HCI International 2014 - Posters’ Extended Abstracts

In this paper, we examine the need for usability methods for game design and argue that within the level design discipline in game design there is a distinct lack of usability methods for users with low game literacy. Therefore, we propose that there is a need for guidance methods to properly accommodate players of all levels of game literacy in the game world. With the player having to spend the majority of its time in digital game environments and color being a basic component of any environment, we have decided to use color contrasts to determine whether color is suitable for player guidance. The goal of this paper is to determine whether player behavior, both in decision making and in viewing behavior, can be influenced through color contrasts.

The poster shows the fundamental difference between the concept of

medium

and

media

. Does the difference exist in each imaging and information system? The topic is focusing on the model of post-media thinking in our post-information society. We would like to analyze

how

the basic difference of

medium – media

influences the human cognition, thinking about the future imaging and information systems, computing processes and future trends of imaging techniques. The concept of science within the post-media theory of thinking focuses on constitution proceeding through critical reflexive medium. It is using still more and more deeply methods for further researches. Critical reflexive form is the methodology used for analysing of the term

medium

which is understand as mediate factor. Here we are investigating the autonomous medium related to itself – this is called, as Luhmann said in his theory of the social systems, Self-reference. On the other hand the medium is able to develop a relation to open universal entity (Other-reference) that just enables self-emancipation of the objects. There is a difference between the individual and general relation. Each medium evinces a possiblity of contradiction in relation to another

media

, that are based on different and authentic conditions.

With the development of cultural creative industry, cultural product design has shifted from "production-oriented" of batch design to "consumer-oriented" of personalized design, on the basis of function, shape, material, color, brand, economic, cultural and other factors of product design. The consumer’s emotional appeal should also be investigated fully and comprehensively. How to master the general rule of consumers’ psychology, follow the law of consumer behavior, design marketable products and finally promote the customers’ satisfaction will be significant subjects of current cultural product design.

This paper studies on the current cultural product from targeted consumers’ cognition point of view based on theories such as Demand Psychology, Consumption Psychology, Cognitive Psychology, Kansei Engineering, Ergonomics, Semantics of Design and Semiotics and etc, and proposes three hierarchy theory of consumer cognition on cultural product by analyzing cultural products’ connotation, characteristic and category and combining human cognitive system in Cognitive Psychology, which are interpretation, experience and cognition. Also present the cultural product design procedure based on consumer cognition on the basis of this theory, including research and analysis of consumers’ cognition, image space establishment of cultural product cognition, cultural product concept design and implementation and cultural product test and evaluation.

With the rise of different interaction modalities, several different devices are available to users that need to learn how to interact with them. To avoid problems in the future, developers need to create intuitive interaction techniques, which is not a trivial task. To support the design of these techniques, we present a process where users interactively and iteratively participate in the design, through a series of individual interviews and focus groups. We also present two case studies, for a multimodal and a multi-touch application.

Agile Software processes emphasize collaboration more than traditional methods. Collaborations and interactions are cited directly in two of the four values listed in the agile manifesto. Because of everything that involves communication contains the potential for conflict, we are interested in knowing how to manage conflicts to enhance agile projects.

We present an approach for teaching and designing embodied interaction based on interactive sketches. We have combined the

mover perspective

and

felt experiences

of movement with advanced technologies (multi-agents, physical simulations) in a generative design session. We report our activities and provide a simple example as a design outcome. The variety and the qualities of the initial ideas indicate that this approach might provide a better foundation for our participants, compared to the approaches that focus only on technologies. The interactive sketches will be demonstrated at the conference.

This paper reports on our experience as Participant Observers in a Project introducing the XO laptop at an elementary school in Brazil. Working together with all members of the school community, we experienced their daily activities with and without technology. Our objective was to build a better understanding of the affective and emotional relationships developed among the community. Moreover, we wanted to understand how users made use and sense of technology. In this article we investigate the presence of affect in our study scenario using the method of Participant Observation. This study was one of the initial steps towards the design of an educational system to be used at elementary schools.

The constant developments in technology of mobile devices are rapidly increasing the demand for applications on these devices. In June 2013, there were 900,000 applications for iPhone available on the iTunes store to be downloaded, and the application store had over 50 billion downloads. Demand for Android phones is also increasing and exceeds analysts’ expectations. As a result of the rapid evolution of mobile device development, a new challenge has emerged for application developers; how to improve the usability of mobile applications. This research examines usability issues of mobile devices, and proposes a metric based model which may be used to evaluate applications on mobile devices.

The objective of this research is to clarify the relationship between the practice of human-centered design (HCD) and the obstacles to applying this approach. Our study is based on research into several factors in the HCD process as applied to the development of hardware devices with embedded software, such as office equipment, home electronics, medical devices and information equipment. From the results of our investigation of 13 companies, we identified several obstacles to applying HCD methods to the development process. Also discussed are the nature of these obstacles, and methods to make better use of the HCD process to avoid such obstacles in future. Previous studies of the HCD process have presented new perspectives by performing various analyses of the benefits of using HCD methods. However, previous studies have not discussed proposals to avoid obstacles, or how to apply the HCD process to company workflows. Therefore, we collected 79 “good cases” and 53 “bad cases” through interviews and questionnaires. We then analyzed those cases, and summarized 4 viewpoints on introducing the HCD process to companies, and 12 approaches for solving these problems. Viewpoints: 1) Establish methods appropriate to each company. 2) Indicate the effects. 3) Share goals. 4) Participate in upstream processes.Approaches: 1) Use easy words. 2) Match HCD methods to the development process. 3) Create simple methods. 4) Compare with other companies. 5) Compare with in-house practices. 6) Share results with users. 7) Publish results as a reference. 8) Create industry standards. 9) Recognize a good point that already exists. 10) Share goals with the relevant departments. 11) Participate in requirement definition process. 12) Create valuable features through observation.

The assumption of the “human” has not been agreed universally in Human-centered design. As the aim of design is to solve human’s problem, the evaluation standard of a “good” design is ambiguous in this context. The marketing designs based on the usage of the weaknesses of human nature, which cause the impulse buying and the immersion of online games easier, made people depressed. The traditional “human” assumption is based on cognition and social requirements. The former should be respected but the latter need a reconsideration. Inspirations from Buddhism are proposed as a solution to the evaluation standard and the problem of “depression”: the general “good” standard transcended culture and religions is happiness based on Dependent Arising, which means to be a “better” existence and realizing the responsibility of self, for both designers and users.

Humans are not just complex adaptive systems; we are flourishing adaptive systems (FAS), because we have human aspirations and tend to flourish. Our wisdom system is multidimensional, and it develops over time. A flourishing adaptive system is guided by its wisdom system to achieve a higher purpose. It seems plausible to augment human practice by developing 8 particular dimensions of wisdom or “wisdom senses”. Further exploration of these 8 wisdom senses could lead to designing “wise organizations”, and even developing “synthetic flourishing adaptive systems”, exploring the frontiers of “artificial wisdom”.

This research aims to propose designs based on cultures comparison. Taking Malaysian and Japanese cultures as the target of this case study, their common and different points are studied before proposing a new design concept which will suit on both cultures. Using the new combination of design concepts, a prototype is built. For the first prototype, a rattan floor chair is designed. To verify the acceptance of the design on both of the cultures, design evaluation and user experience design evaluation is made.

In response to the aging society and change of family structure, intergenerational learning: getting help from the children, has become a new trend of elderly care. However, the elders and children differ a lot in body function, physical perception and mental cognition, and few studies take into account the physical and mental condition of both groups. Products designed for the elders and children to interact and play are even rarer. The study investigates the physical and mental capacity and prerequisite knowledge of the elders and children, analyze the overlapping characteristics of their physical and mental capacity, and provide cross-age body-mind interaction product design guidelines, including: (1)Reviving motor function, (2)Divergent creativity, (3)Intergenerational learning, and(4) Safety. With this product, both groups can strengthen their physical and mental capacity through the joyful game playing process, optimizing the development of synesthesia, and build friendship among them, as well as reducing the cost of social resources for long-term caring.

This is a project based analysis of interactive elements by using smart textiles as media. The effective design processes and methods of turning a concept into a real product in textiles industry are demonstrated. First children’s’ drawings were collected to analyzed the interaction performance expected on soft toys. Second, adapting suitable Smart Textile and the desirable electronic circuits which corresponding to the mode of the situational reaction as well as input and output context design. Finally, customized design process was established for the on-line smart textiles service.

Fragrance is one of important media types that effect on our psycho-physiological states. However, adjustment of fragrance composition is difficult for most of users. Interactive Evolutionary Computation (IEC) is known as an efficient method to optimize media contents, and we have already proposed IECs for optimizing fragrance composition. To enhance the optimization ability of IEC, some previous studies proposed that IEC accepts user’s active intervention as operations on solution candidate. Referring to these previous studies, this study proposes a new IEC for optimizing fragrance composition with user’s intervention. While the user just evaluates the presented fragrance with scoring or comparison in the conventional IECs, the user not only evaluates the fragrance but also operates the composition in the proposed IEC. The user’s intervention is performed on solution candidate directly. In construction of the system, Aromageur, which blends six aroma sources, is used to create the fragrance based on the composition.

