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The academization of midwifery education entails novel challenges. To second the transition process, the Heb@AR App is an innovative Augmented Reality (AR) training application. It is currently being deployed for self-directed and curricular on-site learning in several midwifery degree programs in Germany. The aim is to strengthen students’ practical competencies, especially for emergency situations. Hereby, the Heb@AR App is available through the app store on handheld (Android & iOS) devices for free and currently offers five midwifery-specific training scenarios.

Famous examples like the Amazon headquarter in New York City or the Stuttgart 21 train station demonstrate that construction projects are often subjects of common interest and can therefore produce protests if citizens feel unheard in urban planning. In this manuscript, we would therefore like to investigate whether e-participation can be used as a tool to foster citizen involvement in construction projects that are of public interest. To this end, we present a prototype that combines participation with augmented and virtual reality. While offering a source for a better understanding of construction processes, our prototype allows users to bring in their own design suggestions and discuss these with others. With this prototype paper, we thus want to demonstrate how augmented and virtual reality can lay the ground for innovative ways of political participation that would offer great potential for project initiators and citizens.

As first Virtual Reality (VR) shopping environments have begun to appear on the market, the question arises whether users will adopt them for doing their shopping. However, the evaluation of systems that have not yet diffused the market is potentially challenging because it requires bringing larger samples of respondents into a VR laboratory. Therefore, by conducting two experimental studies we shed light on the research question of whether evaluating the acceptance requires that respondents experience the immersive and interactive shopping environment. Our results reveal that particularly the hedonic variable perceived enjoyment as well as the VR specific variable perceived telepresence are underestimated when participants only imagine (based on a video) being in a VR shopping environment while there is no difference with respect to the behavioral intention to use the system. In addition, we show that particularly the hedonic variable perceived enjoyment and the utilitarian variable perceived usefulness influence the intention to use the shopping environment in the future. Overall, we conclude that experiencing the VR shopping environment is essential for users to be able to evaluate the respective technology.

Prototyping represents an established, essential method of product development and innovation, widely accepted across the industry. Obviously, the use of prototypes, i. e., simple representations of a product in development, in order to explore, communicate and evaluate the product idea, can provide many benefits. From a business perspective, a central advantage lies in cost-efficient testing. Consequently, the idea to “fail early”, and to continuously rethink and optimize design decisions before cost-consuming implementations, lies at the heart of prototyping. Still, taking a closer look at prototyping in practice, many organizations do not live up to this ideal. In fact, there are several typical misunderstandings and unsatisfying outcomes regarding the effective use of prototypes (e. g. Christoforakos & Diefenbach [3]; Diefenbach, Chien, Lenz, & Hassenzahl [4]). For example, although prominent literature repeatedly underlines the importance of the fit between a prototyping method or tool and its underlying research question and purpose (e. g. Schneider [7]), practitioners often seem to lack reflection and structure regarding their choice of prototyping approaches. Instead, the used prototypes often simply rest on organizational routines. As a result, prototypes can fail their purpose and might not contribute to the initial research question or aim of prototyping. Furthermore, the varying interests of different stakeholders within the prototyping process are often not considered with much detail either. According to Blomkvist and Holmlid [1], stakeholders of prototyping can be broadly categorized in colleagues (i. e. team members involved in the process of product development), clients (i. e. clients, whom the product is being developed for or potential new clients to be acquired) users (i. e. potential users of the final product). Each of these stakeholders employ different purposes of prototyping due to their distinct responsibilities within the process of product development. Moreover, they can hold different expectations regarding the prototyping process, and thus, have different preferences for certain methods or tools. Yet, the substantial role of stakeholders in the appropriate choice of prototyping approach and methods is often overlooked.

