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Driven by the maturing of Internet and the development of the Internet of Things, people are becoming connected not only via the smart personal devices, but also via the increasingly responsive and connected environments, which brings up new opportunities to involve potential user group like elderly people into this network through tangible interaction and embedded systems. This paper presents the design and implementation of a participatory view-sharing system which consists of a group of specially designed camera kits and a gallery-like interactive installation, aiming to increase the social connection between elderly people living in a care home and the local communities around. The camera kits are designed to provide openness for local people to share sceneries via public participation, while the interactive installation presents the continuous real-time changes of the shared outside views, and triggers further communication between sharers and receivers through a “postcard-sending” metaphor. In this study, we mainly explore the possibilities of connecting people and facilitating social interaction through the combination of online and offline sharing behaviour, as well as the application of IoT technology.

This chapter is dedicated to explore the relationship between entertainment, culture, and media art. Firstly, the positioning of entertainment will be described including the historical point of view and also focusing on recent digital entertainment technologies. It will be clarified that entertainment is closely related to the mental sustainability of human and therefore has a close relationship with culture and art. Then, based on this, further investigation will be carried out to explain how culture and technology could be combined together. Firstly, the relationship between culture and technology will be discussed proposing the concept of “cultural computing.” Then three typical research examples of cultural computing, “ALICE,” “ZENetic Computer,” and “Confucius Chat” will be described emphasizing how cultural issues could be treated using computer both in the Western culture and Eastern culture. As art is the core part of culture, as a next step the role of art, especially new art called media art where technology plays an important role, will be discussed. And, as an example, media art created by an Eastern media artist will be introduced as a good example of such media art treating cultural issues.

This paper presents a Learning Analytics approach for understanding the learning behavior of students while interacting with Technology Enhanced Learning tools. In this work we show that it is possible to gain insight into the learning processes of students from their interaction data. We base our study on data collected through six laboratory sessions where first-year students of Computer Engineering at the University of Genoa were using a digital electronics simulator. We exploit Process Mining methods to investigate and compare the learning processes of students. For this purpose, we measure the understandability of their process models through a complexity metric. Then we compare the various clusters of students based on their academic achievements. The results show that the measured complexity has positive correlation with the final grades of students and negative correlation with the difficulty of the laboratory sessions. Consequently, complexity of process models can be used as an indicator of variations of student learning paths.

Stories and human society are inseparable. Before human history, our ancestors created myths as the oldest form of narratives. Due to the advances of digital media, stories are nowadays communicated in various ways. Yet the structure and the key elements of modern stories still remain the same. This chapter starts with a discussion about the relationship between stories and human society. It is curious that human beings keep being intrigued by stories of similar structures and scenes. A reasonable speculation is that these identical components of stories might induce emotional experiences at an unconscious level. Can emotions be unconscious? While the answer to this question is still open to debate, more and more empirical evidence suggests that humans might have unconscious emotions in certain conditions. In order to provide a holistic theoretical overview focusing on unconscious emotions, a review of contemporary theories, models, and measures of emotion is provided. This review illustrates an integrated overview of research into unconscious emotions and also points out potential challenges and promising approaches that could inform future research on unconscious emotions in media content.

We survey ways to extract information from users interacting in ambient intelligence entertainment environments. We speculate on the use of this information, including information obtained from physiological processes and brain-computer interfacing, in future game environments.

We are exploring an application for a novel direction in human-computer interaction named 'cultural computing', which aims to provide a new medium for cultural translation and unconscious metamorphosis. The main objective of this project is to create an interactive experience that encourages people in Western culture to reflect on their self-concept. In Western culture the self-concept is generally based on conscious perception of the self. Over centuries the book 'Alice's Adventures in Wonderland' got continuous attention, and therefore seems to be a promising narrative to address issues like logic, rationality, and self. The user in the role of Alice will go through an interactive experience and meets a Caterpillar, who questions the participant's whereabouts of his/her self-concept. To determine the effect of this experience, we discuss a method that measures changes in a person's implicit self-concept for we predict that the experience will have an unconscious effect towards individual metamorphosis. Using the 'implicit association test' (IAT) we could find a significant effect in the hypothesized direction.