This study aims to discuss the effect of radius of curvature on the checkmark in different lanes of 4×100m relay and offer appropriate suggestion of checkmark according to the speed of different runners. The objects of research were sixteen outstanding players of senior high school and college who had accepted the long-term training in 4×100m relay. The research obtained the interval time of checkmark calculation of each runner in 130m to calculate the interval speed by SPM100. This study found that the forecast formula of bend speed developed by Greene in 1985 could be used in present PU track, thus we applied it to substitute the actual measurement. Experimental checkmark was calculated from the interval speed of incoming runner in last 30m and the starting speed of outgoing runner in 30m. Traditional checkmark was the original used distance. Both of them had the obvious differences (

P

< .05). Hence, the two checkmarks had different results. Comparing the individual grade, the grades of experimental checkmark were better than the grades of traditional checkmark. Therefore, the estimate of computer assistance program for checkmark position by the different bend radius of curvature of different lanes in 4×100 m relay could be applied to the real competitions which can provide the runners and coaches as prompt references, which expect to reduce the possibility of mistakes of baton exchange and let relay process more easily completed.

This study aims to find out which kind of car interior design factors influence human emotion change. A special focus was given on emotional effects of dashboard design. The selected design factors of dashboard, which are commonly observed in luxury cars, were the separation between center-fascia and center-console, the orientation of each button and the arrangement of buttons. Perceived luxuriousness and preference were measured out of seven points via an online questionnaire. It was hypothesized that i) when center-fascia and center-console are divided than when they are integrated, ii) when button orientation is horizontal than when it is vertical, iii) when buttons are arranged horizontally than when they are arranged vertically, perceived luxuriousness and preference would be increased. 2 x 2 x 2 repeated-measures ANOVA was conducted on perceived luxuriousness and preference with division, orientation and arrangement as factors. Results showed that when button orientation is horizontal, perceived luxuriousness and preference were higher. Perceived luxuriousness and preference were also higher when buttons are arranged horizontally. An interaction effect between button orientation and arrangement on preference was found. This implies that higher preference can be triggered when at least one factor is horizontal. No other significant effects were found.This study was conducted to make a car interior design guideline which associates particular design factors that trigger particular emotional response. Future studies should investigate low-level psychological elements and conduct factor analysis of various emotional adjectives.

This study develops intelligent interior design components that enhance design communications, based on the concepts and technologies of the building information modeling (BIM) to resolve data inconsistencies in relevant graphics of an interior design project. The developed intelligent decorative wooden walls possess intelligent dynamic correlation functions, with parameters that can control the wooden wall material, size, and restrictions. This study identified that the graphical data inconsistency problem was resolved, and effective communication was promoted among the participants who were involved in the various stages of an interior design project.

To support human factors evaluators, a cooperation system using the multi-touch tabletop computer is developed. The cooperation system, so called COSY, can show static information from drawings and dynamic information from design documents on the multi-touch tabletop computer. Because multiple human factors evaluators can discuss their opinions and draw the final conclusion on the current product design around the COSY. The COSY was applied to evaluate digital indicators for nuclear power plants from the human factors perspective iteratively from the initial design phase before high fidelity prototyping. It is concluded from the application that (1) since human factors evaluators could easily figure out the dynamic behavior, work together for each design issue, and complete their design reviews in a short time, they preferred the COSY as the evaluation support system (2) product designers liked the COSY because they could get fast design feedbacks.

This study aimed to explore the colour imagery of skin tone and eyeglass frames, and whether this affects the preferences of consumers. Glasses are a focal point on the face and we wished to understand whether the frame colour along with skin tone affects the entire facial image. Many businesses provide suggestions on choosing frames that complement one’s skin tone, but what is the basis of these recommendations? We conducted a questionnaire survey and analysed the results using two-way ANOVA and regression analysis. Results were as follows: (1) skin tone significantly influences preference; (2) the colour of eyeglass frames significantly influences preference; (3) the interaction of skin tone and frame colour does not significantly affect preference; (4) consumers with lighter skin tone tend to prefer black frames; (5) elegant, simple, fresh imagery significantly and positively influences preference. Our results showed that when consumers are choosing glasses, the colour relationship between skin tone and glasses frames does not significantly influence their decisions; however, when it comes to choosing the frames, consumers place more emphasis on their skin tone or colour preferences.

In this paper we describe the process of constructing a design laboratory oriented towards designers re-conceptualizing ship bridge interaction. We offer a description of the laboratory itself and the rationale for its form and the current experiences from using it.

The low temperature and low pressure in the space restrict astronauts’ operation when they are wearing Extravehicular (EVA) gloves. Active heating is an effective method for maintaining temperature stability in the gloves; however, research findings in the field are scarce at present. In the study, we designed a structure of active heating in EVA glove, and explore a heating scheme for the structure. We designed a system including environment simulation device, hand simulation device as well as temperature measuring equipment to simulate the parameters of space surroundings and human hands. A electric heating structure was fixed in the limiting layer of the gloves. This structure could maintain the surface temperature of hands which was gauged by the sensors. We adjusted the heating power of heating structure, and confirmed 4 Watt was ideal. The other result is the thumb finger needs more power than middle finger.

The traditional mechanical products have been considered to be structured products all the time. The concept of “priority to function” dominates the design philosophy in the long term, but it unilaterally stresses “technique” and “performance” of the “product” but overlooks “emotion” and “care” of “human”, thus making the relationship between “human” and “product” “disharmonious” and violating the original intention of human for creation. Then this requires us to think deeply. In the aspect of things perception in China, starting from characters invention by Cang Jie, there were cultural heritages being good at abstraction including “intuitive realization”, “sudden enlightenment” and “empathizing and understanding” since ancient times. The six methods of character creation reflect the “intuitive semantics” or the information referred to as “intuitive semiology” formed very early in Chinese culture. The theoretical achievements of domestic and overseas mechanical product design are presented and analyzed firstly in this essay; and then starting with the study on Chinese traditional creation culture and practical activities, the orient traditional creation wisdom that contains substantial thinking and elements related to “intuitive semantics” will be researched; finally, the “intuitive semantics” will be infused into design of modern mechanical products to think and study and survey the relationship between human emotion and technical principles, thus perfecting the innovation theory of modern mechanical product design.

Currently, there are a variety of the early education products in the market. A strict approach for classification of these products, however, is generally absent. But even so, any kind of the early education products are indeed built on the same principle that almost all devisers are making attempts to attract users for participation and experience from the three aspects–the visual sense, the auditory sense and the sense of touch. The way for experience is also limited to some certain operant behavior including “press”, “twist” and “thump”. Due to the fact that young children are the targeted users for the early education products and because of their unique characteristics—the so-called “realistic feature” embedded into their intelligence, their behavioral norms are conspicuously distinguishing from adults. It is therefore that the development of related products should not be conducted in the logical way of adults. It is proper to cultivate the cognitive ability, judgment and logics of infants in a simplistic and pleasant context and circumstances.

This research will delve into behavior from a perspective of Semantics by initiating a study on “Form”, which is the carrier for products’ semanteme. Experimental data of a series of early education products will be reviewed for reference and for making contributions to the quantitative research on the influence of forms on behavior. Three key concepts, which are the “form”, the “semanteme” and the “behavior”, will also be effectively integrated into and contributing to the two new concepts, the “Behavioral Semanteme Form” and the “Semanteme Form Model”. The research aims at providing the entire and detailed explanations to the formation, structural characteristics and category of the semanteme by adopting the operable and controllable approaches.

With increasing complexity of systems under surveillance, demand grows for automated video-based surveillance systems which are able to support end users in making sense of situational context from the amount of available data and incoming data streams. Traditionally, those systems have been developed based on techniques derived from the fields of image processing and pattern recognition. This paper presents MOSAIC (Multi-Modal Situation Assessment and Analytics Platform), a system which aims at exploiting multi-modal data analysis comprising advanced tools for video analytics, text mining, social network analysis, and decision support in order to provide from a richer context an understanding of behaviour of the system under surveillance and to support police personnel in decision making processes.

Law Enforcement Agencies (LEAs) are increasingly more reliant on information and communication technologies and affected by a society shaped by the Internet and Social Media. The richness and quantity of information available from open sources, if properly gathered and processed, can provide valuable intelligence and help drawing inference from existing closed source intelligence. This paper presents CAPER, a state-of-the-art platform for the prevention of organised crime, created in cooperation with European LEAs. CAPER supports information sharing and multi-modal analysis of open and closed information sources, mainly based on Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Visual Analytics (VA) technologies.

