-fidelity content reflecting creators' ideas. Precise drawing from multiple views or strategic step-by-step drawings is often required to tackle the challenge but is not friendly to novice users. In this work, we introduce a novel end-to-end approach, Deep3DSketch+, which performs 3D modeling using only a single free-hand sketch without inputting multiple sketches or view information. Specifically, we introduce a lightweight generation network for efficient inference in real-time and a structural-aware adversarial training approach with a Stroke Enhancement Module (SEM) to capture the structural information to facilitate learning of the realistic and fine-detailed shape structures for high-fidelity performance. Extensive experiments demonstrated the effectiveness of our approach with the state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on both synthetic and real datasets

Deep3DSketch: 3D modeling from Free-hand Sketches with View- and Structural-Aware Adversarial Training

This work aims to investigate the problem of 3D modeling using single free-hand sketches, which is one of the most natural ways we humans express ideas. Although sketch-based 3D modeling can drastically make the 3D modeling process more accessible, the sparsity and ambiguity of sketches bring significant challenges for creating high-fidelity 3D models that reflect the creators' ideas. In this work, we propose a view- and structural-aware deep learning approach, \textit{Deep3DSketch}, which tackles the ambiguity and fully uses sparse information of sketches, emphasizing the structural information. Specifically, we introduced random pose sampling on both 3D shapes and 2D silhouettes, and an adversarial training scheme with an effective progressive discriminator to facilitate learning of the shape structures. Extensive experiments demonstrated the effectiveness of our approach, which outperforms existing methods -- with state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on both synthetic and real datasets.Comment: ICASSP 2023. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:2310.1814

Panoptic NeRF: 3D-to-2D Label Transfer for Panoptic Urban Scene Segmentation

Large-scale training data with high-quality annotations is critical for training semantic and instance segmentation models. Unfortunately, pixel-wise annotation is labor-intensive and costly, raising the demand for more efficient labeling strategies. In this work, we present a novel 3D-to-2D label transfer method, Panoptic NeRF, which aims for obtaining per-pixel 2D semantic and instance labels from easy-to-obtain coarse 3D bounding primitives. Our method utilizes NeRF as a differentiable tool to unify coarse 3D annotations and 2D semantic cues transferred from existing datasets. We demonstrate that this combination allows for improved geometry guided by semantic information, enabling rendering of accurate semantic maps across multiple views. Furthermore, this fusion process resolves label ambiguity of the coarse 3D annotations and filters noise in the 2D predictions. By inferring in 3D space and rendering to 2D labels, our 2D semantic and instance labels are multi-view consistent by design. Experimental results show that Panoptic NeRF outperforms existing semantic and instance label transfer methods in terms of accuracy and multi-view consistency on challenging urban scenes of the KITTI-360 dataset.Comment: Project page: https://fuxiao0719.github.io/projects/panopticnerf

Using mobile technology to facilitate the user experience of group holiday decision-making

With the increasing expenditure of international tourism around the world, the topic of studying group holiday decision-makings has drawn attentions in the fields of tourism research and business management (Mottiar & Quinn, 2004; Wang et al., 2004; Carr, 2005; Jacobsen & Munar, 2012; Assayer et al., 2011). Yet, the user experience of tourists in groups has been reported to be in need of improvements (Garcia et al., 2009). For example, such user experience lacks effective information sharing among group members, a convenient communication environment, and an efficient decision-making support (Decrop, 2005). A possible solution is technology, such as smart phones, that this technology has evolved from single-purpose communication devices into dynamic tools that support users in a wide variety of tasks (Böhmer et al., 2011). This thesis is devoted to studying the user experience related to technology-supported group holiday decision-making. It aims to investigate how mobile technology can help a group of people to make holiday decisions with a view to enhance the user experience. This thesis reviews theoretical approaches to help understand the concepts and related works (Chapter 2). Research methods are also discussed, including the framework of user-centred design employed in this research, and the challenges of exploring user experience in this context (Chapter 3). This thesis investigates the user experience of how tourist groups plan their trips, including an understanding of user behaviour and requirements. It proposes a model of group trip planning process to describe the core elements of group holiday planning (Chapter 4). Then, it explores a number of factors that influence the group holiday planning process (Chapter 5). Next, tourism information presentation is examined in terms of exploring the characteristics of different types of textual tourism information on the Internet and how the perceptions of tourists are affected by these different types of information accordingly (Chapter 6). Design implications are derived and discussed to guide the design of technology, for the purposes of facilitating group holiday planning process. Chapter 7 describes the three key elements considered in this design of mobile technology: usability, personalisation, and enjoyable user experience. The development of a prototype of this technology, #GT-Planner, is also elaborated (Chapter 7). Finally, this thesis investigates the user experience of this prototype (#GT-Planner), in which both subjective approaches (i.e., questionnaires and interviews) and objective approach (i.e., physiological measurement) are employed (Chapter 8). #GT-Planner is shown to facilitate the group holiday decision-making process and result in an enriched user experience. The thesis primarily discusses the understandings of the user experience of group holiday decision-making, the design implications for group holiday decision-making, the framework of user-centred design, and methods for examining the users in a group and evaluating the technology. Finally, findings and conclusions are specified and highlighted, along with a discussion of the contributions derived from this thesis and the avenues for future work

