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Due to the recent COVID-19 pandemic that has swept the globe, more people are working from home. People use synchronous applications to communicate remotely because they are not able to meet face-to-face. However, few research studies on the issues surrounding the virtual conference application, particularly those that include collaborative activities, have been conducted. The usability study recruited 16 participants (in four groups of four) to communicate synchronously while performing collaborative activities, such as drawing together on a shared screen. According to the findings of the usability study, users do not often use the collaborative tools provided by the current virtual conference application. This is due to low exposure and unfamiliarity with the use of collaborative tools. The findings also show that users frequently do not turn on the web camera due to several reasons, including privacy, connectivity issues, the environment, and background distraction. Turning on the web camera can also cause anxiety due to shyness in front of the camera. However, some participants prefer to turn on the web camera so that they can see each other’s reactions when performing collaborative activities. The article provides several guidelines to assist in the design of virtual conference applications, including a simple familiar intuitive interface to encourage the use of collaborative tools and also introduces the use of virtual avatars as a way to represent oneself during online meetings to allow affective sharing while respecting the privacy of its users.

Gamification is one of the trends in education that is best suited to the current learning environment. Putra BINGO is a transformative assessment tool that uses gamification techniques. This research starts by elaborating the concept of Putra BINGO and its implementation using traditional method with pen and paper. The feedbacks gathered from the implementation are analyzed and applied to develop a multiplayer educational online game using Unity Game Engine. This paper describes details of the development for its two components; the database and the digital online game. Putra Bingo is available on PC and Android devices. It required additional plugins such as Photon Networking to handle game communication between multiple players. This is crucial to accommodate its test case application as an alternative assessment for teamwork skills using Rubrics and questionnaires. Further research will be conducted to enhance its functionality and user experience after the initial development of the digital online version is completed.

With the rapid moving technology and innovation, the current digital technology such as smartphones and tabletop system have become vital necessities to accommodate people’s daily activities. As a more robust alternative to tabletop system, the multi-mobile system is also benefiting humans’ interaction by combining multiple mobile devices to become a shared and larger touch surface display. This paper demonstrates the study on effects of bezels on a multi-mobile system which allows users to perform collaborative drawing task with mobile devices in an ad-hoc manner. Unfortunately, gaps and physical design of the mobile devices between the mobile displays cause inherent design problems to the multi-display structure. Before conducting the experiments, two prototypes have been designed; high-fidelity prototype (without solution) and iterative prototype (with the continuous spatial configuration). Two user studies have been conducted with the prototypes by observing groups of students performing an interactive drawing task and the findings were compared. Results from the first user study show gaps and disjointed objects were observed in the drawing outcomes, while in the second user study, where the Continuous Spatial Configuration was implemented as a solution to this bezel issue, the gaps and spaces between the screens were eliminated by 94.8%. From this study, it is believed that implementing the Continuous Spatial Configuration in the prototype designs can improve the user experience in the context of collaboration beyond the use of expensive tabletops systems.

This research focuses on the collocated multi-mobile system (CMMS) which combines multiple mobile devices to become one shared large surface that could provide tabletop interactivity and group collaboration. However, several usability issues are yet to be discovered: (i) the cumbersome and confusing process to calibrate and align display of multiple mobile devices (ii) the lack of multi-touch gesture that can span across the boundaries of multiple mobile devices. Hence, this research aims to study the performance and user experience of connectivity initiation and multi-touch interaction on a CMMS. The research creates a new way to align the display and to allow multi-touch support to spans across multiple screens. The research methodology used is the User-Centered Design (UCD) approach where the process starts from understanding requirements, designing, prototyping and evaluating through a usability test. There are three main studies were carried out which covered the preliminary study, connectivity initiation study and multi-touch study for CMMS. The studies used quantitative and qualitative approaches. During preliminary study, it was found that the initiating process to connect multiple mobile device was time consuming, confusing and cumbersome. The preliminary study also observed that users tended to perform a multi-touch gesture on multiple screens but currently multi-touch gesture is not applicable to existing multi-mobile systems. The first connectivity initiation study was conducted to evaluate several approaches to perform connectivity initiation. Two best approaches were identified based on its performance and users experience on the medium-fidelity prototype. The hover and the swipe approach were found to be the two of the best approaches in terms of shorter time completion, higher user preference ratings and lower perceive workload index. These two approaches were then implemented for designing the high-fidelity prototype. The first multi-touch study als

This paper presents the study on the mobiTop system- a collocated multi-mobile system. The mobiTop system allows users to come together with their mobile devices in an ad-hoc manner to create one seamless and extended interactive display surface. The collocated multi-mobile system allows a group of people to play digital games together in an impromptu manner without having to buy an interactive tabletop equipment. This study investigates the user experience and system design of a collocated multi-mobile system when users play a collaborative game-based application using the mobiTop system. The findings show that the extended screen size of the mobiTop system enhanced the collaborative experience of the users. This study also highlights several design considerations to further improve such systems such as employing a faster network configuration, reducing the bezel effect, catering for dynamic device movements and making the object of interest more prominent and visible. With this understanding, this study present design guidelines to help designers create digital game-based multi-mobile systems for ad-hoc collaboration.

Mobile devices are increasingly becoming an important part of technology. As the demand for handling information grows, so does the need for collaboration in integrating and managing multiple forms of information. With its small screen, it is relatively uncomfortable for a group of people to perform task collaboratively. This paper presents MobiTop-a multi-mobile system that integrates mobile devices that works seamlessly together - promoting an extended screen size for the mobile devices to support collaboration. However, interactivity issues such as bezels and screen orientation are found to restrict users from performing collaborative tasks favourably. This paper discusses the interactivity issues pertaining multi-mobile systems and offers guidelines for designers.

This paper presents findings about connectivity issues when using clock wise swipe gesture of mobiTop system. The mobiTop system is a multi-mobile system that allows users to come together at any location and perform collaborative tasks and information sharing by extending their mobile devices. This study investigates the user experience issues when multiple users calibrate and align multiple mobile devices using the mobiTop system. From the study, users took an average of 5.47 minutes to initiate connections between multiple devices. The finding shows that the existing calibration setting is too complicated for the users despite the step-by-step tutorial provided by the system. The findings also show that although only one user is needed to initiate to connectivity, most of the users tend to contribute towards simultaneous connectivity input leading to system disorientation. Following this, several connectivity methods explored that can be employed by the mobiTop system to minimize connectivity time and promote a seamless integration between the users and the system.