Multi-modal tabletop applications offer excellent opportunities for enriching the education of young children. Read-It is an example of an interactive game with a multi-modal tangible interface that was designed to combine the advantages of current physical games and computer exercises. It is a novel approach for supporting children who learn to read. The first experimental evaluation has demonstrated that the Read-It approach is indeed promising and meets a priori expectations.

We present an extension of Kansei mediated communication in the field of entertainment. We propose to do so by implementing Cultural Computing concept and enriching it with Kansei Mediated Interaction. We present some inspiration for our approach in terms of culture and then discuss them. We relate our work to the Western and to the Eastern world. Thus we use cultural examples from England, France, Japan and China. Finally, we propose as a new direction for HCI, cultural computing with its related paradigm we call Kansei Mediated Interaction. Finally we propose Kansei Mediated Entertainment as a direction merging of Kansei and entertainment.

This paper focused on the identification and description of a new product development (NPD) approach adopted by one of the smallsized car producers in Malaysia. The NPD processes for European, Japanese and American auto makers have been studied and discussed in literature. However, the business strategy of NPD approach of small-sized car makers remains unidentified and less understood. This research involved semistructured face-to-face interview sessions at several occasions with senior project managers and development team members, a senior product planning manager together with a selected first tier vendor. The information obtained through literature on the NPD process was used as secondary data to correlate with the data obtained from the primary source (interview). Results derived from both sources later were used to completely identify and describe the NPD process of this car maker. The results indicated that the NPD process of the automaker was not that distinct as compared with the generic product development of others. In addition, the findings also showed the automaker has adopted the concurrent engineering practices in the product development process. This paper also highlighted the importance of a formal NPD with regard to the frequency of the new product introduction and managing risks and uncertainty.

We look at relational processes of engagement, negotiation and articulation of digital heritage knowledge production. By looking at creative reuse and remix of digital cultural heritage we focus on how those processes manifest at the intersection of established cultural institutions and people outside of these institutions. Two experimental arrangements are described that seek to understand how Human-Computer Interaction and design interventions might contribute to new forms of heritage knowledge production and collective memory-making by mobilizing infrastructuring interventions to question knowledge production, politics and ownership. We conclude by proposing that HCI can contribute to infrastructuring for collective knowledge production by supporting arrangements that open access to digital cultural heritage, open heritage knowledge and its practices, and reimagine authorship and ownership of contributions to heritage.

Consensus exists on the importance of local identity and diversity in the sustainability discourse, including community resilience. As result, cultural policies are essential to enable sustainability goals. In the construction industry, digital technologies are playing a significant role in flattening the richness and distinctiveness of local contexts and homogenizing languages and practices, under the pressure of the constant urge to reduce costs and the necessity to comply with a sometime overwhelming plethora of technical and legal requirements and standards. The ambition of this paper is to shed light to the interplay between digital technologies, planning practice and tangible heritage conservation in the city, by clarifying the dynamic among the three fields and their implications in the practice. In so doing, this paper aims at offering recommendations that can inform the smart heritage conservation planning practice worldwide, and can be used by experts working for heritage conservation authorities, local authorities, professional practices, charities and digital technologies companies.

This paper presents a practical method of deconstructing cultural elements based on the Human Computer Interaction (HCI) perspective to enhance cross-cultural appreciation of Chinese Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH). The author pioneered this approach during conducting two case studies as a means to enhance appreciation and engagement with Chinese ICH, such as the extraction of elements from traditional Chinese painting and puppetry with potential to support cross-cultural appreciation, as well as the establishment of an elements archive. Through integrating a series of HCI research methods, this approach provides a specific foundational framework that assists non-Chinese people to better understand the cultural significance of Chinese ICH.