A Human Factors Approach to Exploring the Experience of Group Trip Planning from the Perspective of Intragroup Interaction

© 2017 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC. Previous studies have investigated the experiences and characteristics of holiday decision-making among groups of travelers. This study adds to the knowledge of group trip holiday planning through exploring influential factors (including the individual and group characteristics of travelers), and linking those with their intragroup interactions when planning a group trip. A total of 261 usable questionnaires were collected across two university campuses in the UK and China. The survey employed a retrospective approach, asking participants to recall one of their past group trip planning experiences within the previous 3 months. This study found that intragroup interactions during a group trip planning process are influenced both by tourists’ individual factors, such as age, gender, and nationality, and by group characteristics, such as group size, common interest, group type, and group travel style. This study shows that common interest is the most influential factor in terms of its positive impact on group collaboration, feeling of connectedness, strength of preparation, and flexibility and spontaneity during group trip planning process. Further, in general, Chinese groups tend to spend less time on planning their trips before departure, but focus more on the details of the itinerary. Finally, the implications for technologies that are designed to facilitate the group trip planning process, with a view to enhancing the level of group enjoyment, are discussed based on the findings in this study

Exploring the group holiday decision-making process with the support of technology

© 2018 Elsevier Ltd Numerous studies have examined the decision-making process and the associated information search behaviour of tourists. However, very few have focused on how tourists make plans for their trips when travelling in groups. This paper adds to the knowledge of the decision-making process of tourist groups with a specific focus on intra-group interaction and the support of technology. This research adopted a mixed-methods approach, combining two studies. Study 1 employed a focus group to gain an understanding of the decision-making process within a tourist group, while Study 2 employed a questionnaire survey to explore how the use of technology in such a process varies among different categories of groups. Study 1 proposed a model for a group holiday decision-making process with four components: information acquisition, intra-group information sharing, knowledge transfer, and decision making. It was adapted from the “Infogineering Model” and the encoding and decoding theory in communication studies. Study 2 identified new influential factors on the use of technology by tourist groups for decision making. Ultimately, this research produced a number of theoretical implications, as well as practical implications in terms of how practitioners can better support Chinese tourists, family travellers, and tourists with little prior travel experience, and how technology can facilitate group holiday decision making

Vulnerability analysis of natural gas pipeline networks based on risk theory

At present, the analysis of natural gas pipeline network safety mainly focuses on the risk assessment, reliability analysis and vulnerability analysis. Because of the different analysis perspectives of the three methods, the results of identifying the key components are also different. In this study, by combining the risk theory and the vulnerability analysis, the risk-vulnerability analysis method was developed, which identifies the key components of the pipeline networks from the three perspectives of pipeline operating status, transmission performance and network characteristics. Definitely, the key components are identified according to the vulnerability that is the product of the importance and risk values of the components. Therein, the risk value is obtained by multiplying the failure probability with the consequence severity of the indicators that is calculated with the risk-preferred utility function, and the importance is calculated according to the formula starting from the ideas for vulnerability analysis. Moreover, the vulnerability of the natural gas pipeline network in Zhejiang Province was analyzed in this way, and the results indicate that: This method does not ignore the influence of the components with low failure probability and serious consequences on the gas supply capacity of the pipeline network while considering the probability of the frequent occurrence of hazardous events, so that the key components of the natural gas pipeline network can be identified more comprehensively and effectively, further guaranteeing the safe operation of pipeline networks