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International audience; HARMONI is the first light, adaptive optics assisted, integral field spectrograph for the European Southern Observatory’s Extremely Large Telescope (ELT). A work-horse instrument, it provides the ELT’s diffraction limited spectroscopic capability across the near-infrared wavelength range. HARMONI will exploit the ELT’s unique combination of exquisite spatial resolution and enormous collecting area, enabling transformational science. The design of the instrument is being finalized, and the plans for assembly, integration and testing are being detailed. We present an overview of the instrument’s capabilities from a user perspective, and provide a summary of the instrument’s design. We also include recent changes to the project, both technical and programmatic, that have resulted from red-flag actions. Finally, we outline some of the simulated HARMONI observations currently being analyzed.

An engaged community that reflects a diverse set of experiences is key to an equitable and livable city. However, maximizing engagement activities is often difficult when competing with residents’ busy schedules and hectic daily lives. To explore new opportunities in this space, we developed four augmented reality experiences to learn more about the potential for this technology to transform community engagement practices in the context of City 4.0. City 4.0 utilizes digital technologies to transform public services and the local economy. Its goal is to produce more sustainable urban and societal outcomes. Our findings suggest that augmented reality is least successful when used to recreate existing engagement practices, such as surveys or questionnaires, and more successful when it empowers a sense of agency and ownership over the process in its users. The way augmented reality situates information can aid in making public space feel personal to the individual. In this way, augmented reality’s affordances are less about overlaying digital information in physical space and more about how this can enable individuals to reclaim a sense of control and relevance in the relationship between citizens and councils. We aim to contribute: (a) novel interaction paradigms and an evaluation of their effectiveness and limitation, and (b) new insights into how to support citizens’ sense of agency in public discourse with augmented reality. This paper highlights the value of augmented reality’s affordances to bring to light new interactions between community engagement stakeholders.

HARMONI is the adaptive optics assisted, near-infrared and visible light integral field spectrograph for the Extremely Large Telescope (ELT). A first light instrument, it provides the work-horse spectroscopic capability for the ELT. As the project approaches its Final Design Review milestone, the design of the instrument is being finalized, and the plans for assembly, integration and testing are being detailed. We present an overview of the instrument's capabilities from a user perspective, provide a summary of the instrument's design, including plans for operations and calibrations, and provide a brief glimpse of the predicted performance for a specific observing scenario. The paper also provides some details of the consortium composition and its evolution since the project commenced in 2015.

Agents are part of our daily lives. They are in the games we play and in our phones as personal assistants. As users develop relationships with these agents, one question is about how to cultivate those relationships. This study chose one design feature, customization, to understand whether it would affect user experiences and whether there are optimal number of choices users prefer. This paper describes the results of two studies. The first, a small scale (N=15), preliminary study explored user preferences when customizing an on-screen, robot-like, virtual agent partner. The data includes eye-tracking, screen capture, and a post-survey. Findings from this study suggests that a robot's clothes (both top and bottom) are the most important for users to customize. Informed by the first study, a custom application was developed to test user preferences for the number of choices and attributes in a large scale online study (N = 343). Findings from the second study suggest that participants preferred at least 8 different attributes to customize and they showed no decrease in satisfaction with the most number of choices (i.e., 24) per attribute. These findings are different from previous studies on choice overload and contribute to further understanding of choices in games and digital spaces.

Accurately eliciting long-term procedural knowledge continues to be a non-trivial challenge. In this project, we continued an exploration into a novel approach that provides users with virtual stimuli during the elicitation process. Specifically, users were placed into a virtual reality (VR) environment, representing a real-world location, and asked to role-play a familiar task while verbally describing each action they were simulating. This approach has previously shown promise when compared with context-devoid methods, but no research has yet considered whether the detail of the provided virtual stimuli may meaningfully affect recall performance.To explore this possibility, two virtual environments with identical spatial characteristics and object placement were developed. One of these environments had high visual detail while the other had minimal visual detail. An A/B lab-based study was then conducted, in which 30 participants were assigned to each of the two environments (N=60). The results of this study showed that, despite major visual differences between the two environments, both treatment groups described a similar amount of information. Practically, this suggests that even minimally detailed environments may be sufficient to provide appropriate context to users for effective memory recall in an elicitation setting.

