Günter Alce

WozARd: a wizard of oz method for wearable augmented reality interaction—a pilot study

Head-mounted displays and other wearable devices open up for innovative types of interaction for wearable augmented reality (AR). However, to design and evaluate these new types of AR user interfaces, it is essential to quickly simulate undeveloped components of the system and collect feedback from potential users early in the design process. One way of doing this is the wizard of Oz (WOZ) method. The basic idea behind WOZ is to create the illusion of a working system by having a human operator, performing some or all of the systems functions. WozARd is a WOZ method developed for wearable AR interaction. The presented pilot study was an initial investigation of the capability of the WozARd method to simulate an AR city tour. Qualitative and quantitative data were collected from 21 participants performing a simulated AR city tour. The data analysis focused on seven categories that can have an impact on how the WozARd method is perceived by participants: precision, relevance, responsiveness, technical stability, visual fidelity, general user-experience, and human-operator performance. Overall, the results indicate that the participants perceived the simulated AR city tour as a relatively realistic experience despite a certain degree of technical instability and human-operator mistakes.

Personal Shopping Assistance and Navigator System for Visually Impaired People

In this paper, a personal assistant and navigator system for visually impaired people will be described. The showcase presented intends to demonstrate how partially sighted people could be aided by the technology in performing an ordinary activity, like going to a mall and moving inside it to find a specific product. We propose an Android application that integrates Pedestrian Dead Reckoning and Computer Vision algorithms, using an off-the-shelf Smartphone connected to a Smartwatch. The detection, recognition and pose estimation of specific objects or features in the scene derive an estimate of user location with sub-meter accuracy when combined with a hardware-sensor pedometer. The proposed prototype interfaces with a user by means of Augmented Reality, exploring a variety of sensorial modalities other than just visual overlay, namely audio and haptic modalities, to create a seamless immersive user experience. The interface and interaction of the preliminary platform have been studied through specific evaluation methods. The feedback gathered will be taken into consideration to further improve the proposed system.

WozARd: a wizard of oz tool for mobile AR

Wizard of Oz methodology is useful when conducting user studies of a system that is in early development. It is essential to be able to simulate part of the system and to collect feedback from potential users. Using a human to act as the system is one way to do this. The Wizard of Oz tool presented here is called WozARd and it aims at offering a set of tools that help the test leader control the visual, tactile and auditive output that is presented to the test participant. Additionally, it is suitable for using in an augmented reality environment where images are overlaid on the phones camera view or on glasses. The main features that were identified as necessary include presentation of media such as images, video and sound, navigation and location based triggering, automatically taking photos, capability to log test results and visual feedback, and the integration of Sony SmartWatch for interaction possibilities.

Feasibility Study of Ubiquitous Interaction Concepts

There are all sorts of consumer electronics in a home environment. Using ”apps” to interact with each device is neither feasible nor practical in an ubicomp future. Prototyping and evaluating interaction concepts for this future is a challenge. This paper proposes four concepts for device discovery and device interaction implemented in a virtual environment. The interaction concepts were compared in a controlled experiment for evaluation and comparison. Some statistically significant dierences and subjective preferences could be observed in the quantitative and qualitative data respectively. Overall, the results indicate that the proposed interaction concepts were found natural and easy to use.

UbiCompass: An IoT Interaction Concept

Lately, different wearable form factors have reached the consumer domain. Wearables enable at-a-glance access to information and can continually sense the surrounding environment. Internet of Things (IoT) researchers have focused on the main enabling factors: the integration of several technologies and communication solutions. Less effort has been devoted to exploring how not-so-tech-savvy end users can discover and directly interact with the numerous connected things predicted by the IoT vision. This paper presents a novel IoT interaction concept called UbiCompass. A functional, smartwatch face prototype of the UbiCompass was developed and integrated with an existing smart home system, in which five different connected devices could be controlled using simple interaction. It was then compared to a traditional smartphone mobile application in a controlled experiment. The results show statistically significant differences in favor of the proposed concept. This highlights the potential the UbiCompass has as an IoT interaction concept.