In the last decade, Virtual and Augmented Reality (VR/AR) hardware entered the consumer market, which broaden up potential use of VR and AR in everyday context. With everyday context we mean situations, environments or workflows that are part of everyday life. Examples may be the use of VR for data analysis as part of the data analyst’s workflow or the use of AR for supporting spatially dispersed workers in, e.g., maintaining of technical systems. To support research and development in this area of interest, we propose a one-day workshop on VR and AR in Everyday Context (VARECo) bringing together interested researchers and practitioners to discuss current and future work in this research domain. The workshop will be split into two parts: presentation of submitted and reviewed papers as well as an interactive part discussing current and future research topics in the field. The latter will be guided towards a common journal publication as follow-up activity.

Das Exzellenzcluster Kognitive Interaktionstechnologie (CITEC) an der Universität Bielefeld beschäftigt sich seit 2013 mit der virtuellen Realität (VR). Ausgehend von konkreten Projektkooperationen (Publikations- und Forschungsdatenmanagement) mit der Universitätsbibliothek ist die Idee entstanden, mit der in 2016 neu angebotenen Konsumer-VR-Hardware die im Labor entwickelten Interaktionstechniken auf geeignete Szenarien im Bereich von bibliothekarischen Umgebungen anzuwenden. Als interessantes Anwendungsgebiet kristallisierte sich im gemeinsamen Diskurs die Literatursuche heraus: Als Suchsystem wurde die Bielefelder BASE-Datenbank (d.i. Bielefeld Academic Search Engine mit inzwischen mehr als 100 Mio. indexierten Dokumenten) ausgewählt. Diese Auswahl erfolgte vor dem Hintergrund, dass sich die von zahlreichen externen Institutionen bereits genutzte API-Schnittstelle als universell und robust erwiesen hat und umfangreiche Funktionen bereitstellt. Auf der Grundlage der umfangreichen theoretischen und praktischen Erfahrungen des CITEC mit VRTechniken wurde der Prototyp für eine virtuelle Suchumgebung realisiert, der ein Retrieval in einem Suchraum von Online-Dokumenten erlaubt. Die Nutzerinnen und Nutzer können die Suchanfrage explorativ zusammenstellen und dabei die Ergebnisse intuitiv verwalten. Unterstützt werden sie dabei durch Ergebnisanzeige, Sortierung, Optimierung des Suchergebnisses mittels Suchverfeinerung (Drilldown-basiert) oder Anfrageerweiterung und Wiederverwendung von abgelegten Ergebnissen. Gleichzeitig wird der Zugriff- und Lizenzstatus visualisiert und die Detailanzeige der Metadaten des Objektes integriert. CITEC (Cluster of Excellence Cognitive Interaction Technology) at Bielefeld University has been engaged in virtual reality (VR) since 2013. Based on concrete joint project activities (publication and research data management) together with Bielefeld University Library the idea emerged to use consumer-VR hardware to transfer laboratory interaction techniques to library environments. In our co-operation, discussions have focused on literature search. The partners decided to choose BASE (Bielefeld Academic Search Engine, indexing more than 100 million documents) not least because the BASE API is used by more than 200 external institutions, has proven to be robust, and offers a broad range of functionality. Based on the broad theoretical and practical experience of CITEC with VR technology, a prototype for a virtual search environment has been developed, supporting a search space of online documents. Users may construct a query in an explorative way and manage the results intuitively. This includes result display as well as optimizing the search results by means of search refinement (based on drilldown facets), search query adoption and re-use of contents. Besides that, the access and re-use status is visualized and the display of document metadata has been integrated., o-bib. Das offene Bibliotheksjournal / Herausgeber VDB, Bd. 4 Nr. 4 (2017)

In many everyday purchase decisions, consumers have to trade-off their decisions between alternatives. For example, consumers often have to decide whether to buy the more expensive high quality product or the less expensive product of lower quality. Marketing researchers are especially interested in finding out how consumers make decisions when facing such trade-off conflicts and eye-tracking has been used as a tool to investigate the allocation of attention in such situations. Conflicting decision situations are also particularly interesting for human-computer interaction research because designers may use knowledge about the information acquisition behavior to build assistance systems which can help the user to solve the trade-off conflict. In this paper, we build and test such an assistance system that monitors the user’s information acquisition processes using mobile eye-tracking in the virtual reality. In particular, we test whether and how strongly the tradeoff conflict influences how consumers direct their attention to products and features. We find that trade-off conflict, task experience and task involvement significantly influence how much attention products receive. We discuss how this knowledge might be used in the future to build assistance systems in the form of attentive smart glasses.

