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Wearable cameras allow users to record their daily activities from a user-centered (First Person Vision) perspective. Due to their favourable location, they frequently capture the hands of the user, and may thus represent a promising user-machine interaction tool for different applications. Existent First Person Vision, methods understand the hands as a background/foreground segmentation problem that ignores two important issues: (i) Each pixel is sequentially classified creating a long processing queue, (ii) Hands are not a single “skin-like” moving element but a pair of interacting entities (left-right hand). This paper proposes a GPU-accelerated implementation of a left right-hand segmentation algorithm. The GPU implementation exploits the nature of the pixel-by-pixel classification strategy. The left-right identification is carried out by following a competitive likelihood test based the position and the angle of the segmented pixels.

Long-term interactions in groups can be monitored through games in which the participants need to show their social preferences by making choice to help or to use egoistic game strategy. In this paper we analyse the facial expressions of a group of isolated individuals (astronauts) during repeated interactions in subsequent encounters in a game. The astronauts were taking part in the Mars-500 isolation experiment and their relations were influenced by the everyday interaction in this untypical environment, and monitored through the cooperative game. We analysed different statistical properties of the recorded emotional facial expressions of the astronauts, where emotions were determined by the FaceReader software. We found that there is a memory effect between the collective emotional expressions corresponding to subsequent experiments, separated by two weeks time period. This dependance suggest that it is possible to predict the development of interpersonal relations in groups of isolated individuals. In a broader perspective, this finding can inform the design of long-term interaction behavior of artificial agents.

The chapter’s idea stems from the observation that technology is difficult to learn in an abstract way (books, lectures, etc.) and practical activities are needed not only to apply concepts but also to help learning itself. This is particularly challenging in a younger age where this concern is often neglected frequently, leading to poor instruction, if any. However, science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) topics typically involve facts and concepts that could be effectively implemented and/or shown through smart objects according to the Internet-of-Things paradigm. Such objects, we called “iBlocks,” could be manipulated by young learners to study various types of phenomena/artifacts and compose new aggregations (reflecting – at a younger age – the experience of the “Makers” now successful in world-leading technological universities). The presented idea is to build an environment consisting of physical objects enhanced with sensing, computing, and communicating capabilities in order to support advanced and multimodal/multisensory interaction. An important aspect is that the environment supports the definition of game rules, so that users are stimulated and invited in educational paths involving guided exploration, competition, and collaboration.

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.

The growing interest in recent years towards Learning An- alytics (LA) and Educational Data Mining (EDM) has enabled novel ap- proaches and advancements in educational settings. The wide variety of research and practice in this context has enforced important possibilities and applications from adaptation and personalization of Technology En- hanced Learning (TEL) systems to improvement of instructional design and pedagogy choices based on students needs. LA and EDM play an im- portant role in enhancing learning processes by oering innovative methods of development and integration of more personalized, adaptive, and inter- active educational environments. This has motivated the organization of the ESANN 2015 Special Session in Advances in Learning Analytics and Educational Data Mining. Here, a review of research and practice in LA and EDM is presented accompanied by the most central methods, bene- ts, and challenges of the eld. Additionally, this paper covers a review of novel contributions into the Special Session.

In iTV and online video, narrative interaction has long been a Holy Grail for both audiences and creators of these digital audiovisual works. On the one hand, interactive digital narrative promises interactors some exciting opportunities: to enter the world of the story, to affect the story and perhaps even to control its outcome, and in the process to gain a transformative self-revelation. On the other hand, this new medium changes the role and craft of the author and entails a host of technological, conceptual, and institutional challenges. The authors describe these opportunities and challenges in detail, before examining various projects that have attempted to realize this vision and grapple with the challenges. Works discussed span several decades, from the late 1960s to 2015. They also span a variety of forms, including interactive cinema, online video, interactive television, and both video- and animation-based games. Particular emphasis is given to contemporary interactive documentaries (iDocs). The chapter further discusses current research directions, such as explorations of the increasing incorporation of the interactor’s body and affects as well as second-screen and cross-device integration, and concludes with a fresh look at the original vision in light of conceptual and design approaches, current technological developments, their implications on the changing landscape of audiovisual content creation and consumption, and the new creative space of opportunities that they open up.

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.

This special issue celebrates the 10th edition of the International Conference on Advances in Computer Entertainment (ACE) by collecting six selected and revised papers from among this year’s accepted contributions.

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.

This paper describes a number of general design problems with adventure-like computer games for young children in order to demonstrate the need for specific design guidelines for this type of products. These problems were experienced by children participating in a number of user tests of existing computer games. By providing a generalization of these problems some first directions are given for the nature of the design guidelines that could be developed. Furthermore, a first proposal for a unifying framework to organize these guidelines is given.

In Probabilistic Opponent-Model search (PrOM search) the opponent is modelled by a mixed strategy of N opponent types omega(0) ... omega(N-1). The opponent is assumed to adopt at every move one of the opponent types 0, according to the probability Pr(omega(i)). We hypothesize that PrOM search is a better search mechanism than Opponent-Model search (OM search) and Minimax search. In this paper we investigate two questions: (1) to which extent is PrOM search better than OM search and Minimax search in the game of Bao? and (2) which opponent type is most advantageous to use? To answer the second question we constructed Five evaluation functions which we applied in a tournament consisting of 352,000 games. Our conclusions are twofold: (1) in Bao, PrOM search performs better than OM search and sometimes also better than Minimax search even when no perfect information of the opponent is available, and (2) for an adequate performance of PrOM search, emphasis on the own evaluation function in the opponent model should be higher than assumed so far.

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.

The current paper describes research that is aimed to elucidate our understanding of technology factors that may help users of home exercise equipment to stay motivated for doing regular work-outs. In particular, we investigated the effects of immersion and coaching by a virtual agent on intrinsic motivation and the sense of presence of participants cycling on a stationary home exercise bike. A basic two-by-two within-subjects experimental design was employed whereby participants were presented with a virtual racetrack with two levels of immersion (high vs. low) and two levels of a virtual coach (with vs. without). Results indicate a clear positive effect of immersion on both motivation and presence. The virtual coach significantly lowered the perceived control and pressure/tension dimensions of intrinsic motivation, but did not affect the enjoyment dimension. The presence of the virtual coach also reduced negative effects associated with VEs.

In this paper we introduce an ontology-based approach to the design of multimodal user interfaces. The main benefit of our approach is the unified ontology of multimodal interaction, where we have integrated the knowledge and common concepts from different domains of multimodal interaction in a uniform way. The unified ontology of multimodal interaction can be viewed as a tool that a designer of user interfaces can use to see relations between his design and various human factors. Using this ontology we have explored novel design approaches in order to provide means for abstract definition of a human-computer interaction at different levels. We have also integrated the ontology with existing user interface platforms, what allows mapping of high-level concepts from the ontology to primitives in a user interface platform, and evaluation existing user interfaces in order to see what perceptual or cognitive effects they produce.