scholarly journals Exploring Smart Agents for the Interaction with Multimodal Mediated Environments

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 27
Author(s):  
Robert Richer ◽  
Nan Zhao ◽  
Bjoern M. Eskofier ◽  
Joseph A. Paradiso
Keyword(s):  
User Study ◽  
Information Overload ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
Smartphone Application ◽  
Objective Measures ◽  
Conversational Agents ◽  
Natural Interaction ◽  
Input Modality ◽  
Personal Assistants ◽  
System Intelligence

After conversational agents have been made available to the broader public, we speculate that applying them as a mediator for adaptive environments reduces control complexity and increases user experience by providing a more natural interaction. We implemented and tested four agents, each of them differing in their system intelligence and input modality, as personal assistants for Mediated Atmospheres, an adaptive smart office prototype. They were evaluated in a user study ( N = 33 ) to collect subjective and objective measures. Results showed that a smartphone application was the most favorable system, followed by conversational text and voice agents that were perceived as being more engaging and intelligent than a non-conversational voice agent. Significant differences were observed between native and non-native speakers in both subjective and objective measures. Our findings reveal the potential of conversational agents for the interaction with adaptive environments to reduce work and information overload.

scholarly journals Comparative evaluation of WIMP and immersive natural finger interaction: a user study on CAD assembly modeling

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marius Fechter ◽  
Benjamin Schleich ◽  
Sandro Wartzack
Keyword(s):  
User Interfaces ◽  
User Study ◽  
Spatial Location ◽  
Ease Of Use ◽  
Natural Interaction ◽  
Assembly Modeling ◽  
3D Space ◽  
Computer Mouse ◽  
Study Results ◽  
Assembly Procedure

AbstractVirtual and augmented reality allows the utilization of natural user interfaces, such as realistic finger interaction, even for purposes that were previously dominated by the WIMP paradigm. This new form of interaction is particularly suitable for applications involving manipulation tasks in 3D space, such as CAD assembly modeling. The objective of this paper is to evaluate the suitability of natural interaction for CAD assembly modeling in virtual reality. An advantage of the natural interaction compared to the conventional operation by computer mouse would indicate development potential for user interfaces of current CAD applications. Our approach bases on two main elements. Firstly, a novel natural user interface for realistic finger interaction enables the user to interact with virtual objects similar to physical ones. Secondly, an algorithm automatically detects constraints between CAD components based solely on their geometry and spatial location. In order to prove the usability of the natural CAD assembly modeling approach in comparison with the assembly procedure in current WIMP operated CAD software, we present a comparative user study. Results show that the VR method including natural finger interaction significantly outperforms the desktop-based CAD application in terms of efficiency and ease of use.

New Forms of Interaction in Serious Games for Rehabilitation

2012 ◽  
pp. 1188-1211 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paula Alexandra Rego ◽  
Pedro Miguel Moreira ◽  
Luís Paulo Reis
Keyword(s):  
Serious Games ◽  
User Study ◽  
Classification Criteria ◽  
Natural Interaction ◽  
Open Problems ◽  
Main Research ◽  
Research Opportunity ◽  
Potential Benefits ◽  
Natural Forms ◽  
Motivating Factor

This chapter addresses up-to-date research development regarding the adoption of more natural forms of interaction in the Serious Games for Rehabilitation domain of application. The chapter starts by presenting fundamental concepts on Serious Games illustrated by relevant applications. It describes the main problems involved and how Serious Games can benefit the process of rehabilitation. A comprehensive literature survey is presented and accompanied by a proposed set of classification criteria towards a taxonomy. From this study, a main research opportunity the authors identified is the potential benefits of the adoption of natural interaction modalities. The remainder of the chapter presents the authors’ recent work on this subject, including the description and design of game prototypes using alternative and natural interaction modalities. The chapter presents experiments and the results of a user study in order to make it possible to conclude about the benefits of the newer forms of interaction. From this study, it was concluded that the introduction of the natural interaction modalities has increased the attractiveness and intuitiveness of the prototyped Serious Game. This important result is a motivating factor to improve the interaction mechanisms and conduct studies with distinct tasks and larger samples of users/patients. Lastly, the authors report identified research opportunities and open problems.