Although many biometric characteristics are not secrets, biometric reference data (also known as biometric templates) need to be stored securely and to be protected against unauthorized use. For this purpose, biometric template protection techniques have been developed that do not only prevent privacy leakage and provide confidentiality of the stored biometric templates, but address also problems like identity theft and cross-matching of biometric templates stored in different systems. This paper describes the security and privacy risks associated with storing biometric data and highlights the necessity of using biometric template protection as a potential remedy to these risks. Privacy considerations are discussed with respect to using fingerprint verification for access control to a public outdoor swimming pool.

This paper discusses the role of interaction and user experience in the design of an interface of search for digital libraries. We present our preliminary work in the design of an advanced interaction interface for “Publicamente”, a web based semantic multimedia digital library that allows the archiving, management and access to a collection of heterogeneous documents types. In this paper we explore the user requirements, and present the design guidelines for the interface of the system. Users of “Publicamente” are be both expert users and casual users and the interface need to being able to accommodate different search styles, make semantic technologies transparent to casual users, and leverage on the semantic layer in the presentation of the retrieved information and its context.

Constraint programming (CP) allows users to solve combinatorial problems by simply launching the corresponding model in a search engine. However, achieving good results may clearly depend on the correct search engine configuration, which demands advanced knowledge from the modeler. Recently, Autonomous Search (AS) appeared as a new technique that enables a given search engine to control and adapt its own configuration based on self-tuning. The goal is to be more efficient without the knowledge of an expert user. In this paper, we illustrate how the integration of AS into CP is carried out, reducing as a consequence the user involvement in solver tuning.

The time spent using a web browser on a wide variety of tasks such as research activities, shopping or planning holidays is relevant. Web pages visited by users contain important hints about their interests, but empirical evaluations show that almost 40-50% of the elements of the web pages can be considered irrelevant w.r.t. the user interests driving the browsing activity. Moreover, pages might cover several different topics. For these reasons they are often ignored in personalized approaches. We propose a novel approach for selectively collecting text information based on any implicit signal that naturally exists through web browsing interactions. Our approach consists of three steps: (1) definition of a DOM-based representation of visited pages, (2) clustering of pages according with a tree edit distance measure and (3) exploiting the acquired evidence about the user behaviour to better filtering out irrelevant information and identify relevant text related to the current needs. A comparative evaluation shows the effectiveness of the proposed approach in retrieving additional web resources related to what the user is currently browsing

Chinese character (

Kanji

) is thought as very complexity to person who just started to learn

Kanji

such as a primary schoolchildren or a foreigner. Especially, almost of these beginners are looked like to draw

Kanji

than to write it. It means, almost of the all beginners think

Kanji

is difficult to write. Therefore, in elementary school in Japan, the exercise to write

Kanji

repeatedly using a paper sheet is conducted for primary schoolchildren. However, it was clarified that many primary schoolchild don’t like the exercise to write

Kanji

repeatedly is conducting. Moreover, there are many applications to learn

Kanji

in Japan, however almost of all applications are made for a practician to write

Kanji

tidily and quickly. Based previous backgrounds, we address that beginners in learning

Kanji

can get enjoyment of pleasant experience of writing

Kanji.

The purpose of this research is to propose a pleasant handwriting exercise application using each one’s handwriting as individuality and sound information. Therefore, experiment to quantify value of each one’s handwriting was conducted with 50 Japanese who were from 6 years old to 80 years old. As the results of the analysis, it was clarified that these handwritings as input information are effective to produce a coordinated sounds as output information in an application of electronic device. “

KanjiOn

” was proposed based on the results of the experiment. In using “

KanjiOn

”, user writes various

Kanji

many times with various handwritings then they can hear various sound based on the each handwriting. The experiment conducted with 48 participants including primary schoolchildren at

Hakodate Chuo

library. Almost of participants evaluated “

KanjiOn

” is very pleasant application to write

Kanji

, they wanted to use “

KanjiOn

” more. We hope that not only primary schoolchildren but also foreigners who want to learn

Kanji

become to enjoy writing

Kanji

and can understand more

Kanji

by using ”

KanjiOn

”.

Webster is a new information system for the Web using it as a huge database and not a huge amount of pages. By concentrating on content and not on authorship, Webster offers a new way to search and browse the Web. Webster shows how the presentation and usage of the Web with new semantic technologies could work without using the metaphor of a page in all its dimensions. The metaphor of a page as well as the history of web design will be discussed in the following to present the concept and the basic ideas of Webster in an understandable way.

We introduce a prescriptive analytics system, InSciTe Advisory, to provide researchers with advice for their future research direction and strategy. It consists of two main parts: descriptive analytics and prescriptive analytics. Descriptive analytics provides results from research activity history as well as the research power index for the designated researcher. Prescriptive analytics suggests a group of role model researchers to the researcher, as well as methods to adopt their best practices. The prescription for the researcher is provided according to 5W1H questions and their corresponding answers. All of the analytical results and their explanations related to the given researcher are automatically generated and saved to a report. This researcher-centric prescriptive analytics framework is expected to be a useful tool to understand the designated researcher from the perspective of prescriptive and descriptive analytics. We evaluated user satisfaction results for InSciTe Advisory and Elsvier Scival by five test users. The result of the evaluation demonstrated that user satisfaction of InSciTe Advisory is 126.5% higher than Scival.

We present a case study of the redesign of the organizational presentation and content of the Virtual Library website at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (Open University of Catalonia, UOC), based on a user-centered design strategy. The aim of the redesign was to provide users with more intuitive, usable and understandable content (textual content, resources and services) by implementing criteria of customization, transparency and proximity. The study also presents a selection of best practices for applying these criteria to the design of other library websites.

This short paper encompasses the birth of Project Anno. The researcher investigated the possibility of support for accurate annotation on the output of 3D scanners [14] to enhance the use of 3D printers [12] for use in 3D prototyping. As Project Anno is a work-in-progress, the current system aims to simulate accurate natural user interaction and expects to result in a user’s physical movement and voice input being able to operate the system’s annotation functions with some degree of precision, nicknamed as the “twist and shout” method by the researcher. In this interactive annotation environment, users can have a natural interactive experience by using their hands to practise accurate control of using the hand in place of a mouse. A description of the solution, closest related work, how Project Anno is novel, how Project Anno’s design is iterated upon, and the usability evaluation method of Project Anno are discussed.

Product performance charts are commonly seen in the product reviews published on the relevant web sites, magazines, and other public media. They are aimed at helping consumers understand the similarities and differences among the gathered products. This study investigates whether the design style influences the perception of the product performance charts. And this paper presents the result of an initial experiment that evaluates three chart types, including bar charts, count charts, and radar charts. The result shows that the participants may evaluate a product differently if presented with different design style. The result of this initial experiment provides some interesting insights. Further investigations that follow will include the dimensional factors and the more in-depth analysis of how a consumer responds to product performance charts.

The visualization of information in computers is a necessary work in professional and personal scopes, because nowadays a big amount of information is represented, or at least accompanied, by visual representations in order to give a better interpretation to the viewers. However, two main problems are shown for this topic. By one hand the information could be of different types (nominal, text, ordinal and graphics to name a few) and they could come from different resources (data bases, descriptive files, multimedia, etc.). No all visualization techniques are applicable to all kinds of data sets derived by different numerical techniques. By the other hand we have the big amount of devices that the computer equipment uses to display information. This devices ranges from big video walls and immersion systems to mobile devices with a limited amount of resources. An important problem that this entails is how information, been an abstract element ,could be represented in a suitable form in every device that we have available, taking its characteristics into account. In this work, a dissertation of the problems and implications of adaptability of information, a revision of the kinds of data, output displays and techniques for data representation is made, in order to have a base to propose solutions to this problem.

This paper explores the effectiveness of prompting abstract paintings’ viewers’ inspiration and imagination by the authors’ gaze based music generation system. The authors’ music generation system detects the viewer’s gaze by a gaze detection equipment. At each of the gaze staying positions in the painting, the color of that point is converted to the sound so that as the gaze moves, music that consists of the converted time series sounds is generated. Experiments using six subjects and six abstract paintings were conducted for the three cases in which the subjects see the abstract paintings without hearing any music, while hearing pre-selected music and while hearing the viewers’ gaze based music generated by the authors’ system. The experimental results imply that “hearing gaze based music” could stimulate the viewers’ inspiration and imagination best, “hearing pre-selected music” second best, and “without music” third best.

We examine the ways in which answers formulated in the Q&A community Quora are aggregated in a collaborative, computer-mediated body of knowledge. Readers’ experiences are shaped by the answer ranking algorithm, a central rhetorical device on Quora. Answer visibility on page is strongly dependent on the number of upvotes, but also on recency and author popularity. Upvotes depend to some extent on wordcount, followers, and use of visual representations, but not on answer’s age. This indicates that readers engage with Quora as a body of stratified information, rather than pursuing unlimited diversity of perspectives: engagement seems to be limited to the top answers, which represent, for practical purposes, Quora’s persuasive statements.

