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Volunteering benefits recipients, volunteers, communities, and society, while digital technologies establish new opportunities for virtual volunteering. We describe how volunteers transitioned the UK's long-established Oxjam grassroots music festival online in response to the COVID pandemic, delivering a local pilot before scaling up nationwide. We adopt an infrastructural perspective to reveal how two teams of volunteers defined a flexible festival format, knitted together diverse technologies into a technical platform, and operated this to deliver the festival. We highlight the need for teams of volunteers to orchestrate both audience and performer trajectories through festivals. We argue for deliberately designing in volunteer labour rather than automating it out by translating traditional roles online while defining new digital ones. We propose to make these roles rewarding through a more social volunteer experience, including privileged backstage access. We highlight the challenges of using social media for such events, including complying with algorithmic policing of rights.

Collision, "the violent encounter of a moving body with another", is poorly understood in HCI. When we discuss people colliding with the physical artifacts we create, or colliding with each other while using our systems, this is primarily treated as a hazard, something which we should design to avoid. However many other human activities involve situations where deliberate exposure to risk of collision may in fact have positive aspects. In this paper we discuss how the ’risk matrix’, a widely used risk-management tool, which categorizes risks in terms of likelihood and severity, may limit interaction in unintended ways. We discuss reframings of this matrix in relation to design concepts of ’adventure’, ’disempowerment/agency’ and ’consent’. and show that a range of design spaces for collisions exist which may be fruitful to explore. QC 20230628

In a deliberate and valiant effort to adapt to the conditions created by the recent pandemic, many theatre companies across the globe shifted their activities from the stage to online video platforms. But in releasing large portions of their back-catalogues at speed, opportunities to make such shows accessible have been under-exploited. This migration has created an unprecedented opportunity to examine the way accessible practices are transferred from stage to screen and has brought into sharp focus the somewhat inadequate provision for accessibility of online video platforms. While the very practice of making these shows available online, often at no cost to the viewer, has made them more socially accessible, practical accessibility for portions of the audience, such as the D/deaf community, has often been ignored or addressed in a low fidelity way. Through lack of time, lack of expertise or lack of resources, many companies have resorted to the use of auto-captioning tools, or the most basic of captions. Rarely do such captions come close to capturing the creativity of the shows they represent. This paper represents a call to arms for the development of bespoke tools to support better, more immersive and creative, retroactive captioning of stage productions presented as videos. Lay Summary In this article, we discuss how videos of stage performances can be subtitled in a way that is accurate and that preserves the creativity original performances. The recent pandemic forced theatre companies to adapt or perish. With playhouses closed, some companies moved their activities online. They either released old footage of their past shows and performances on video platforms such as YouTube but did not necessarily have the time or the right tools to make these videos accessible to members of the D/deaf community. One the one hand, their shows are more easily accessed since they can be found online, but on the other hand, whole sections of the general public, such as D/deaf people, still cannot accessed these videos because they are not subtitled. Most video platforms have built-in tools that can generate subtitles automatically, but these are not very precise and do not help to convey the creativity of the performances. The tools that are currently available are therefore not suitable and new tools need to be developed to provide access to D/deaf people and do justice to the performances.

As computer interfaces spread across and even into our bodies, so we find ourselves engaged in ever more deeply connected bodily interactions. From the mouse and keyboard, to wearables and gestural...

We examine the experience of Thresholds , a virtual reality (VR) recreation of the world's first photographic exhibition, which has toured to multiple museums. Following the method of performance-led research in the wild, we provide an account of the artist's design rationale and the experiences of visitors as the work toured. We reveal how the overlaying and juxtaposing of virtual and physical spaces established a VR architecture that underpinned the extended user experience. Overlaying was used to layer a virtual model onto a corresponding physical set to deliver physical sensations of touch and movement alongside visual and audio stimuli. Juxtaposition was used to embed the VR installation within the surrounding gallery space at each host museum, dealing with the challenges of entering, exiting, spectating, and invigilating the experience. We propose that museum designers can use these techniques to deliver VR installations that are compelling but also scalable and tourable.

Data is seen as the ‘new oil’ that drives the digital economy, and museums are no exception to this. We investigate how data captured from hybrid museum experiences can become a resource for designers, for museums, and for visitors in their understanding of a museum and a museum visit. We ground our discussion in three complementary case studies: Analysing visitors’ movements in a touring virtual reality exhibition called Thresholds; analysing their gifting behaviours in the Gift app; and capturing data about how designers used our Visitor Box cards.