Brain-computer interface (BCI) technologies, or technologies that use online brain signal processing, have a great promise to improve human interactions with computers, their environment, and even other humans. Despite this promise, there are no current serious BCI technologies in widespread use, due to the lack of robustness in BCI technologies. The key neural aspect of this lack of robustness is human variability, which has two main components: (1) individual differences in neural signals and (2) intraindividual variability over time. In order to develop widespread BCI technologies, it will be necessary to address this lack of robustness. However, it is currently unknown how neural variability affects BCI performance. To accomplish these goals, it is essential to obtain data from large numbers of individuals using BCI technologies over considerable lengths of time. One promising method for this is through the use of BCI technologies embedded into games with a purpose (GWAP). GWAP are a game-based form of crowdsourcing which players choose to play for enjoyment and during which the player performs key tasks which cannot be automated but that are required to solve research questions. By embedding BCI paradigms in GWAP and recording neural and behavioral data, it should be possible to much more clearly understand the differences in neural signals between individuals and across different time scales, enabling the development of novel and increasingly robust adaptive BCI algorithms.

Tesi en modalitat cotutela: Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya i Eindhoven University of Technology. This dissertation was produced under Erasmus Mundus Joint Doctorate Program in Interactive and Cognitive Environments. The research was conducted towards a joint double PhD degree between the following partner universities: TU/e & UPC Emotion is an intriguing and mysterious psychological phenomenon. While everyone seems to know what it is, researchers have not yet come to consensus on its definition, and many questions still remain unanswered. While the nature of emotion is yet to discover, the design community has noticed is importance, and poses the challenge of how emotion could inform design. We see the necessity to follow the state of the art in psychology and initiate the undertaking by exploring the emotional qualities in various types of media content. The first part of this thesis aims at constructing a theoretical framework. Recent years have seen empirical studies suggest that emotion could be unconscious. While this is to be further justified, scientists are motivated to reconsider current theories of emotion to account for this phenomenon. In light of this, we integrate these studies about unconscious emotion into our literature review. An overview from theory to practice is illustrated to provide a reference for viewing the current states in application domains, such as affective computing and emotional design. This review offers a holistic understanding about emotion from various perspectives, which allow us to look for new directions in future studies. Based on our review, we see a promising direction by applying psychoanalysis methods to analyze the media content as affective stimuli, and these stimuli can be evaluated by using quantitative measures to investigate the connection between the content and the corresponding emotions. The analysis on the media content is based on a psychoanalysis theory¿the theory of archetypes¿proposed by Carl Jung. He argues that there exists a universal pattern in humans¿ unconscious thoughts, which can be manifested as symbolic content in various forms of narratives, such as myth and fairy tales. Today, this archetypal symbolic content can be seen in modern media, particularly in movies. By applying the Jungian approach, we analyzed the symbolic meaning in movie scenes and edit these feature scenes into a collection of archetypal media content, which serve as the experimental materials for later explorations. In the second part of this thesis, we present three experimental studies that aim at determining if archetypal media content can be differentiated based on emotional responses. We adopted the psychoanalytical approach described earlier to collect feature scenes in movies as archetypal media content. Meanwhile, affective stimuli of explicit emotions are also included as benchmarks for comparison, such as sadness and joy. Self-reports and physiological signals are both adopted for measuring emotional responses. These three studies follow similar experimental design: presenting stimuli and measuring emotion concurrently. The results of these studies confirm that emotions induced by archetypal content are different from explicit emotions, and the statistical analysis further indicate that the predictive model obtained from physiological signals outperforms the model generated from self-reports while viewing archetypal media content. These results, however, are opposite to the results gained from affective stimuli of explicit emotions, leading us to the conclusion that archetypal media content might induce unconscious emotions, and physiological signals are more effective than self-reports for recognizing emotions induced by archetypal media content. La emoción es un fenómeno psicológico intrigante y misterioso. Aunque todo el mundo parece saber lo que es, los investigadores