This paper proposes a method to measure the performance of keyword extraction based on topic coverage. The answer set of a keyword is required to evaluate keyword extraction by methods such as TF-IDF. However, creating an answer set for a large document is expensive. Thus, this paper proposes a new measurement called topic coverage on the basis of the assumption that the keywords extracted by a superior method can express the topic information efficiently. The experiment using the proceedings of a conference shows the feasibility of our proposed method.

Recently, commercial interest in the field of music information retrieval (MIR) has been growing rapidly. This paper describes a MIR system that accept any Japanese word as query. Previous studies focused on emotion based MIR system generally uses limited words such as major adjectives or kansei words. However, emotion of the music is represented by various words in practice. Music review is a one of good example. Word can also express complicated emotions with which various emotions are mixed. Starting from this point of view, we propose a method for MIR system that is able to find the appropriate music directory from any word as query. There are three main issues in this study. First one is how to mapping music and emotion. We introduce two-dimensional space which can represent emotion and music in a unified space. This space is obtained automatically from the emotion evaluation data of words and music. Second issue is extraction method for musical feature in order to map to the emotion space from given music. In our approach, optimal feature parameters are automatically selected with respect to each axis of the emotion space. Third issue is how to cope with any query word. Our method can find a music pieace corresponding to emotion of any word by measurement of relationship between each basic word for the given query word. A feature point of this approach is the use of co-occurrence probability of words obtained from a large scale of web text corpus. We performed a subjective evaluation experiments using 100 classical musical pieces and 50 Japanese words that are often used in music reviews. The experimental results show that our proposed system can find the correct music piece which matches mostly given query word.

The objective of this poster is to discuss the extensible database design for an Online Psychometric Design (OnPsyD) Tool that will be used for research in Online Psychometrics.

We have developed a framework to support adaptive elements in Web pages. In particular we focus on adaptive menus. Developers are able to define rules for menu adaptation according to the features of the device and browser in use. This paper briefly describes the selected adaptation patterns and their implementation.

In recent years, as use of the Internet became widespread, numerous music videos became available on Web. In Japan, many of these music videos are the CGM (Consumer Generated Media) that are created using a singing synthesis software called Hatsune Miku, and published on YouTube and other similar Web sites. Existing Web sites, however, support only the search methods based on music video title and artist name, which could not be effectively used to search for the unknown music videos such as the CGM ones. This paper presents a system model for effectively searching for the unknown music videos, which is characterized by the use of the onomatopoeia. The system model consists of a music video collecting engine for collecting pairs of music video URL and its tags, an onomatopoeia assigning engine for assigning onomatopoeias to music videos, and an onomatopoeia retriever for presenting users the music video URLs satisfying their onomatopoeia requirements. We have implemented a prototype system of the proposed system model and conducted experiments to study its performance. It has been found that with the proposed system model, a precision ratio of 66.82%, a recall ratio of 56.36%, and an F-measure of 61.14% could be achieved.

One problem faced by an emergency response headquarters is that emergency response procedures are not adequately documented. This lack of documentation is a major problem in testing preparedness for future emergencies. However, it is difficult to document an emergency response while actually responding to an event. The authors have attempted to resolve this issue by building a content management system with a focus on documentation created during emergency responses and on documentation that can be printed out and attached.

This study investigates the efficacy of training in facilitating human-computer interaction during a timetabling task. A computerized feedforward facility highlighted timeslots that could accommodate class requirements, thus integrating relevant constraint information and easing the computational workload of the timetabler. Feedforward training was compared to: metacognitive training that prompted individuals to plan and evaluate their timetabling decisions; a metacognition plus feedforward condition; and a control no training condition. A training and transfer design was used. Results indicated that feedforward training did not improve performance. However, metacognitive training resulted in more classes successfully scheduled and fewer timetabling errors than in control or feedforward conditions. The addition of feedforward to the metacognitive training did not result in additional improvement. Therefore, feedforward training, in its present form, offered no advantage, unlike metacognitive training. Practical advantages of metacognitive training is that it is inexpensive and quick to develop.

The visual analytics is increasingly drawing attention according to the fast growing trend of big data. To meet the demands of the times, the project was carried out to make a working prototype of visual analytics system for big data analysis.The visual analytics system ‘Sapientia’ was planned for providing big data analytics service. By performing user researches to establish user-centered UX strategy, it provides intuitive and convenient UI, which is able to easily control the pipeline of data analysis and also customize the UI depending on the purpose of use.We anticipate that ‘Sapientia’ will be able to encourage the expansion of big data analysis and also be able to contribute to finding new business opportunities and enhancing the business capabilities of company.

Institutional Repositories (IR) are tools of information and communication technologies (ICTs) which are altering the process of science communication and its impact on society. It aims primarily to improve the scientific communication of institutions internally and externally, maximizing its accessibility, usage and visibility. Literature searches indicate a lack of usability studies about IR involving users in the task of self-archiving, a fundamental process in the change of culture and behavior of researchers, which improves RI adherence and success. Aiming to know more about this question, a usability study with five researchers in accomplishing the task of self-archiving in ARCA is presented. Cooperative evaluation and post-test questionnaires were applied and possible solutions to usability issues were identified and solved. As a result, despite the recognition of the benefits provided by the use of institutional repositories in terms of visibility of their scientific production, usability barriers of the interface have been contributing to the non-adherence. Other barriers identified were language translation of the software; lack of immediate feedback overall, principally in the authorization of deposit; excess of information in the pages, often leading the user to error. By evaluating interfaces and providing solutions to usability problems of repositories, the area of Human-Computer Interaction has greatly aided in perfecting institutional repositories and the process of scientific communication as a whole.

Digital publication resources contain a lot of useful and authoritative information which is normally organized in small sections such as paragraphs, book sections or chapters. It is important to use the information from digital publication resources for knowledge service. In this paper, concepts in a domain are obtained from encyclopedia. Sections are extracted from e-books and then indexed for searching. The related sections for the important concepts are then found by using full text search technique. SVM is used to classify the related sections and the semantic information is computed for the concept. The sentences are then extracted by dynamically extending the adjacent sentences into sentence group. With the method, the sentences extracted are continuous and the length of the sentences would approximate to a specified length statistically. The method is effective for domain-specific knowledge service.

The transactions between the government of a given country and businesses, services, employees’ details and roles, the wellbeing of citizens and transactions with other governments is becoming faster and remotely through what is known as an eGovernment system. This system utilizes an information and communication technology platform to perform digital interaction in real time. The mGovernment system is a mobile platform extension of eGovernment, but unfortunately it has drawbacks in terms of gaining citizens’ trust and willingness to embark on using the system. Previous studies have attributed this to the state of information quality as well as the privacy and security of transmitted information. This paper focuses on evaluating mGovernment information quality. The quantitative user study of a sample population is based on the assumption that knowledge about reality can be obtained through the eyes of the researcher. The result indicates that the representation format of mGovernment is tied to its information quality, whereas the accessibility, accuracy and relevance of information are also key attributes of mGovernment.

DXF File is a graph exchanging file for CAD data exchange between other softwares provided by Autodesk Company. The house drawing of Shandong University is designed by AutoCAD software, and the graph information of house is recorded by the DXF file. Based on the DXF file, this paper will conduct an analysis on DXF file and extract the information from it. Then this paper will relate those extracted information with the information of house saved in the database by the automatic information retrieval algorithm and manual information retrieval algorithm. Finally, the information from database can be reclassified into four layers: base graph layer, room name layer, room area layer and room user layer.And those reclassified information will be displayed at the end of CS.

The consideration of human factors for Industrial Product-Service Systems (IPS²) is an essential purpose in the SFB/TR29 to prevent errors due to malpractice or human error. These innovative systems, integrating both products and services in industrial applications, are multifaceted and dynamic, providing a challenge to the operators because of their high complexity. On the operational level this requires human operators to handle highly complex technical systems in different environments. At the same time operator errors pose a considerable risk to the overall system robustness. This negative impact on work complexity, resulting in additional costs, can be counterbalanced by a cognitive system which detects erroneous behavior before damage or injury occurs. This article describes a pretest with this recognition system where a spindle dismantling is performed. The task, system setup and an estimate of the performance for real-time use is reported.

For professionals in various domains, training based on Virtual Reality can be an interesting method to improve their emotion regulation skills. However, for such a training system to be effective, it is essential to trigger the desired emotional state in the trainee. Hence, an important question is to what extent virtual stimuli have the ability to induce an emotional stress response. This paper addresses this question by studying the impact of anxiety-inducing video material on skin conductance, heart rate and subjective experience of participants that watch the videos. The results indicate that the scary videos significantly increased skin conductance and subjective response, while no significant effect on heart rate was found.