People get disoriented and detached from the real world when immersed in a virtual environment; this makes them lose track of rotation in the real world. This paper studies people’s ability to maintain perception of spatial orientation in the real environment while engaged in a virtual experience and explores how visual cues affect the results. Twelve participants performed targeting tasks with rotations, followed by pointing in a known direction to observe the error in perception of real world orientation. Error was measured in three VR environments: visual cues consistent with real world rotation; visual cues slowly changing to become inconsistent with real world; no rotational visual cues. We found that visual cues are essential for people to perceive real-world orientation and removing cues results in drastic disorientation. Moreover, altering visual cues deliberately can be used to control people’s orientation perception to disorientate people in the direction we desire; in our experiment participants did not notice this manipulation. Manipulation of the presentation of visual cues may allow designers to control, correct and manipulate people’s cognitive representation of their orientation and position not only in the virtual world, but also in the real world, be it for in-place redirection or "redirected standing", or corrective redirection for safety.

BACKGROUND: Aircraft passengers’ physical activity levels are often limited during flight for extended periods of time, which can have serious impact on health, comfort, and passenger experience. However, several factors, such as limited personal space and social factors, can make movement difficult. OBJECTIVE: The study aimed to identify participant behaviour and postures during medium to long-haul flights and their effect on location and severity of physical discomfort. This work investigated how aircraft passengers’ comfort ratings changed over time and explored the association between postures and comfort ratings during flight. The study also explored the association between performing in-flight exercises and factors limiting participants’ abilities to complete these exercises. METHOD: Twenty-nine participants sat in an aircraft simulated cabin for 180 minutes and periodically performed in-seat exercises. They also completed a questionnaire providing data on demographic information, self-reported discomfort scores for multiple areas of the body, which types of exercises participants performed, and qualitative comments about discomfort. Self-reported comfort ratings were measured at 20-min intervals and posture identification was conducted by analysing the video recordings. RESULTS: Six postures were identified, and it was observed that individual participants changed posture at least once and up to nine times during the three-hour period. Body part areas with the highest reported scores of discomfort ratings were: back of the neck, back-left shoulder, back-right shoulder, back-left buttock, and lower back. Participants reported that they had difficulty in performing recommended in-flight exercises due to limited space. CONCLUSIONS: Limited space in aircraft seating restricts passenger movement. Some body areas are more prone to discomfort.

The Corrupt Kitchen is a room-scale virtual-reality game in which players act as a chef servicing a queue of customers. Tasked with making burgers, players must prepare the food while ensuring it is safe to eat, engaging explicitly and implicitly with challenges related to regulatory compliance and derived from UK legislation, but also efficient and ethical decision making; washing hands, placing rat traps, hiring appropriate help, time saving and money making. Interviewing nineteen players with professional involvement in food preparation reveals a diversity of perceived alignment with participants' everyday real-world practice that ranges from rules to be gamed to serious concerns. We contribute an examination of how the game, combined with a study protocol that further prompted debriefing and reflection, demonstrates opportunities for training, reflection and engagement with the subject matter. We consider how fidelity and immersion allow comparisons between gameplay and real world compliance.

We report on a workshop bringing together researchers working in soma design and sensory misalignment. Creating experiences that make use of sensory misalignment has become increasingly common, often associated with virtual reality research. However, little attention has been paid to how to design such experiences. We argue that the practice of soma design is a relevant candidate method for designing misalignment experiences, since soma design brings with it concepts such as estrangement and disrupting the habitual as a path to design. We further argue that sensory misalignment may in turn extend soma design methods, adding methods for explicitly disrupting sensory perception using technology interventions. Finally, we draw on the findings of that workshop to discuss the ideas of: pluralism in experience; orchestration of overall experience; as well as the broader intersection of soma design and sensory misalignment approaches.

Existing conceptualisations of mixed reality technologies embody a fundamental assumption, that they are a tool to simulate consistent ‘realities’. We present three examples of how this assumption constrains designers: One way to avoid these issues is to define such ‘immersive technologies’ purely as motion tracked sensory stimulation devices. This offers a basic building block for design, however in the the future a range of higher level concepts will be required to enable new and exciting uses of VR and AR equipment. Convincing simulation of realities is only a small subset of the potential uses.

