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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.

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.

It is becoming popular to render art exhibitions in Virtual Reality (VR). Many of these are used to deliver at-home experiences on peoples’ own mobile devices, however, control options on mobile VR systems are necessarily less flexible than those of situated VR fixtures. In this paper, we present a study that explores aspects of control in such VR exhibitions - specifically comparing ‘on rails’ movement with ‘free’ movement. We also expand the concept of museum audio guides to better suit the VR medium, exploring the possibility of embodied character-guides. We compare these controllable guides with a more traditional audio-guide. The study uses interviews to explore users’ experience qualitatively, as well as questionnaires addressing both user experience and simulator sickness. The results suggest that users generally prefer to have control over both their movement and the guide, however, if relinquishing movement control, they prefer the uncontrolled guide. The paper presents three key findings: (1) users prefer to be able to directly control their movement; (2) this does not make a notable difference to simulator sickness; (3) embodied guides are potentially a good way to deliver additional information in VR exhibition settings.

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.

While gamification is becoming an increasingly popular tool in HCI, it is often criticized for not being meaningful. In this work, we present a new approach: narrative-oriented gamification, applied in the context of environmental conservation. A biodata-driven game experience was developed to raise awareness during an environmental non-governmental organization (NGO) event at a music festival. The NGO representatives developed narratives, tailored to each potential outcome of the game, which encouraged participants to immediately reflect on the broader environmental issues and take action. In this paper we present the findings from this work suggesting that this form of gamification, predicated on narrtives and reflection, can be a powerful tool for creating engagement with, and raising public awareness of, environmental issues.

We present a study of how filmmakers collected and visualized physiological data—“biodata”—to construct a series of short promotional films depicting people undergoing “thrilling” experiences. Drawing on ethnographic studies of two major advertising campaigns, we highlight key concerns for integrating sensors and sensor data into film production. Our findings address the perceived benefits of using biodata within narratives; the nature of different on-screen representations of biodata; and the challenges presented when integrating biodata into production processes. Drawing on this, we reconsider the nature of information visualization in the filmmaking context. Further implications from our case studies provide recommendations for human--computer interaction (HCI) collaborations with filmmaking and broadcast industries, focusing both on the practical matters of fitting sensor technologies into and handling data within production workflows, as well as discussing the broader implications for managing the veracity of that data within professional media production.

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.

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.

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.

As mobile computing technologies become more common, there is an ever-greater interest in evaluation and analysis of such systems. Evaluating the use of large, multi-user, mobile systems can be a challenging task and can be aided by analysing both system generated logs of activity and video of user behaviour. Replayer provides a distributed, cross platform toolkit for utilising multiple coordinated visualisations in the analysis and understanding of these heterogeneous forms of data. In this paper we pay particular attention to the methods used to combine recorded media such as video with numerical visualisations such as histograms and time series graphs. We examine in some detail the architecture behind the system, and the techniques used to maintain synchronisation and coordination when interactively brushing components. We demonstrate how Replayer can be used to explore data sets using an array of available visualisations, can focus analysis of video data on the most salient periods and can provide context for every area of the recorded data.

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.