This work presents the relevance of emotions in the software development process. Emotions are an important human factor that must be considered when developing software. Unlike in psychology, where the influence of emotions on industrial productivity is well known, there are few studies reported on its importance in software engineering.

This research focuses on the study of the Eco-Visualization Interface for water resource, and explores the different design elements and approaches that affect the user’s emotional valence and arousal of eco-visualization interface. Respondents were invited to view the interactive interfaces with 6 different ways to show the volume of consumed water in a certain setting. The surveys were also incorporated with the scales of Self-Assessment Manikin (SAM) and the Questionnaires for User Interaction Satisfaction (QUIS). As statistical results indicated, the interfaces with the best performance were separately those of tropical fish and water droplets with a good conformity with typical design principles. The interfaces with emotional animation brought with positive responses. However, what was noteworthy was a fact that some respondents contended more water would be consumed whenever the interfaces were displayed. Such a response deviated from our original expectation.

We describe the utilization of the visual phenomenon saccadic suppression for masking graphical modifications in real-time 3D visualizations in order to hide disruptive effects from the human visual perception. Consequently, a saccade detection algorithm was implemented, which delivers outcomes at runtime. Furthermore an appropriate plugin for a software framework for 3D visualization (cf. [8]) was developed. A demonstration scene illustrates the performance of our approach regarding saccade detection and processing. Test results revealed that 96,5% of the measured latencies undercut our determined threshold of 30ms.

Using gaze as input modality has often been promoted as a method for advanced computer interaction. One important detail in gaze controlled interfaces is the design of optimal feedback. Highlighting the current point of gaze by a gaze contingent cursor represents a simple form of feedback. In an experimental study, we investigated the influence of gaze cursor feedback on eye movement behavior, task performance and subjective distraction. Participants of the study completed three different tasks (gaze typing, reading and image exploration) with five different feedback conditions. No-feedback was implemented as baseline condition and compared with gaze cursor feedback of various spatial precision and temporal delays. A blue, semitransparent small dot served as gaze cursor. The observed findings are discussed in the context of user friendly feedback for gaze based computer interaction.

With the ever increasing computerization in vehicles it becomes essential to assess the impact these technologies have on drivers. DriveLab is an easy to use system for measuring and analyzing driver behavior. Introduced by Green Dino, Noldus Information Technology and SmartEye, it is designed to support researchers’ need to quickly record and analyze a driver’s behavior. It records common driver performance measures and various (cognitive) workload measures. Using real-time date exchange, data analysis can start immediately after a trial.

Drivelab is built on Green Dino’s driving simulator, SmartEye’s Smart Eye Pro and Noldus’ The Observer XT.

This contribution presents a summary of activities performed in an ongoing military research project aiming at investigating the impact of navigational support on spatial awareness. Investigated tasks are e.g. indication of direction to objects beyond visual range with and without navigational support, display size, performance time, and use of GPS device in darkness. The results indicate that the ability to keep track of targets in the terrain without a technical aid is very poor, but with a GPS device targets can be indicated with relatively high precision. Precision on target indication is slightly better with a larger display, it seems possible to indicate as fast as 5 seconds with a GPS device without impairments of precision, and a GPS device can be used for target indication in darkness. Spatial ability measured by PTSOT can discriminate important aspects of spatial ability with direct relevance for navigation and target indication.

The aims of this study are reconstructing audio signal from fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) data measured primary auditory cortex of human and developing brain machine interface. In order to develop a sound decoding system from brain activity, it is necessary to distinguish brain activities which respond to several frequencies of stimuli. In this paper, it is shown that the brain activities have significant differences which respond to semitone-difference stimuli with 3-mm spatial resolution of fMRI.

This paper reports experiments investigating the effect of presentation on visual working memory (VWM) when set-size increases. The capacity of VWM is limited to approximately four items (Luck & Vogel, 1997) and increasing set-size impairs the performance in visual tasks. Also, the performance in visuospatial tasks was better in the simultaneous presentation than in the sequential presentation. However, it is possible that large set-size in the simultaneous presentation caused overload in visual processing, and also, there is a possibility to increase interference among stimuli.Therefore, we speculated that performance in a simultaneous presentation would show a sharper decrease than in a partitioned presentation, which divides stimuli into two halves in order to reduce visual processing load and interference among stimuli when number of stimuli increases. Thus, the experiments with two types of set-size and two types of presentations (simultaneous and partitioned) were performed.The experiment examined whether a probe item was old or novel after seeing 4 or 8 items that appeared at random locations. These items were displayed either in simultaneous or in a partitioned manner. The results revealed a significant interaction between set-size and presentation. In a small set-size condition, performance was better in the simultaneous presentation than in the partitioned presentation. However, no difference was found between performances for both presentations in the large set-size condition, as it was influenced by the partitioned presentation. The results proposed that the partitioned presentation was more stable method to show items than the simultaneous presentation when set-size is large.

This study explores the possibility of using EEG (electroencephalography) in conducting usability tests of hardware products such as DSLR cameras which require physical contact with hands. Since questionnaire-based usability tests use verbal or lingual expressions about tactile feeling, it is often difficult to precisely indicate the level of the differences. Thus this study took a different approach utilizing EEG technology to directly measure psychophysical responses in order to quantitatively observe the difference in tactile sensation. In the experiment, four different brands of camera with similar market position and outfit design were used. Twenty subjects were asked to complete the same three tasks. They included the primary modes of picture taking: gripping, shuttering, and mode dialing. Among EEG parameters, we chose relative alpha band power (7.5-12.5 Hz) and beta band power (13-30 Hz) on the frontal, parietal, and occipital lobes. Subjects were told to perform the tasks twice, once with closed eyes and again with eyes opened. ANOVA and post-hoc analysis were performed to indicate the differences of alpha and beta band power response of subjects during given tasks. In results, relatively apparent differences were observed in mode dialing in left hemisphere and with open eyes than the others. Such data revealed user’s tactile preference among four DSLR cameras although the outcome was not always statistically significant. In conclusion, psychophysical response can be applied to evaluate the subtle tactile stimulation of products along with questionnaire-based tests under certain experimentally-controlled conditions.

This study is intended as an investigation of relationship between task-switching and time pressure. Task-switching means switching attention from one task to another task. There are two sub-categories: task-switching which is involuntary task-switching, switching task caused by external stimulus, and voluntary task-switching, switching task caused by internal motivation. To investigate whether time pressure makes people do task-switching more frequently and perform task better or not, an experiment was executed. The existence of stopwatch was set as independent variable. The number of task-switching and result of task performance were set as dependent variables. After the experiment, a survey was taken by participants to examine their evaluation on experiment, time pressure, and preference of task-switching. As a result, task-switching occurred more frequently in timer condition when participants were not interested in tasks. Moreover, participants performed tasks better in timer condition when the difficulty level of task was high. These results lead to the conclusion that effect of time pressure varies according to interest in tasks and level of difficulty.

We experimentally investigated the influence of high-resolution images on viewers’ psychological state while viewing content at 4K and 2K on a 65-inch 4K TV. Their scores for “presence,” “relaxed,” “natural,” “liked,” “comfortable” and “precise” when viewing 4K scenic content were significantly higher than those for 2K content. Our results suggest that, when using a large (65-inch) screen, viewing 4K scenic content affords greater psychological refreshment and lower stress than when viewing similar material at 2K resolution.

This study investigated methods of enhancing human computer interaction in applications of pattern recognition where higher accuracy is required than is currently achievable by automated systems, but where there is enough time for a limited amount of human interaction. On a flower identification task, methods were explored to improve the accuracy of human-only and machine-only recognition by employing human-computer interaction. Human involvement in the feature extraction process, especially in color selection, was found to be most beneficial.

This contribution presents a study in which subjects are shown perspective views of simple shapes. The subject’s task was to decide whether the shape’s outlines were parallel to each other or not. It was observed that the subjects were strongly misled by perspective depth cues. Real parallels in orthographic projections were rarely detected. In contrast a minor convergent alignment of the outlines like in a linear perspective projection were perceived as parallel.

We introduce ESTER, an interactive 3D real-time (Eye-tracking) Science Tool and Experiment Runtime for investigating visual attention by means of the aggregation and representation of three-dimensional gaze paths and positions.

Wallis and colleagues have reported that drivers have a surprisingly limited understanding of the relation between steering movements and vehicle heading [1-3]. They suggest that popular models based on wholly open-loop or closed-loop control fail to capture a driver’s true behavior. One limitation of Wallis et al.’s studies has been that they were all conducted on a straight road. Because of the tendency of passenger vehicles to self-center their steering wheels, it is possible that the effects which they report are due to drivers not actively centering the steering wheel, but simply releasing it. This report describes an experiment conducted on a circular road, which required a non-zero steering wheel angle to be actively selected by the driver at all times. Despite this added requirement, the results were highly consistent with previous experiments carried out on a straight road [1-3], confirming that the errors are due to the drivers’ poor understanding of basic vehicle dynamics.