Mental Workload (MWL) can be both good and bad; we can thrive under high MWL, or our performance can drop if the demands become either too low or too high. Similarly, stress is not always bad, short term stress can be beneficial to overcome a challenge or dangerous situation. In our research, we have seen both people that enjoy high workload, and people that feel stressed by it, but we do not know whether that experience of stress significantly affects our measurements. Our recent results show that fNIRS measurements are affected by stress (measured by SSSQ). This paper seeks to discuss the relationship between these concepts, discussing examples of where similar influencing factors appear within models of both Stress and Mental Workload, as well as within subjective measures of them. We conclude that future work must consider participants' experiences of both Stress and Mental Workload, as well as other cognitive concepts, when trying to estimate them from physiological measures.

Overlaying virtual worlds onto existing physical rides and altering the sensations of motion can deliver new experiences of thrill, but designing how motion is mapped between physical ride and virtual world is challenging. In this paper, we present the notion of an abstract machine, a new form of intermediate design knowledge that communicates motion mappings at the level of metaphor, mechanism and implementation. Following a performance-led, in-the-wild approach we report lessons from creating and touring VR Playground, a ride that overlays four distinct abstract machines and virtual worlds on a playground swing. We compare the artist's rationale with riders' reported experiences and analysis of their physical behaviours to reveal the distinct thrills of each abstract machine. Finally, we discuss how to make and use abstract machines in terms of heuristics for designing motion mappings, principles for virtual world design and communicating experiences to riders.

When we use digital systems to stimulate the senses, we typically stimulate only a subset of users' senses, leaving other senses stimulated by the physical world. This creates potential for misalignment between senses, where digital and physical stimulation give conflicting signals to users. We synthesize knowledge from HCI, traditional entertainments, and underlying sensory science research relating to how senses work when given conflicting signals. Using this knowledge we present a design dimension of sensory alignment, and show how this dimension presents opportunities for a range of creative strategies ranging from full alignment of sensory stimulation, up to extreme conflict between senses.

The mixed reality lab has now been a staple of the CHI community for twenty years. From its founding in 1999 through to today, we have placed our relationship with art and artists at the forefront of our research methods. In this retrospective exhibition, we present some of our most recent and exciting work, alongside some of our archived works, and ask viewers to consider twenty years of CHI research and innovation - not just from our lab, but from the whole CHI community. Back in 1999 when we started, Virtual Reality was the exciting new technology. A lot has changed since then.

Recent work has demonstrated that functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy has the potential to measure changes in Mental Workload with increasing ecological validity. It is not clear, however, whether these measurements are affected by anxiety and stress of the workload, where our informal observations see some participants enjoying the workload and succeeding in tasks, while others worry and struggle with the tasks. This research evaluated the effects of stress on fNIRS measurements and performance, using the Montreal Imaging Stress Task to manipulate the experience of stress. While our results largely support this hypothesis, our conclusions were undermined by data from the Rest condition, which indicated that Mental Workload and Stress were often higher than during tasks. We hypothesize that participants were experiencing anxiety in anticipation of subsequent stress tasks. We discuss this hypothesis and present a revised study designed to better control for this result.

For many of us, the notion of ‘fun’ conjures up visions of experiences that are amusing, pleasant, entertaining, playful—perhaps even frivolous. Rides, games, shows and perhaps even the experience of visiting an art gallery can embody these senses of fun, providing amusing and momentary distractions from the toils of life. And yet, such experiences often have a darker side to them. Thrill rides such as roller coasters may be scary and physically demanding. Games routinely involve us in pretending to commit unspeakable acts such as butchering others. And the works we encounter in theatres and galleries may challenge, confront and even outrage us. So perhaps fun is not so frivolous after all? Maybe fun inevitably encompasses a ‘dark side’ as a vital, even necessary, part of the entertainment.

Virtual reality experiences typically isolate the user from the real world. Notions of immersion are conventionally associated with the idea of convincing users that they are in another place, disassociated from physical reality. Given the user is however situated in that physical reality, kinesthetic bodily sensations often conflict with the virtual reality. In this paper we seek to elucidate the challenges associated with developing Visual-Kinaesthetic Experiences - experiences which provide related visual and kinaesthetic spectacle. Rather than use complex motion platforms, we submit here that physical reality is replete with interesting kinaesthetic experiences, which may be repurposed by the application of new visuals to create engaging hybrid experiences. We approach this by describing the development and deployment of Oscillate - a virtual reality experience that takes place on a swing, using it as an example to draw out what makes such experiences intrinsically interesting, and to construct three design challenges for this space.