scholarly journals GazeGuide: An Eye-Gaze-Guided Active Immersive UAV Camera

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (5) ◽  
pp. 1668 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pavan Kumar B. N. ◽  
Adithya Balasubramanyam ◽  
Ashok Kumar Patil ◽  
Chethana B. ◽  
Young Ho Chai
Keyword(s):  
User Study ◽  
Eye Gaze ◽  
Three Dimensional ◽  
Video Stream ◽  
Eye Tracker ◽  
Input Devices ◽  
Input Modality ◽  
Head Mounted Display ◽  
Aerial Vehicle ◽  
Remote Controller

Over the years, gaze input modality has been an easy and demanding human–computer interaction (HCI) method for various applications. The research of gaze-based interactive applications has advanced considerably, as HCIs are no longer constrained to traditional input devices. In this paper, we propose a novel immersive eye-gaze-guided camera (called GazeGuide) that can seamlessly control the movements of a camera mounted on an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) from the eye-gaze of a remote user. The video stream captured by the camera is fed into a head-mounted display (HMD) with a binocular eye tracker. The user’s eye-gaze is the sole input modality to maneuver the camera. A user study was conducted considering the static and moving targets of interest in a three-dimensional (3D) space to evaluate the proposed framework. GazeGuide was compared with a state-of-the-art input modality remote controller. The qualitative and quantitative results showed that the proposed GazeGuide performed significantly better than the remote controller.

scholarly journals Enhancing Interaction with Augmented Reality through Mid-Air Haptic Feedback: Architecture Design and User Feedback

2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (23) ◽  
pp. 5123 ◽  
Author(s):  
Diego Vaquero-Melchor ◽  
Ana M. Bernardos
Keyword(s):  
Augmented Reality ◽  
User Study ◽  
Haptic Feedback ◽  
Form Perception ◽  
Natural Interaction ◽  
Head Mounted Displays ◽  
Flexible Architecture ◽  
Immersive Visualization ◽  
Study Participants ◽  
Interface Metaphor

Nowadays, Augmented-Reality (AR) head-mounted displays (HMD) deliver a more immersive visualization of virtual contents, but the available means of interaction, mainly based on gesture and/or voice, are yet limited and obviously lack realism and expressivity when compared to traditional physical means. In this sense, the integration of haptics within AR may help to deliver an enriched experience, while facilitating the performance of specific actions, such as repositioning or resizing tasks, that are still dependent on the user’s skills. In this direction, this paper gathers the description of a flexible architecture designed to deploy haptically enabled AR applications both for mobile and wearable visualization devices. The haptic feedback may be generated through a variety of devices (e.g., wearable, graspable, or mid-air ones), and the architecture facilitates handling the specificity of each. For this reason, within the paper, it is discussed how to generate a haptic representation of a 3D digital object depending on the application and the target device. Additionally, the paper includes an analysis of practical, relevant issues that arise when setting up a system to work with specific devices like HMD (e.g., HoloLens) and mid-air haptic devices (e.g., Ultrahaptics), such as the alignment between the real world and the virtual one. The architecture applicability is demonstrated through the implementation of two applications: (a) Form Inspector and (b) Simon Game, built for HoloLens and iOS mobile phones for visualization and for UHK for mid-air haptics delivery. These applications have been used to explore with nine users the efficiency, meaningfulness, and usefulness of mid-air haptics for form perception, object resizing, and push interaction tasks. Results show that, although mobile interaction is preferred when this option is available, haptics turn out to be more meaningful in identifying shapes when compared to what users initially expect and in contributing to the execution of resizing tasks. Moreover, this preliminary user study reveals some design issues when working with haptic AR. For example, users may be expecting a tailored interface metaphor, not necessarily inspired in natural interaction. This has been the case of our proposal of virtual pressable buttons, built mimicking real buttons by using haptics, but differently interpreted by the study participants.

Evaluating exploratory visualization systems: A user study on how clustering-based visualization systems support information seeking from large document collections

2012 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-43 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yujie Liu ◽  
Scott Barlowe ◽  
Yaqin Feng ◽  
Jing Yang ◽  
Min Jiang
Keyword(s):  
Information Seeking ◽  
User Study ◽  
Information Overload ◽  
Human Subjects ◽  
Scientific Discovery ◽  
Cognitive Learning ◽  
Document Collections ◽  
Important Research Topic ◽  
Visualization Systems ◽  
General Guidance