In many everyday purchase decisions, consumers have to trade-off their decisions between alternatives. For example, consumers often have to decide whether to buy the more expensive high quality product or the less expensive product of lower quality. Marketing researchers are especially interested in finding out how consumers make decisions when facing such trade-off conflicts and eye-tracking has been used as a tool to investigate the allocation of attention in such situations. Conflicting decision situations are also particularly interesting for human-computer interaction research because designers may use knowledge about the information acquisition behavior to build assistance systems which can help the user to solve the trade-off conflict. In this paper, we build and test such an assistance system that monitors the user's information acquisition processes using mobile eye-tracking in the virtual reality. In particular, we test whether and how strongly the trade-off conflict influences how consumers direct their attention to products and features. We find that trade-off conflict, task experience and task involvement significantly influence how much attention products receive. We discuss how this knowledge might be used in the future to build assistance systems in the form of attentive smart glasses.

Industrie 4.0 (English translation: Industry 4.0) stands for functional integration, dynamic reorganization, and resource efficiency. Technical advances in control and communication create infrastructures that handle more and more tasks automatically. As a result, the complexity of today’s and future technical systems is hidden from the user. These advances, however, come with distinct challenges for user interface design. A central question is: how to empower users to understand, monitor, and control the automated processes of Industrie 4.0? Addressing these design challenges requires a full integration of user-centered design (UCD) processes into the development process. This paper discusses flexible but powerful methods for usability and user experience engineering in the context of Industrie 4.0.

Eye gaze plays an important role in human communication. One foundational skill in human social interaction is joint attention which is receiving increased interest in particular in the area of human-agent or human-robot interaction. We are focusing here on patterns of gaze interaction that emerge in the process of establishing joint attention. The approach, however, should be applicable to many other aspects of social communication in which eye gaze plays an important role. Attention has been characterized as an increased awareness 1 and intentionally directed perception 2 and is judged to be crucial for goal-directed behavior. Joint attention can be defined as simultaneously allocating attention to a target as a consequence of attending to each other's attentional states 3. In other words: Interlocutors have to deliberatively focus on the same target while being mutually aware of sharing their focus of attention 2 4.

Every now and then there are situations in which we are not sure how to proceed and thus are seeking for help. For example, choosing the best product out of dozens of different brands in a supermarket can be difficult, especially when following a specific diet. There are, however, also people who have problems with decision making or sequencing actions in everyday life, e.g. because they suffer from dementia. In such situations, it may be welcomed when there is someone around noticing our problem and offering help. In more private situations, e.g. in the bathroom, help in shape of a human being cannot be expected or even is not welcomed. Our research focuses on the design of mobile assistive systems which could assist in everyday life activities. Such a system needs to detect situations of helplessness, identify the interaction context, conclude what would be an appropriate assistance, before finally engaging in interaction with the user.

SAGA - International Workshop on Solutions for Automatic Gaze Data Analysis : Proceedings, SAGA 2015: 2nd International Workshop on Solutions for Automatic Gaze Data Analysis, Bielefeld, 29.-30. September 2015