Commonplace objects are being redesigned with digital functionality. Near invisible networks of radio frequency identification tags (RFID) are being deployed on almost every type of consumer product, and the “Ambient intelligence” promises to form a global network of physical objects as ubiquitous as the worldwide web itself. This diverse global network, “the internet of things” (IoT), provides digital connectivity on top of existing infrastructure and items. Nascent “smart object” developments like the presented “UCF Smart Mailbox,” not only reformulate our relationship with the objects themselves, but they can also support social relationships that contribute to the sustainability of the society.

As message transmitters, all acoustic signals - natural or constructed - are perceived as having specific information. However, a little amount of research has been directed to the study of what is heard by people about the world around them and how it occurs, especially with regard to its interrelationship with interactive environments applications. Based on the universe of hypermedia, this study aims to explain the main applications of sound in a broad perspective with regard to its features of content, form and function, which are manifested through the use of dialogue, ambience and sound effects.

We implemented a virtual dressing system that presents fashion coordination recommendations to users based on their likes and dislikes using parallel interactive tabu search (ITS). Parallel ITS operations were implemented via user hand movements tracked by a Kinect sensor. Our proposed system automatically generates numerous fashion coordination recommendations that consist of four components, namely jackets, shirts, pants, and socks. Users choose multiple fashion coordination that they likes while trying on clothes virtually. In this study, we performed evaluation experiments with real users to demonstrate the efficacy of our proposed system. Experimental results show that our proposed system successfully presented fashion coordination based on user likes and dislikes.

Immersion, referring to the level of physical or psychological submergence of a user within a virtual space relative to that user’s consciousness of the real-world environment, has predominantly been established as an indispensable part of interactive media designs. This is most prevalent in

Virtual Reality

(VR) platforms, as their applications are typically reliant on user believability. With a wide variation of possible methodologies for the enhancement of this feature, the collectively recognised paradigm lies on the emphasis of naturalism in the design of the virtual system [7].

Though widely used by some specialised VR applications [4] such concepts are yet to be fully explored in the more contemporary virtual systems such as Social Immersive Virtual Environment (SIVE).

The focus of the study described in this paper are the techniques being developed to enhance user immersion, virtual presence and co-presence in a SIVE application, through the design and integration of a VR-based

Natural User Interface

(NUI) that allows users to naturally and intuitively interact with the virtual environment and other networked users through the utilisation of full body gesture controls. These gestural controls prioritise the emulation of the alternate equivalent of such real-wold interactions, whilst also providing an interface for the seamless and unobtrusive translation of the user’s real-world physical state into the virtual environment through intuitive user to virtual avatar proprioceptive coordination.

Elastic displays offer new ways to interact with multi-dimensional data by using the deformation of the surface as a tool to explore, filter, structure, or manipulate data. While a large number of prototypes exist, a general concept for using this promising technology in real-world application domains has not been established. In this paper, we introduce a framework about elastic displays and their applications with reference to the interaction techniques they provide. We investigate the data applicable to elastic displays and the appropriate interaction techniques. Using this approach, it is possible to identify strengths and weaknesses of this technology regarding specific scenarios, to find commonalities to traditional user interfaces and to explore novel concepts for interaction.

This research proposes a new process of designing wearable computers, which combines interaction design methodology and actual stage costume design processes. The performing arts have achieved an extension of space and time on stage and the enhancement in expressivity by introducing a new technology to theater, resulting in the strengthened “liveness” of performance. Performers, considered as the primary medium of performance communication by showing their characters, lively on stage, are the most important factor in achieving “presence”, which is the key aesthetic concept in performing arts. From this perspective, liveness is re-mediated and strengthened by the performer’s capabilities of expression, and wearable computer technology can further extend the performer’s expression, thereby creating a new media effect on stage. However, literature on performing arts lacks an adequate study of the design processes of wearable computers to help actual performers understand them. This study provides artists an understanding of this process and presents a new method of design that integrates interaction design and stage costume design. This new process is applied to the design and construction process of costumes using wearable computer technology in a live performance work,

$\ulcorner{\rm The} Pieces of Me \lrcorner$

. Through this case study, artists can understand the concept of wearable computer technology more easily and potentially engage with wearable computers with a deeper understanding.

In recent years, Intuitive style operations and the user-friendly operations are necessary for the future computer interaction. HMD and camera devices are usually used on those style systems and research. For beginner operators, HMD is easy devices at anywhere and anytime. But there are some problems. Especially, the hand detection is difficult. The hand area has specific dynamic colors. It is not robust for illumination change and individual difference of flesh color. For those problems, our research selects the color distribution of hand area for the gesture operations. Our method renews color distributions dynamically about hand areas by the characteristic tracking. This method has robustness at illumination change and individual difference of flesh color. In addition, this method runs only processing of tracking area. It cuts calculation cost. The implementing the proposal method has an advantage at real time.

This manuscript attempts to expand work space with the basic idea of omnidirectional virtual desktops. HMDs are used to expand work space. Users wear the HMD and look around to see it. Application windows can be placed all around the user virtually and their positions are represented in the world coordinate system. Their positions are transformed in the HMD coordinate system then these windows are shown on the HMD screen. Our system requires less room to work as compared with multi-display systems that take up much more room. From a pilot experiment in target search tasks, the result showed that users tended to look for the target in a spiral way and locate them in about 19 seconds.

solution for recreating the natural sound reception of the open ear while wearing earphones exists. It is achieved by mounting microphones on the outside of earphones, and simultaneously record and playback the sound. The solution could potentially be used for augmented audio applications. Due to practical limitations, such as the size of the earphones and microphones, it is not possible to record the sound in the ideal position. This paper presents work on finding the best position of a microphone with the purpose of reproducing as much of the spatial information as possible. The results from measurements with an artificial ear show that all spatial informations can be reproduced up to around 5-6 kHz. Above this frequency deviations in the reproduced sound, compared to the natural, is introduced. A method to evaluate how the deviations in the reproduced sound affect the listening experience is also proposed

Our study introduces an interactive 3D sound playback interface system that is controlled by the user’s behavior. It consists of an Android terminal, stereo headphone, and Nintendo Wii Balance Board. Traditional binaural audio systems can only deal with simple fixed playback conditions. On the other hand, our system assumes that the user is continuously moving. When a user who is riding on the Wii Balance Board moves his/her body, binaural sounds during playback are generated according to changes in his/her center of gravity. To implement the system, we have prepared a set of twenty-four acoustic signals for embedding into the system. If the user’s center of gravity corresponds with one of the twenty-four regions, an acoustic signal recorded in advance corresponding to that region is reproduced for the user. We experimentally evaluate how accurately a user can judge the position of a sound source. Experimental results prove the proposed system yielded significantly higher locational accuracy than the original binaural system.

Because a pose is implemented with static configuration of bodily joints expressing an abstract meaning of human intention, a gesture can be thought as a sequential combination of specific poses of human body. Therefore we can understand the meaning of a gesture if we can analyze the arrangement of the poses in spatiotemporal space. In this paper we propose a novel gesture recognition algorithm in which a pose is decomposed into micro-poses that are constructed with a small number of bodily joints. A micro-pose is a smallest unit of joints which can include a physical mean of body. To obtain the location of body joint MS Kinect is used and the information extracted from the micro-poses is finally applied to code matrix as the code book of the Bag-of-Words to understand the meaning of the gesture.

CAD systems are very useful tools in the industry, because they help design processes and new product development. However, it requires new mechanisms of interaction to provide greater usability of these tools. This usability can be provided through new interaction devices such as Kinect. We describe a methodology to find a series of gestures makes by the hands for control a CAD system with Kinect sensor of Microsoft. These gestures must be easy to remember for the user of the system and they don’t should represent a cognitive load to make the design’s experience most interactive.

Previously we contributed to the development of a brain-computer interface (Brainput) using functional near infrared spectroscopy (NIRS). This NIRS-based BCI was designed to improve performance on a human-robot team task by dynamically adapting a robot’s autonomy based on the person’s multitasking state. Two multitasking states (corresponding to low and high workload) were monitored in real-time using an SVM-based model of the person’s hemodynamic activity in the prefrontal cortex. In the initial evaluation of Brainput’s efficacy, the NIRS-based adaptivity was found to significantly improve performance on the human-robot team task (from a baseline success rate of 45% to a rate of 82%). However, failure to find any performance improvements in an extension of the original evaluation prompted a reinvestigation of the system via: (1) a reanalysis of Brainput’s signal processing on a larger NIRS dataset and (2) a placebo-controlled replication using random (instead of NIRS-based) state classifications [1].