In this paper we discuss vicarious, a flexible, extensible, distributed framework for capturing, processing, visualising, recording and generally handling sensed biodata. We outline six specific creative needs: heterogeneity of sensor inputs, liveness, high quality video, synchronisation, scalability, usability. Next, by outlining the architecture and features of vicarious, we show how the system meets each of those expectations. We then provide four examples of creative experiences developed using vicarious. The paper thus contributes the tool vicarious as support for creative experience design, as well as concrete examples of creative, artistic or performative applications of the system.

Well-developed interpersonal skills are crucial for all social interactions. However, understanding how interpersonal skills are taught or learned, and how technology can play a part in this, is yet an under-researched area in CSCW and HCI research. To start addressing this gap, our research explores the learning processes of counselling students, for whom developing interpersonal skills forms a fundamental part of their university education. We followed an iterative process to gain an in-depth understanding of a specific counselling program in the UK, combining interviews and low-fidelity technology prompts. Overall, 26 participants comprising tutors, students and expert counsellors took part. Our findings first provide insights into the highly collaborative and social learning process of the students. We highlight the complexity of interpersonal reflection as a crucial process for developing counselling skills, and identify the challenges to learning that students face. Second, we build on this understanding to draw out empirically grounded design considerations around opportunities for technology innovation in this setting.

Detecting interpersonal and emotional aspects of behaviour is a growing area of research within HCI. However, this work primarily processes data from individuals, rather than drawing on the dynamics of an interaction between people. Literature in social psychology and neuroscience suggests that the synchronisation of peoples' biosignals, in particular skin conductance (EDA), can be indicative of complex interpersonal aspects such as empathy. This paper reports on an exploratory, mixed methods study to test the potential of EDA synchronisation to indicate qualities of interpersonal interaction in real-world relationships and contexts. We show that EDA synchrony can be indicate meaningful social aspects in everyday settings, linking it to the mutual emotional engagement of those interacting. This connects to earlier work on empathy in psychotherapy, and suggests new interpretations of EDA sychronisation in other social contexts. We then outline how these findings open opportunities for novel HCI and ubicomp applications, supporting training of social skills such as empathy for doctors, and more generally to explore shared experiences such as multiplayer games.

Most mobile systems are 'stop-to-interact'; designed for active interaction only when a user is standing still, paying visual and mental attention to the device. However, people are increasingly carrying and using devices while undertaking a wide range of movement activities, such as walking, cycling, running. Some existing systems such as Apple's Siri aim for hands and eyes free use, but they do not consider the wider challenges of interaction during movement. We describe the challenges of system design for active mobile interaction. These 'interaction in motion' challenges are discussed with reference to an extreme movement interaction situation - cold water swimming.

This paper examines how biodata' physiological information captured from the human body -- might enhance television shows by giving viewers access to actors' physiological data. We broach this challenge through a prototype-show called The Experiment Live, in which four paranormal investigators were outfitted with sensors as they explored a haunted' basement. This experience has enabled us to probe the challenges of using biodata as part of broadcasting and formulate an agenda for future research that includes: exploring whether/how biodata can be acted and/or simulated; and developing techniques that treat biodata visualisations in similar ways to existing camera-based production processes.

This paper explores the potential for breath control as an interaction medium for gaming. In particular it examines the positioning of breath control within the stack of interface paradigms: As the only control, as a secondary control and as an ancillary or ambient control. It describes a technology developed using specially adapted gas masks to measure breath flow. By describing five simple games (or game modifications), each developed using breath in a somewhat different way, we show some of the possibilities of this unique interface paradigm. Crucially, the paper aims to demonstrate that breathing, though in principle a one dimensional interface medium, is actually a subtle and viable control mechanism that can be used either as a control mechanism in itself, or to enhance a more traditional game interface, ultimately leading to a satisfying and immersive game experience.

Recently, the HCI community has taken a strong interest in problems associated with networking. Many of those problems have also been the focus of much recent networking research, e.g., traffic identification, network management, access control. In this paper we consider these two quite different viewpoints of the problems specifically associated with home networking. Focusing on traffic identification as a core capability required by much recent HCI work, we explore the mismatch between the approaches the two communities have taken, and suggest some resulting challenges and directions for future work.

We introduce an interface for horror-themed entertainment experiences based on integrating breath sensors and WiFi into gas masks. Beyond enabling the practical breath control of entertainment systems, our design aims to heighten the intensity of the experience by amplifying the user's awareness of their breathing, as well as their feelings of isolation, claustrophobia and fear. More generally, this interface is intended to act as a technology probe for exploring an emerging research agenda around fearsome interactions. We describe the deployment of our gas masks in two events: as a control mechanism for an interactive ride, and to enhance a theme park horror maze. We identify six broad dimensions - cultural, visceral, control, social, performance and engineering - that frame an agenda for future research into fearsome interactions.