aún no han llegado a un consenso sobre su definición, y todavía quedan muchas preguntas sin respuesta. Si bien la naturaleza de las emociones está aún por descubrir, la comunidad de profesionales del diseño ha entendido su importancia, y se plantea el desafío de interrelacionar ambos mundos, explorando de las cualidades emocionales en diversos tipos de contenido en medios de comunicación. La primera parte de esta tesis tiene como objetivo la construcción de un marco teórico. Recientemente se han realizado estudios empíricos que sugieren que las emociones puede ser inconscientes. Si bien esto debe justificarse mejor, los científicos están motivados a reconsiderar las teorías actuales de la emoción para explicar este fenómeno. En vista de ello, integramos estos estudios sobre las emociones inconscientes en nuestra revisión de referencias bibliográficas incluyendo dominios de aplicación recientes, tales como la Computación Afectiva y el Diseño Emocional. Una dirección prometedora de investigación se basa en la aplicación de métodos del psicoanálisis para analizar contenidos multimedia como estímulos afectivos, y estos estímulos pueden ser evaluados mediante el uso de medidas cuantitativas para investigar la conexión entre el contenido y las emociones correspondientes. Este análisis se basa en la teoría de los arquetipos propuesto por el psicólogo Carl Jung. El autor sostiene que existe una patrón universal en los pensamientos inconscientes de los personas, que puede manifestarse como un símbolo contenido en las diversas formas de narrativas, como en los mitos y los cuentos de hadas. Hoy en día, estos arquetipos de contenido simbólico se puede ver frecuentemente en los contenidos multimedia modernos, sobre todo en las películas. Mediante la aplicación del enfoque de Jung, analizamos el significado simbólico en escenas de películas seleccionando las correspondientes a diversos arquetipos, que servirá como material experimental para exploraciones posteriores. En la segunda parte de esta tesis, se presentan tres estudios experimentales que apuntan a determinar si el contenido multimedia arquetípico puede diferenciarse en base a respuestas emocionales. Con el enfoque psicoanalítico descrito anteriormente para los arquetipos, también se incluye los estímulos afectivos de emociones explícitas son como puntos de referencia para la comparación, como la tristeza y la alegría. Se realizan auto-informes y se miden señales fisiológicas para la determinación de las respuestas emocionales en todos los experimentos realizados. Los resultados de estos estudios confirman que las emociones inducidas por arquetipos son diferentes de las emociones explícitas, y el análisis estadístico indica además que el modelo predictivo obtenido a partir de señales fisiológicas supera el modelo generado por los auto-informes durante la visualización de contenidos multimedia arquetípicos. Estos resultados, sin embargo, son opuestos a los resultados obtenidos a partir de los estímulos afectivos de emociones explícitas, llevándonos a la conclusión de que los contenidos de los medios arquetípicos podría inducir emociones inconscientes, y que las señales fisiológicas son más eficaces que los auto informes para el reconocimiento de las emociones inducidas por el contenido de medios arquetípico. En la tercera parte de esta tesis, exploramos cómo los contenidos arquetípicos podrían utilizarse para diseñar contenido multimedia mediante "mood boards". Se realizaron dos estudios con diseñadores para responder a la pregunta de investigación de si es posible generar contenido emocionalmente rico a través de la generación automática de contenido arquetípico por "mood boards" en comparación con el contenido multimedia no arquetípico.

In this paper, identification with a game character is discussed as mechanism of computer game enjoyment. Identification is explicated in terms of players' altered self-perception during game play: When identifying with a character or role offered by the game, players change their self-concept by adopting relevant attributes of the character, for instance, they perceive themselves as more courageous, heroic, and powerful during identification with a soldier. Theoretical arguments for the enjoyable quality of such temporary changes of the self-concept are introduced. Computer game interactivity is proposed as important facilitator of strong identification. Subsequently, a pilot experiment with players of "Battlefield 2" supports the assumptions on the relationships between interactivity, identification, and game enjoyment. Implications of the identification concept for research and applications in entertainment computing are discussed.

We present an interactive content-based video browser allowing fast, non linear and hierarchical navigation of video over the Internet through multiple levels of key-frames that provide a visual summary of video content. Our method is based on an XML framework, dynamically generated parameterized XSL style sheets, and SMIL. The architecture is designed to incorporate additional recognized features (e.g. from audio) in future versions. The last part of this paper describes a user study which indicates that this browsing interface is more comfortable to use and approximately three times faster for locating remembered still images within videos compared to the simple VCR controls built into RealPlayer.