Dirk Wenig

The Geography of Pokémon GO: Beneficial and Problematic Effects on Places and Movement

The widespread popularity of Pokémon GO presents the first opportunity to observe the geographic effects of location-based gaming at scale. This paper reports the results of a mixed methods study of the geography of Pokémon GO that includes a five-country field survey of 375 Pokémon GO players and a large scale geostatistical analysis of game elements. Focusing on the key geographic themes of places and movement, we find that the design of Pokémon GO reinforces existing geographically-linked biases (e.g. the game advantages urban areas and neighborhoods with smaller minority populations), that Pokémon GO may have instigated a relatively rare large-scale shift in global human mobility patterns, and that Pokémon GO has geographically-linked safety risks, but not those typically emphasized by the media. Our results point to geographic design implications for future systems in this space such as a means through which the geographic biases present in Pokémon GO may be counteracted.

HoverZoom: making on-screen keyboards more accessible

Text entry on mobile devices such as smartphones or tablets almost exclusively depends on using on-screen keyboards that base on touch interaction. Due to the often limited space available on the touchscreen, the keys are displayed very small and are therefore hard to hit, especially in mobile scenarios or with users that do not have perfect eyesight. In our work we utilize a feature of some smartphones where a users finger is detected before it touches the screen. This hover detection is used to enlarge the area of the keyboard under the finger to make it more readable and easier to use. A first working prototype exists and will be evaluated in the near future.

Interaction with combinations of maps and images for pedestrian navigation and virtual exploration

While studies have shown the advantages of map-image-combinations for pedestrian navigation, none of them concentrated on interaction. We suggest to combine an intuitive pitch gesture with the natural peephole metaphor not only for pedestrian navigation but also for virtual exploration with mobile devices and present a first prototype implementing our ideas.

Exercise My Game: Turning Off-The-Shelf Games into Exergames

Exercise video games (exergames) can motivate players to be more physically active. However, most exergames are controlled by confined and predefined movements and do not promote long-term motivation. Well-funded commercial games often excel at long-term motivation, but are not operated with motion input. Exercise My Game (XMG) is a design framework for turning off-the-shelf action games into full-body motion-based games. Challenges with this approach involve finding mappings from control input to game-action, as well as blending active input feedback with the game’s interface. XMG facilitates transforming well-produced, non-exercise video games into captivating exergames by structuring the design space and outlining game requirements. We illustrate XMG with the example of turning the popular first-person action game Portal 2 into the exergame Sportal.

WatchThru: Expanding Smartwatch Displays with Mid-air Visuals and Wrist-worn Augmented Reality

We introduce WatchThru, an interactive method for extended wrist-worn display on commercially-available smartwatches. To address the limited visual and interaction space, WatchThru expands the device into 3D through a transparent display. This enables novel interactions that leverage and extend smartwatch glanceability. We describe three novel interaction techniques, Pop-up Visuals, Second Perspective and Peek-through, and discuss how they can complement interaction on current devices. We also describe two types of prototypes that helped us to explore standalone interactions, as well as, proof-of-concept AR interfaces using our platform.

Suspended Walking: A Physical Locomotion Interface for Virtual Reality

We present a novel physical locomotion interface for virtual environments. It suspends the user in a torso harness so that the feet just touch ground. Low friction materials allow walking motions with ground contact similar to real walking, while maintaining the user in the same position. We detail the hardware and motion tracking setup and outline results of a first user study.

Instrument-mounted displays for reducing cognitive load during surgical navigation

PurposeSurgical navigation systems rely on a monitor placed in the operating room to relay information. Optimal monitor placement can be challenging in crowded rooms, and it is often not possible to place the monitor directly beside the situs. The operator must split attention between the navigation system and the situs. We present an approach for needle-based interventions to provide navigational feedback directly on the instrument and close to the situs by mounting a small display onto the needle.MethodsBy mounting a small and lightweight smartwatch display directly onto the instrument, we are able to provide navigational guidance close to the situs and directly in the operator’s field of view, thereby reducing the need to switch the focus of view between the situs and the navigation system. We devise a specific variant of the established crosshair metaphor suitable for the very limited screen space. We conduct an empirical user study comparing our approach to using a monitor and a combination of both.ResultsResults from the empirical user study show significant benefits for cognitive load, user preference, and general usability for the instrument-mounted display, while achieving the same level of performance in terms of time and accuracy compared to using a monitor.ConclusionWe successfully demonstrate the feasibility of our approach and potential benefits. With ongoing technological advancements, instrument-mounted displays might complement standard monitor setups for surgical navigation in order to lower cognitive demands and for improved usability of such systems.

What People Really Remember: Understanding Cognitive Effects When Interacting with Large Displays

This paper investigates how common interaction techniques for large displays impact on recall in learning tasks. Our work is motivated by results of prior research in different areas that attribute a positive effect of interactivity to cognition. We present findings from a controlled lab experiment with 32 participants comparing mobile phone-based interaction, touch interaction and full-body interaction to a non-interactive baseline. In contrast to prior findings, our results reveal that more movement can negatively influence recall. In particular we show that designers are facing an immanent trade-off between designing engaging interaction through extensive movement and creating memorable content.

ScrollingHome: bringing image-based indoor navigation to smartwatches

Providing pedestrian navigation instructions on small screens is a challenging task due to limited screen space. As image-based approaches for navigation have been successfully proven to outperform map-based navigation on mobile devices, we propose to bring image-based navigation to smartwatches. We contribute a straightforward pipeline to easily create image-based indoor navigation instructions that allow users to freely navigate in indoor environments without any localization infrastructure and with minimal user input on the smartwatch. In a user study, we show that our approach outperforms the current state-of-the art application in terms of task completion time, perceived task load and perceived usability. In addition, we did not find an indication that there is a need to provide explicit directional instructions for image-based navigation on small screens.

Keep an eye on your photos: automatic image tagging on mobile devices

In this paper we present how to tag images automatically based on the image and sensor data from a mobile device. We developed a system that computes low-level tags using the image itself and meta data. Based on these tags and previous user tags we learn high-level tags. With a client-server-implementation we source out computational expensive algorithms to recommend the tags as fast as possible. We show what are the best feature extraction methods in combination with a machine learning technique to recommend good tags.