Eliciting accurate and complete knowledge from individuals is a non-trivial challenge. In this paper, we present the evaluation of a virtual-world based approach, informed by situated cognition theory, which aims to assist with knowledge elicitation. In this approach, we place users into 3D virtual worlds which represent real-world locations and ask users to describe information related to tasks completed in those locations. Through an empirical A/B evaluation of 62 users, we explore the differences in recall ability and behaviour of those viewing the virtual world via a virtual reality headset and those viewing the virtual world on a monitor. Previous results suggest that the use of a virtual reality headset was able to meaningfully improve memory recall ability within the given scenario. In this study, we adjust experiment protocol to explore the potential confounds of time taken and tool usability. After controlling for these possible confounds, we once again found that those given a virtual reality headset were able to recall more information about the given task than those viewing the virtual world on a monitor.

Business process models have become an effective way of examining business practices to identify areas for improvement. While common information gathering approaches are generally efficacious, they can be quite time consuming and have the risk of developing inaccuracies when information is forgotten or incorrectly interpreted by analysts. In this study, the potential of a role-playing approach to process elicitation and specification has been examined. This method allows stakeholders to enter a virtual world and role-play actions similarly to how they would in reality. As actions are completed, a model is automatically developed, removing the need for stakeholders to learn and understand a modelling grammar. An empirical investigation comparing both the modelling outputs and participant behaviour of this virtual world role-play elicitor with an S-BPM process modelling tool found that while the modelling approaches of the two groups varied greatly, the virtual world elicitor may not only improve both the number of individual process task steps remembered and the correctness of task ordering, but also provide a reduction in the time required for stakeholders to model a process view. HighlightsImplemented a virtual world (VW) role-play tool to assist with process elicitation.Performed A/B experiment comparing developed VW with standard 2D modelling tool.VW group specified more tasks, made fewer errors and took significantly less time.VW group referred to similar actions/objects more consistently with their naming.Behavior of VW participants consistent with identified traits of better modellers.

Eliciting accurate knowledge from individuals is a non-trivial challenge. In this paper, we present the evaluation of a virtual reality-based approach to knowledge elicitation informed by situated cognition theory. This approach places users into 3D virtual worlds representing real-world locations and asks them to recall information about tasks completed in those locations. Through an empirical A/B evaluation of 64 users, we investigate whether the situated context provided by these virtual environments is adequate to assist with memory recall, and explore whether the added immersion provided by a head-mounted display (HMD) may meaningfully improve user memory recall capability when compared with a desktop display experience. Results suggest that those provided with a HMD may be able to recall more information about a sequenced task than those provided with a desktop display.

Business process models have traditionally been an effective way of examining business practices to identify areas for improvement. While common information gathering approaches are generally efficacious, they can be quite time consuming and have the risk of developing inaccuracies when information is forgotten or incorrectly interpreted by analysts. In this study, the potential of a role-playing approach for process elicitation and specification has been examined. This method allows stakeholders to enter a virtual world and role-play actions as they would in reality. As actions are completed, a model is automatically developed, removing the need for stakeholders to learn and understand a modelling grammar. Empirical data obtained in this study suggests that this approach may not only improve both the number of individual process task steps remembered and the correctness of task ordering, but also provide a reduction in the time required for stakeholders to model a process view.

Accurate process model elicitation continues to be a time consuming task, requiring skill on the part of the interviewer to extract explicit and tacit process information from the interviewee. Many errors occur in this elicitation stage that would be avoided by better activity recall, more consistent specification methods and greater engagement in the elicitation process by interviewees. Metasonic GmbH has developed a process elicitation tool for their process suite. As part of a research engagement with Metasonic, staff from QUT, Australia have developed a 3D virtual world approach to the same problem, viz. eliciting process models from stakeholders in an intuitive manner. This book chapter tells the story of how QUT staff developed a 3D Virtual World tool for process elicitation, took the outcomes of their research project to Metasonic for evaluation, and finally, Metasonic’s response to the initial proof of concept.