The reinvestigation revealed confounds responsible for the original performance improvements and underscored several challenges for NIRS-based BCIs in general. Specifically, it revealed the original performance improvements were due to a disparity in difficulty between experimental conditions of the original evaluation (i.e., the task being easier in the adaptive versus the baseline condition). Moreover, the reinvestigation showed Brainput’s model of user multitasking (trained on the n-back task) generalized to neither the human-robot team task (the classifications showed systemic violations of basic hemodynamic principles) nor to other workload-inducing tasks (classifications of brain activity while users performed arithmetic were better than chance for only 1/4 of the subject population). Hence, in in an effort to identify ways forward, we first summarize the methods and results of this reinvestigation and then explore the challenges for achieving more reliable NIRS-BCIs.

In this study, we provide an index of classification for BCI-processing. We named the index a discrimination rate. A discrimination rate is the percentage of the LDA classifier, which was able to accurately determine P300. Based on the experimental results, we found that the correct answer rate is changed in proportion to the discrimination rate. Particularly, there was a statistical significance in less than 75% and more than 80% (p<0.01). In addition, the correct answer rate also increases with expression of P300.

In this study, we developed an emotional virtual creature that grows according to a growth function model influenced by user input. Our preceding study proposed a growth model for emotions based on changes in the network structure of a self-organizing map. We applied a multilayer perceptron neural network to generate more sophisticated emotional expressions using growth functions. This model generated behavior similar to affective change, as described in behavioral genetics. Based on the growth model for emotions, we propose a virtual creature with which a user can interact using a tablet computer. This creature resembles a bouncing ball and changes color depending on its emotion. The user can pet or tap the creature, play with it using some items, and provide it food. The creature’s actions and emotional expressions are influenced by a various stimuli from the user. We implemented the virtual creature using an Apple iPad and confirmed that the creature grew and learned various emotional expressions through user interaction.

This paper proposes a method for real-time face detection. The proposed method is to use depth information to detect faces in a manner that performs robustly even in response to changes of lighting and face sizes. And we use the depth difference features in depth image and apply this to the boosting algorithm for training and recognition. The depth difference features that this study proposes to use enable dynamic changes to be made to the window according to the face size. The conventional method of face detection was to define the size of the face to be detected in advance, and complete scanning for all the possible sizes. By contrast, this new method requires only a single scan to detect faces of all sizes, since it uses the central depth value to predict size based on 2

nd

polynomial model. These detected depth difference features are performed training and recognition step with boosting algorithm[1]. The boosting classifier performs recognition by connecting strong classifiers that are constituted by weak classifiers.

This study was aimed to investigate the multimodal interaction providing wheel gesture and voice inputs together- that is suitable for car driers in the driving environment, and to define it by function. The structure was defined first of the wheel gesture-voice multimodal interaction, followed by discussion on the resulting wheel gesture and voice interaction respectively. Next, multimodal interaction set was extracted to practically use after mapping the two interactions with the in-vehicle functions, and verify it through interviews with experts. This allowed the deriving of a specific set for multimodal interaction based on the wheel gesture and voice in the vehicle, which is expected to be used as a basis for future research on the multi interaction interface that can take advantage of the gesture and voice in a driving environment.

The Weighted Set Covering Problem is a formal model for many practical optimization problems. In this problem the goal is to choose a subset of columns of minimal cost covering every row. Here, we present a novel application of the Artificial Bee Colony algorithm to solve the Weighted Set Covering Problem. The Artificial Bee Colony algorithm is a recent Swarm Metaheuristic technique based on the intelligent foraging behavior of honey bees. Experimental results show that our Artificial Bee Colony algorithm is competitive in terms of solution quality with other recent metaheuristic approaches.

The manufacturing cell design problem aims at organizing a manufacturing plant in cells that contain machines processing parts from a same family for a given product. The purpose is to minimize the flow of parts among cells so as to increase productivity while reducing costs. This paper focuses on comparing metaheuristics and constraint programming —from a modeling standpoint— when used to solve this problem.

New methods in Combinatorial Problem Solving can solve larger problems in different domains. They also became more complex, which means that they are hard to use and fine-tuning to the peculiarities of a given problem, limiting its use to a small set of experts, and instead black-box solvers with automated search procedure are needed for its broad applicability. Autonomous Search Systems represent a new research field defined to precisely address the above challenge. The main goal of this paper is to review recent works on this kind of Self-adaptive Systems from the standpoint of the actual requirement for solvers.

The Weighted Set Covering Problem is a formal model for many practical optimization problems. In this problem the goal is to choose a subset of columns of minimal cost covering every row. Here, a Binary Firefly Algorithm has been developed to tackle the Weighted Set Covering Problem. Firefly Algorithm is a recently developed population-based metaheuristic inspired by the flashing behaviour of fireflies. Experimental results show that our approach is competitive solving the problem at hand.

This paper aimed to show the idea that concepts and methods from Creative Problem Solving can also be useful in dealing with developing Metaheuristics. A dynamic approach based on Divergent and Convergent Thinking can be used to understand the modus operandi and behaviour of this kind of optimization solvers.

The open pit mining problem aims at correctly identifying the set of blocks of a given mine to be extracted in order to maximize the net present value of the production. During the last years, different techniques have been proposed to solve mining problems, which range from the classic mathematical programming to more recent ones such as the metaheuristics. In this paper we illustrate how this problem can easily be solved by a relatively modern and declarative programming paradigm called constraint programming.

We have recently proposed Interactive Genetic Algorithm (IGA) creating music piece with user’s intervention. IGA is one of interactive evolutionary computation and is known as effective method to optimize certain pattern suited to each user’s feelings. The user’s intervention is expected to accelerate the optimization. In the intervention method, the user operates the music melody by changing keys of some music notes in each of music melodies. In general IGA, solution candidates are presented to the users, then the users subjectively evaluate them. In the IGA with user’s Intervention, after the presentation, the users can operate the individual when the users want to. After finishing the operation, the user input the fitness value of the presented solution candidate to the IGA system. This study focuses on improving the proposed IGA to create more music like melody. With the improvements, pattern of music melody is lengthened and is attached music chord.

Personal authentication alongside card use is implemented in a wide range of situations such as use in financial institutions or swiping a card key. However, card authentication systems have several issues, the largest of which concerns usage by another person as a result of theft or forgery. PINs (personal identification number) are a countermeasure for such crimes, but there is a limit to the number of digits that can be memorized, making it difficult to achieve robust authentication. Bio data like veins and fingerprints are also used, but resistance to the registration of such personal data is high. In this research, a means was devised to obtain human behavioral data for card authentication that is provided more freely by registering customers. The method involves using an image of the card owners swiping style for authentication. This paper also describes a newly devised authentication method for cards that applies a near-infrared transmission filter as a countermeasure for illicit peeking.

Occurrence Human Factors Analysis Model is developed for China civil aviation based on the Human Factors Analysis and Classification System (HFACS) and the actual operation conditions and characteristics of China civil aviation to enhance the classification, analysis and utilization of safety information. In addition, to generate a model which can provides quantitative analysis supportive in aviation incident analysis, a human factor analysis model based on OHFAM and Bayesian network is established. This model constructed by combing hill-climbing search method with CH score function is a Bayesian network which uses three layers nodes to represent causality between human factors and incidents. The specific impact degree of human factors on aviation incidents is represented by conditional probability parameters of the model. It is useful in aviation incident analyses and deductions.

In this paper, we propose an error diffusion algorithm that produces higher visual quality results while preserving fine texture details and high contrast present in the original images. Based on the analysis of the Laplacian kernel, we get an edge-enhanced image with the Laplacian transform. Next, we use the adaptive median filter to remove noises and preserve sharpness in the edge-enhanced images. Besides, error diffusion(E-D) by Stucki is adopted to get our halftoning results. Multiple experiments show that our method is superior to the improving mid-tone E-D especially in preserving texture details and contrast. Combined good visual properties with fast speed, our method has significantly improved the user perception and may be applied to most real-world applications.

The object recognition is an important research area about computer vision. In the object recognition, the BoF (Bag of Features) is kind of generally technique and this is based on “bag of words”. The BoF is a frequency histogram, is made from the local features of an image. This is not based on the feature distribution on the frequency histogram and this technique is using k-means and k-nearest neighbor. Therefore, our approach used the FCM (Fuzzy C-Means). The reason is a frequency histogram based on feature distribution for improving the recognition accuracy. The FCM uses another process about a frequency histogram than k-means and k-nearest neighbor. The FCM is a clustering method using fuzzy theory. This method allows variations of a local feature to make two or more clusters. The belonging level of each cluster is fuzzy membership. We discuss about our methods compared to the BoF’s results. There results is made from two proposal method and one basic method. Finally, we compare about which category recognition.

