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Video games are an established medium that provides interactive entertainment beyond pure enjoyment in many contexts. Game designers create dedicated tutorials to teach players the game mechanisms and rules, such as the conventions for interaction, control schemes, core game mechanics, etc. While effective tutorial design is considered a crucial aspect to support this learning process, the existing literature approaches focus on designing ad hoc tutorials for specific game genres rather than investigating the impact of different tutorial styles on game learnability and player engagement. In this paper, we tackle this challenge by presenting a general-purpose approach aimed at supporting game designers in the identification of the most suitable tutorial style for a specific genre of video games. The approach is evaluated in the context of a simple first-person shooter (FPS) mainstream video game built by the authors through a controlled comparative user experiment involving 46 players.

Gamification has been recently proposed as a technique to improve user engagement in different activities, including visits to cultural sites and cultural tourism in general. We present the design, development and initial validation of the NEPTIS Poleis system, which consists of a mobile application and a Web interface for curators, allowing the definition, and subsequent fruition by users, of different minigames suitable for open-air assets.

Healthcare is one of the largest business segments in the world and is a critical area for future growth. In order to ensure efficient access to medical and patient-related information, hospitals have invested heavily in improving clinical mobile technologies and spreading their use among doctors towards a more efficient and personalized delivery of care procedures. However, there are also indications that their use may have a negative impact on patient-centeredness and often places many cognitive and physical demands on doctors, making them prone to make medical errors. To tackle this issue, in this paper, we present the main outcomes of the project TESTMED, which aimed at realizing a clinical system that provides operational support to doctors using mobile technologies for delivering care to patients, in a bid to minimize medical errors. The system exploits concepts from Business Process Management (BPM) on how to manage a specific class of care procedures, called clinical guidelines, and how to support their execution and mobile orchestration among doctors. To allow a non-invasive interaction of doctors with the system, we leverage the use of touch and vocal user interfaces. A robust user evaluation performed in a real clinical case study shows the usability and effectiveness of the system.

In 1947, N. Herlofson proposed a modification to the 1884 Heinrich Hertz’s Emagram with the goal of getting more precise hand-made weather forecasts providing larger angles between isotherms and adiabats. Since then, the Herlofson’s nomogram has been used every day to visualize the results of about 800 radiosonde balloons that, twice a day, are globally released, sounding the atmosphere and reading pressure, altitude, temperature, dew point, and wind velocity. Relevant weather forecasts use such pieces of information to predict fog, cloud height, rain, thunderstorms, etc. However, despite its diffusion, non-technical people (e.g., private gliding pilots) do not use the Herlofson’s nomogram because they often consider it hard to interpret and confusing. This paper copes with this problem presenting a visualization based environment that presents the Herlofson’s nomogram in an easier to interpret way, allowing the selection of the right level of detail and at the same time inspection of the sounding row data and the plotted diagram. Our visual environment was compared with the classic way of representing the Herlofson’s nomogram in a formal user study, demonstrating the higher efficacy and better comprehensibility of the proposed solution.

A smart space is an environment, mainly equipped with Internet-of-Things (IoT) technologies, able to provide services to humans, helping them to perform daily tasks by monitoring the space and autonomously executing actions, giving suggestions and sending alarms. Approaches suggested in the literature may differ in terms of required facilities, possible applications, amount of human intervention required, ability to support multiple users at the same time adapting to changing needs. In this paper, we propose a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) that classifies most influential approaches in the area of smart spaces according to a set of dimensions identified by answering a set of research questions. These dimensions allow to choose a specific method or approach according to available sensors, amount of labeled data, need for visual analysis, requirements in terms of enactment and decision-making on the environment. Additionally, the paper identifies a set of challenges to be addressed by future research in the field.

This demonstration concerns the visual user interface of the On-TIME system, a task-centered information management system, whose aim is to actively participate to and support the user tasks. The design of a user friendly interface is one of the key challenges that needs to be addressed for the success of On-TIME. Being On-TIME based on the use of a so-called Personal Ontology to provide a semantic account to user’s personal data, the interface has to allow the user to easily browse the ontology. On the other hand, it has to address the management of tasks. This requires to both suggest tasks that the user might be willing to perform, and to support her while executing tasks. We present a typical user scenario in order to illustrate a possible interaction with the On-TIME interface, and discuss some preliminary user evaluation.

The brain computer interface (BCI) technology allows a direct connection between brain and computer without any muscular activity required, and thus it offers a unique opportunity to enhance and/or to restore communication and actions into external word in people with severe motor disability. Here we present a set of findings that confirm the feasibility of a real domotic environmental control operated via P300-based BCI. Furthermore, the relevant issue of a low bit rate of command execution is addressed by the implementation of a dynamical BCI interface whose upgrade is based on a continuous real- time collection of information from the environment.