In evaluating and analysing a pervasive computing system, it is common to log system use and to create video recordings of users. A lot of data will often be generated, representing potentially long periods of user activity. We present a procedure to identify sections of such data that are salient given the current context of analysis; for example analysing the activity of a particular person among many trial participants recorded by multiple cameras. By augmenting the cameras used to capture a mobile experiment, we are able to establish both a location and heading for each camera, and thus model the field of view for each camera over time. Locations of trial participants are also recorded and compared against camera views, to determine which periods of user activity are likely to have been recorded in detail. Additionally the stability of a camera can be tracked and video can be subsequently filtered to exclude footage of unacceptable quality. These techniques are implemented in an extension to Replayer: a software toolkit for use in the development cycle of mobile applications. A report of initial testing is given, whereby the technique's use is demonstrated on a representative mobile application.

We introduce a location--based game called Feeding Yoshi that provides an example of seamful design, in which key characteristics of its underlying technologies-the coverage and security characteristics of WiFi-are exposed as a core element of gameplay. Feeding Yoshi is also a long--term, wide--area game, being played over a week between three different cities during an initial user study. The study, drawing on participant diaries and interviews, supported by observation and analysis of system logs, reveals players' reactions to the game. We see the different ways in which they embedded play into the patterns of their daily lives, augmenting existing practices and creating new ones, and observe the impact of varying location on both the ease and feel of play. We identify potential design extensions to Feeding Yoshi and conclude that seamful design provides a route to creating engaging experiences that are well adapted to their underlying technologies.

This paper presents a framework for the pervasive sharing of data using wireless networks. 'FarCry' uses the mobility of users to carry files between separated networks. Through a mix of ad-hoc and infrastructure-based wireless networking, files are transferred between users without their direct involvement. As users move to different locations, files are then transmitted on to other users, spreading and sharing information. We examine three applications of this framework. Each of these exploits the physically proximate nature of social gatherings. As people group together in, for example, business meetings and cafés, this can be taken as an indication of similar interests, e.g. in the same presentation or in a type of music. MediaNet affords sharing of media files between strangers or friends, MeetingNet shares business documents in meetings, and NewsNet shares RSS feeds between mobile users. NewsNet also develops the use of pre-emptive caching: collecting information from others not for oneself, but for the predicted later sharing with others. We offer observations on developing this system for a mobile, multi-user, multi-device environment.

Outdoor multi-player games are an increasingly popular application area for ubiquitous computing, supporting experimentation both with new technologies and new user experiences. This paper presents an outdoor ubicomp game that exploits the gaps or seams that exist in complex computer systems. Treasure is designed so that players move in and out of areas of wireless network coverage, taking advantage not only of the connectivity within a wireless ‘hotspot’ but of the lack of connectivity outside it. More broadly, this paper discusses how the notion of seamful design can be a source of design ideas for ubicomp games.

This paper presents Treasure, an outdoor mobile multiplayer game inspired by Weiser's notion of seams, gaps and breaks in different media. Playing Treasure involves movement in and out of a wi-fi network, using PDAs to pick up virtual 'coins' that may be scattered outside network coverage. Coins have to be uploaded to a server to gain game points, and players can collaborate with teammates to double the points given for an upload. Players can also steal coins from opponents. As they move around, players' PDAs sample network signal strength and update coverage maps. Reporting on a study of players taking part in multiple games, we discuss how their tactics and strategies developed as their experience grew with successive games. We suggest that meaningful play arises in just this way, and that repeated play is vital when evaluating such games.

Ethnography has become a staple feature of IT research over the last twenty years, shaping our understanding of the social character of computing systems and informing their design in a wide variety of settings. The emergence of ubiquitous computing raises new challenges for ethnography however, distributing interaction across a burgeoning array of small, mobile devices and online environments which exploit invisible sensing systems. Understanding interaction requires ethnographers to reconcile interactions that are, for example, distributed across devices on the street with online interactions in order to assemble coherent understandings of the social character and purchase of ubiquitous computing systems. We draw upon four recent studies to show how ethnographers are replaying system recordings of interaction alongside existing resources such as video recordings to do this and identify key challenges that need to be met to support ethnographic study of ubiquitous computing in the wild.