Using Time-Delay-Of-Arrival (TDOA) features has been proven greatly beneficial to the conventional acoustic feature-based speaker diarization systems by linking the speakers with their localization information. However, most state of-the-art speaker diarization systems depend on (relatively) limited distant microphones, which might not be sufficient in completely exploring the spatial information of speakers. In this study, the feature space spanned by TDOAs from (up to) 64 distant microphones is explored for the purpose of improving the performance of speaker classification, as an important branch of speaker diarization. Additionally, observing the intrinsic correlations of the high-dimensional feature space spanned by large-scale TDOAs, we compare several dimensionality reduction algorithms to explore an effective low-dimensional representation of TDOAs. Experimental results of speaker classification show consistent improvements when expanding the TDOA feature space by increasing the number of distant microphones. Furthermore, dimensionality reduction with the manifold information has been proven to be necessary for large-scale TDOAs.

This manuscript introduces an indoor navigation system that uses signpost metaphor. A signpost is usually installed at each fork of a path and tells people which fork they should take. Our system locates the user’s position by reading visual markers, which represent signposts. After that, it retrieves floor maps from the database and allows the user to turn around seeing labels from the perspective of the user’s position, which are overlaid on the real world. It also navigates the user’s way not only at the signpost but also between signposts by allowing the user to move around in the corresponding virtual world. From an experiment in usability, our system demonstrated good results for indoor navigation.

Drivers of intelligent agent in the virtual environment offer researchers a great opportunity to study interaction between drivers in the safe, controlled, replicable and low-cost simulator environment. However, the validation for the effectiveness of agent drivers upon human drivers is required. The present study aimed to evaluate the validity of agent-human interaction in a simulator, compared with human-human interaction on real roads. 20 male participants were recruited to watch eight scenarios concerning interactive driving behaviors and signal usage, which were presented in the forms of both realistic films with human drivers and virtual graphic scenes with agent drivers. Participants’ attitude, emotions and visual attention were recorded. The relative validity was established for all measurements. This result suggested that medium fidelity simulator with agent drivers could provide the effective values to evaluate the human-human interaction mirrored these values obtained on real road.

This study attempted to develop CamouFAB, which uses flexible plastic optic fiber (POF) to display camouflage patterns. Previously developed CamouLED system which uses light emitting diodes (LED) array to present camouflage patterns has limitations in that it is inflexible thus is difficult to be applied to combat uniforms. This study shows a further research to expand the CamouLED system to development of a new military uniform, using photonic technology which can change its color according to background. Like CamouLED, a camera receives background image and camouflage patterns are generated by the real-time patterning program. The generated patterns are then displayed on an 8 x 8 optic fiber display instead of LED display. An 8 x 8 flexible optic fiber patch was made by embroidered fabric with high luminance and controlling module was connected to each pixel of optic fiber bundle. This study concludes with an implication that the use of flexible POFs instead of an LED display would broaden the system’s application and use.

The authentic display of shadows by modern video games has long become a matter of course. On the web however, this is somewhat different: the rendering of three dimensional scenes in the browser has only in recent years been on the rise. At best, shadows have only played a minor part in that development, despite their importance regarding recognition of spacial relationships in human vision and general increase of a scene’s authenticity. An important part in the development of web-based 3D is played by the open-source JavaScript framework X3DOM, as it provides an approach for the integration of declarative 3D in HTML5. However the framework too only offers rudimentary shadow rendering techniques that hardly meet today’s demands. This work tackles this issue by first examining existing shadow mapping techniques for their suitability in the web context and based on that developing and implementing a concept for the enhancement of shadow display in X3DOM.

This research is going to demonstrate a virtual museum via second life, the visitors can have the chance to more profoundly experience the masterpieces. By extending 2D paintings to 3D world, users can be not only more adaptively perceive the expression of painting but also intuitively interact with the 2D famous painting in 3D world. Also this kind of art appreciation can play a profound contribution to the art education especially for children. By using game-like navigation around the virtual art gallery, children can receive deeper impression and be more interested in this immersive art museum than traditional one.

In this study, manipulations of virtual cloth model were examined for draping. Cloth was mechanically formalized and modeled. Motion of real human hand is detected by a sensor and the motion is utilized for handling of the cloth model. Cloth manipulations to hold, release and attach were realized. When the cloth model is handling, “coarse model” and fast dynamic calculation method is used and when the cloth is at rest, “precise model” and precise static calculation method is used. When the cloth model is stopped from dynamic regime, the model of the cloth is switched from “coarse” to “precise”. When the model is started to move from static regime, the model of the cloth is switched from “precise” to “coarse”.

In this study, we examined methods of sensing roughness with haptic displays. We used a PHANToM DeskTop-E Device (Sensable Technologies) as our haptic device. Representation of paper quality applies to dictionaries, notebooks and other everyday items, not just calligraphy and washi paper(Japanese paper). In contrast, the discrimination thresholds were Z

0.75

= 1.0 [N] for dynamic friction and Z

0.75

= 0.25[N] for static friction. In the case of PHANToM DeskTop-E, we showed that we made a large range of the comparison friction.

This manuscript proposes a navigation method with fishing metaphor for large translations and specifies its design, and shows a brief demonstration. From the demonstration, it was shown that the fishing metaphor has a better performance and the potential for providing large translations with intuitive ways.

This paper attempts to show the fourth generation of the immersive art forms - Immersive Art - Interactive art platforms that artists and designers serve audience to make their own art through this art platform. The user not only participated in media art, but also they can make their own art. This paper will focus on demonstration all of the above. Therefore we introduce the art form ‘Sound Clay’ on the border of Immersive Art. An audience can deform clay and refine transforming sound simultaneously in the immersive environment. Thus, this study provides an exciting opportunity to advance our knowledge of user experience design in the media art. Our second goal is to develop a range of techniques that support intuitive 3D modeling interactions based on free-form sculpting operations like those used when working with modeling clay.

Augmented reality is growing rapidly and supports people in different fields such as education, design, navigation and medicine. However, there is limited discussion about the characteristic features of augmented reality and what is meant by the term. This paper presents five different features: changeability, synchronicity and instant, antecedent, partial one to one and hidden reality. The explanation of each of these features is given follow a consistent structure. The benefits of generating features and future work are described.

Maintenance of complex technology artifacts in hazardous environments can be a risky and demanding procedure. Operators need to be both efficient and meticulous in their activities in order to ensure the quality of their maintenance activities and the effectiveness of the limited time spent in the hazardous environment. Thus, an intuitive AR informative system could improve the operators’ efficiency during their presence in the hazardous environment. What are the Human-Computer Interaction implications that arise in such applications?

Controlling the available degrees of freedom in virtual environments often represents a challenge for the design of 3D user interfaces. Based on the concept of Tangibles and their natural affordances for spatial interaction, we conducted a study to investigate how users intuitively use physical objects in Virtual Environments. The results reveal a wide range of different approaches. This specifically relates to the utilization of an object’s surface or edges for different functions or as representation of elements in the virtual world. The findings of the study have several implications on further research directions regarding tangible objects in Virtual Environments.

This paper presents a learning tool set in immersive virtual reality to aid students in learning the subject of engineering/architectural graphics. Current instruction methods do not use 3D objects to teach the subject. This hinders student’s ability to manipulate and interact with objects and understand the projections produced. Our tool allows students to observe 3D simulations of geometric objects and manipulate them in a virtual environment to closely understand the nature of the projections.

This paper proposes a guidance system to help to solve the Rubik’s cube. For the puzzle to be solved, each face must be returned to consisting of one color. But the problem is quite difficult because there are 4.3252x1019 different states that can be reached from any given configuration. Our system use augmented reality technology to recognize the placement of each square and provide intuitive and easily understandable guidance for solving procedure.

This paper presents a framework for processing visual and auditory textures in an augmented reality environment that enables real-time artistic creativity without imposing predefined interaction rules or constraints. It integrates multiple problem domain knowledge in sonification, real-time rendering, object tracking and object recognition in a collaborative art installation using a familiar Carom Billiard game table, motion tracking cameras, a table-top digital projector and a digital audio installation. A demonstrator was presented at a 10-day annual innovation exhibition in Belgium and was perceived as innovative, intuitive and very easy to interact with.

Virtual reality and haptic systems use geometric transformations with points represented in homogeneous coordinates extensively. In many cases interpolation and barycentric coordinates are used. However, developers do not fully use properties of projective representation to make algorithms stable, robust and faster. This paper describes geometric transformations and principle of duality which enables to solve some problems effectively.

A virtual reality driving simulator is designed as a tool for improving driving skills of individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). Training at an appropriate driving difficulty level can maximize long term performance. Affective state information has been used for difficulty level adjustment in our previous work. This paper integrates performance with affective state information to predict the optimal difficulty level. The participant’s performance data, physiology signals, and eye gaze data are captured. The performance features and affective state features are extracted. Two classification methods, Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Artificial Neural Network (ANN), are implemented to predict difficulty level. The results demonstrate that performance together with affective state information outperform the separated features in difficulty level prediction. A highest accuracy of 83.09% is achieved with the integrated features.