Iterative, opportunistic and evolving visual sense-making has been an important research topic as it assists users in overcoming ever-increasing information overload. Exploratory visualization systems (EVSs) maximize the amount of information users can gain through learning and have been widely used in scientific discovery and decision-making contexts. Although many EVSs have been developed recently, there is a lack of general guidance on how to evaluate such systems. Researchers face challenges such as understanding the cognitive learning process supported by these systems. In this paper, we present a formal user study on Newdle, a clustering-based EVS for large news collections, shedding light on a general methodology for EVS evaluation. Our approach is built upon cognitive load theory, which takes the user as well as the system as the focus of evaluation. The carefully designed procedures allow us to thoroughly examine the user’s cognitive process as well as control the variability among human subjects. Through this study, we analyse how and why clustering-based EVSs benefit (or hinder) users in a variety of information-seeking tasks. We also summarize leverage points for designing clustering-based EVSs.

scholarly journals Voice-based Conversational Agents for the Prevention and Management of Chronic and Mental Conditions: A Systematic Literature Review (Preprint)

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Caterina Bérubé ◽  
Theresa Schachner ◽  
Roman Keller ◽  
Elgar Fleisch ◽  
Florian v. Wangenheim ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Literature Review ◽  
Technology Acceptance ◽  
Systematic Literature Review ◽  
State Of The Art ◽  
Data Extraction ◽  
Empirical Evaluation ◽  
Behavioral Measure ◽  
Conversational Agents ◽  
Natural Interaction ◽  
Quasi Experimental

BACKGROUND Chronic and mental conditions are increasingly prevalent worldwide. As devices in our everyday lives offer more and more voice-based self-service, voice-based conversational agents (VCAs) have the potential to support the prevention and management of these conditions in a scalable way. VCAs allow for a more natural interaction compared to text-based conversational agents, facilitate input for users who cannot type, allow for routine monitoring and support when in-person healthcare is not possible, and open the doors to voice and speech analysis. The state of the art of VCAs for chronic and mental conditions is, however, unclear. OBJECTIVE This systematic literature review aims to provide a better understanding of state-of-the-art research on VCAs delivering interventions for the prevention and management of chronic and mental conditions. METHODS We conducted a systematic literature review using PubMed Medline, EMBASE, PsycINFO, Scopus, and Web of Science databases. We included primary research that involved the prevention or management of chronic or mental conditions, where the voice was the primary interaction modality of the conversational agent, and where an empirical evaluation of the system in terms of system accuracy and/or in terms of technology acceptance was included. Two independent reviewers conducted screening and data extraction and measured their agreement with Cohen’s kappa. A narrative approach was applied to synthesize the selected records. RESULTS Twelve out of 7’170 articles met the inclusion criteria. The majority of the studies (N=10) were non-experimental, while the remainder (N=2) were quasi-experimental. The VCAs provided behavioral support (N=5), a health monitoring service (N=3), or both (N=4). The VCA services were delivered via smartphone (N=5), tablet (N=2), or smart speakers (N=3). In two cases, no device was specified. Three VCAs targeted cancer, while two VCAs each targeted diabetes and heart failure. The other VCAs targeted hearing-impairment, asthma, Parkinson's disease, dementia and autism, “intellectual disability”, and depression. The majority of the studies (N=7) assessed technology acceptance but only a minority (N=3) used validated instruments. Half of the studies (N=6) reported either performance measures on speech recognition or on the ability of VCA’s to respond to health-related queries. Only a minority of the studies (N=2) reported behavioral measure or a measure of attitudes towards intervention-related health behavior. Moreover, only a minority of studies (N=4) reported controlling for participant’s previous experience with technology. CONCLUSIONS Considering the heterogeneity of the methods and the limited number of studies identified, it seems that research on VCAs for chronic and mental conditions is still in its infancy. Although results in system accuracy and technology acceptance are encouraging, there still is a need to establish evidence on the efficacy of VCAs for the prevention and management of chronic and mental conditions, both in absolute terms and in comparison to standard healthcare.

scholarly journals Empirical analysis of session-based recommendation algorithms

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Malte Ludewig ◽  
Noemi Mauro ◽  
Sara Latifi ◽  
Dietmar Jannach
Keyword(s):  
Prediction Accuracy ◽  
User Study ◽  
Information Overload ◽  
Research Literature ◽  
Evaluation Framework ◽  
Heuristic Methods ◽  
Recommendation Algorithms ◽  
Algorithmic Approaches ◽  
Study Participants