Visual attention can be a viable source of information to assess human behaviors in many different contexts, from human-computer interaction, over sports or social interactions, to complex working environments, such as to be found in the context of Industry 4.0. In such scenarios in which the user is able to walk around freely, mobile eye-tracking systems are used to record eye movements, which are then mapped onto an ego-perspective video. The analysis of such recordings then requires large efforts for manually annotating the recorded videos on a frame-by-frame basis to label the fixations based on their locations to the target objects present in the video. First, we present a method to record eye movements in 3D scenarios and annotate fixations with corresponding labels for the objects of interest in real-time 2. For this purpose, we rely on computer-vision methods for the detection of the camera position and orientation in the world. Based on a coarse 3D model of the environment, representing the 3D areas of interest, fixations are mapped to areas of interest. As a result, we can identify the position of the fixation in terms of local object coordinates for each relevant object of interest. Second, we present a method for real-time creation and visualization of heatmaps for 3D objects 1. Based on a live-streaming of the recorded and analyzed eye movements, our solution renders heatmaps on top of the object s urfaces. The resulting visualizations are more realistic than standard 2D heatmaps, in that we consider occlusions, depth of focus and dynamic moving objects. Third, we present a new method which allows us to aggregate fixations on a per object basis, e.g. similar to regions/areas of interest. This allows us to transfer existing methods of analysis to 3D environments. We present examples from a virtual supermarket, a study on social interactions between two humans, examples from real-time gaze mapping on body parts of a moving humans and from studying 3D prototypes in a virtual reality environment.

For validly analyzing human visual attention, it is often necessary to proceed from computer-based desktop set-ups to more natural real-world settings. However, the resulting loss of control has to be counterbalanced by increasing participant and/or item count. Together with the effort required to manually annotate the gaze-cursor videos recorded with mobile eye trackers, this renders many studies unfeasible. We tackle this issue by minimizing the need for manual annotation of mobile gaze data. Our approach combines geo\-metric modelling with inexpensive 3D marker tracking to align virtual proxies with the real-world objects. This allows us to classify fixations on objects of interest automatically while supporting a completely free moving participant. The paper presents the EyeSee3D method as well as a comparison of an expensive outside-in (external cameras) and a low-cost inside-out (scene camera) tracking of the eyetracker's position. The EyeSee3D approach is evaluated comparing the results from automatic and manual classification of fixation targets, which raises old problems of annotation validity in a modern context.

SAGA - International Workshop on Solutions for Automatic Gaze Data Analysis : Proceedings, SAGA 2013: 1st International Workshop on Solutions for Automatic Gaze Data Analysis, Bielefeld, 24.-25. Oktober 2013

SAGA - International Workshop on Solutions for Automatic Gaze Data Analysis : Proceedings, SAGA 2013: 1st International Workshop on Solutions for Automatic Gaze Data Analysis, Bielefeld, 24.-25. Oktober 2013

SAGA - International Workshop on Solutions for Automatic Gaze Data Analysis : Proceedings, SAGA 2013: 1st International Workshop on Solutions for Automatic Gaze Data Analysis, Bielefeld, 24.-25. Oktober 2013

Modern mobile eye trackers calculate the point-of-regard relatively to the current image obtained by a scene-camera. They show where the wearer of the eye tracker is looking at in this 2D picture, but they fail to provide a link to the object of interest in the environment. To understand the context of the wearer’s current actions, human annotators therefore have to label the recorded fixations manually. This is very time consuming and also prevents an online interactive use in HCI. A popular scenario for mobile eye tracking are supermarkets. Gidlöf et al. (2013) used this scenario to study the visual behaviour in a decision-process. De Beugher et al. (2012) developed an offline approach to automate the analysis of object identification. For usage of mobile eye tracking in an online recommender system (Pfeiffer et al., 2013), that supports the user in a supermarket, it is essential to identify the object of interest immediately. Our work addresses this issue by using location information to speed-up the identification of the fixated object and at the same time making detection results more robust.

In a typical grocery-shopping trip consumers are overwhelmed not only by the number of products and brands in the store, but also by other possible distractions like advertisements, other consumers or smartphones. In this environment, attention is the key source for investigating the decision processes of customers. Recent mobile eyetracking systems have opened the gate to a better understanding of instore attention. We present perspectives from the two disciplines marketing research and human-computer interaction and refine methodical and technological requirements for attention analysis at the point-of-sale (POS).