Abstract Recommender systems are tools that support online users by pointing them to potential items of interest in situations of information overload. In recent years, the class of session-based recommendation algorithms received more attention in the research literature. These algorithms base their recommendations solely on the observed interactions with the user in an ongoing session and do not require the existence of long-term preference profiles. Most recently, a number of deep learning-based (“neural”) approaches to session-based recommendations have been proposed. However, previous research indicates that today’s complex neural recommendation methods are not always better than comparably simple algorithms in terms of prediction accuracy. With this work, our goal is to shed light on the state of the art in the area of session-based recommendation and on the progress that is made with neural approaches. For this purpose, we compare twelve algorithmic approaches, among them six recent neural methods, under identical conditions on various datasets. We find that the progress in terms of prediction accuracy that is achieved with neural methods is still limited. In most cases, our experiments show that simple heuristic methods based on nearest-neighbors schemes are preferable over conceptually and computationally more complex methods. Observations from a user study furthermore indicate that recommendations based on heuristic methods were also well accepted by the study participants. To support future progress and reproducibility in this area, we publicly share the session-rec evaluation framework that was used in our research.

Imitation of Suprasegmental Patterns by Non-Native Speakers of English

1993 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-50 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nancy Jeanne Haak ◽  
Rieko Marie Darling
Keyword(s):  
Clinical Application ◽  
Limited English Proficiency ◽  
English Proficiency ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
Native English Speakers ◽  
English Speakers ◽  
Objective Measures ◽  
Short Sentence ◽  
Native Speakers Of English ◽  
Potential Measure

Speakers with limited English proficiency (LEP) usually produce a combination of articulation errors and differences in the prosodic patterns of English. There are abundant measures of articulation, but few objective measures of prosodic performance. The Tennessee Test of Rhythm and Intonation Patterns (TRIP) was selected as a potential measure for distinguishing the prosodic patterns of native and non-native English. First, the TRIP was given to 12 native speakers of Asiatic languages and 12 native speakers of English. The performances of the two groups did not differ significantly, suggesting that the TRIP was not a definitive measure of prosodic differences in English. Second, a group of listeners was asked to identify native versus non-native English speakers based only on selected stimuli from the TRIP and a short sentence of comparable length. The listeners were significantly better able to identify native and non-native speakers when listening to the sentence than when listening to the TRIP items. Clinical application of this information in working with LEP clients is discussed.

scholarly journals Affective Embodied Conversational Agents for Natural Interaction

10.5772/6173 ◽  
2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eva Cerezo ◽  
Sandra Baldassarri ◽  
Isabelle Hupont ◽  
Francisco J.
Keyword(s):  
Embodied Conversational Agents ◽  
Conversational Agents ◽  
Natural Interaction

scholarly journals Collective expression: how robotic swarms convey information with group motion

2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 418-435 ◽  
Author(s):  
David St-Onge ◽  
Florent Levillain ◽  
Elisabetta Zibetti ◽  
Giovanni Beltrame
Keyword(s):  
User Study ◽  
Group Behavior ◽  
Natural Interaction ◽  
Robotic Swarms ◽  
Group Motion ◽  
Internal States ◽  
Temporal And Spatial ◽  
Distributed Behavior ◽  
The Relationship

AbstractWhen faced with the need of implementing a decentralized behavior for a group of collaborating robots, strategies inspired from swarm intelligence often avoid considering the human operator, granting the swarm with full autonomy. However, field missions require at least to share the output of the swarm to the operator. Unfortunately, little is known about the users’ perception of group behavior and dynamics, and there is no clear optimal interaction modality for swarms. In this paper, we focus on the movement of the swarm to convey information to a user: we believe that the interpretation of artificial states based on groups motion can lead to promising natural interaction modalities. We implement a grammar of decentralized control algorithms to explore their expressivity. We define the expressivity of a movement as a metric to measure how natural, readable, or easily understandable it may appear. We then correlate expressivity with the control parameters for the distributed behavior of the swarm. A first user study confirms the relationship between inter-robot distance, temporal and spatial synchronicity, and the perceived expressivity of the robotic system. We follow up with a small group of users tasked with the design of expressive motion sequences to convey internal states using our grammar of algorithms. We comment on their design choices and we assess the interpretation performance by a larger group of users. We show that some of the internal states were perceived as designed and discuss the parameters influencing the performance.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document