Katherine Isbister

The sensual evaluation instrument: developing an affective evaluation tool

In this paper we describe the development and initial testing of a tool for self-assessment of affect while interacting with computer systems: the Sensual Evaluation Instrument. We discuss our research approach within the context of existing affective and HCI theory, and describe stages of evolution of the tool, and initial testing of its effectiveness.

The sensual evaluation instrument: Developing a trans-cultural self-report measure of affect

In this paper we describe the development and testing of a tool for self-assessment of affect while interacting with computer systems, meant to be used in many cultures. We discuss our research approach within the context of existing cultural, affective and HCI theory, and describe testing of its effectiveness in the US and Sweden.

Digital City Kyoto: Towards a Social Information Infrastructure

This paper proposes the concept of digital cities as a social information infrastructure for urban life (including shopping, business, transportation, education, welfare and so on). We propose the three layer architecture for digital cities: a) the information layer integrates both WWW archives and real-time sensory information related to the city, b) the interface layer provides 2D and 3D views of the city, and c) the interaction layer assists social interaction among people who are livinghisiting idat the city. We started a three year project to develop a digital city for Kyoto, the old capital and cultural center of Japan, based on the newest technologies including GIS, 3D, animation, agents and mobile computing. This paper introduces the system architecture and the current status of Digital City Kyoto.

Evaluating affective interfaces: innovative approaches

This paper presents the broad outlines of the context and goals for a one-day workshop concerning the evaluation of affective interfaces.

SENSITIZING SOCIAL AGENTS FOR VIRTUAL TRAINING

ABSTRACT Virtual training allows the learning and rehearsal of implicit cues, e.g., trustworthy leading action in an emergency evacuation, that cannot be easily understood through merely reading about situations, while mitigating the danger and expense of live rehearsals. We have focused our efforts on designing social agents that can engage in and help to train humans to generate the trustworthy behaviors that help to ensure a successful evacuation. Drawing upon social science research and using a “role-reversal method,” we successfully constructed agents that can perceive trustworthiness as humans do. The agents first collect human responses to their own nonverbal cues in controlled experimental training scenarios. Using these results, we obtain optimal parameters for nonverbal cues of trustworthiness, and then can use them to guide agents who evaluate human performance in the same training scenarios. The method enables us to convert social psychological findings into computational mechanisms.

Supple interfaces: designing and evaluating for richer human connections and experiences

The aim of this workshop is to create a common language for discussing the issues involved, the research challenges, and progress already made in designing and evaluating supple interfaces. Supple interfaces aim to build richer connections between people as well as deeper emotional experiences through interface. Examples include affective interactive systems, games, and relationship-building systems. For these kinds of applications, the CHI community is struggling with a new set of design values and accompanying challenges that can be hard to articulate and thus to advance as a community. These application spaces and interaction modes require an emphasis on the quality of experience rather than outcome, and often involve subtleties of the dynamics of engagement with such interfaces and with others through these interfaces. Through hands-on experiences, presentations, and active discussion during the day, we hope to make a start at creating a coherent working framework for this area that can be shared with the larger CHI community.

A Warm Cyber-Welcome: Using an Agent-Led Group Tour to Introduce Visitors to Kyoto

Like thriving physical cities, successful digital cities will provide many opportunities and approach points for building local social connections and context. This project focuses on bringing cultural outsiders into the Kyoto Digital City community, using a tactic that is well understood in the physical world of travel: the guided group tour. We are creating an interface agent to perform the tour guide role. With careful design of this agents narration strategies, we can accomplish two goals: providing preliminary cultural and historical context for foreigners who want to learn more about Kyoto, and providing a shared experience, so that they can form relationships that build upon their common interest in Kyoto.

Usable Content in a Post-Document World

The Usable Content Project aims to develop a set of useful paradigms for the analysis, design, and testing of usable content in a post-document world. In planning work supported by the STC, we have brought together a multidisciplinary team of Rensselaer faculty and students to explore a variety of post-document exemplars and develop an over-arching framework for what makes them usable. Our suggestion is that post-documents move users from control through identity and toward community, using a process clearly different from traditional documents. As a consequence, traditional metrics of usability - efficiency, accuracy, and satisfaction - are no longer adequate for post-documents

Chapter Three – Culture

This chapter offers a brief and targeted introduction to culture as it affects peoples perceptions and interpretations of one another. Particularly for those who have never lived in another culture (or in a setting with a diverse population of subcultures), it is dangerously easy to resort to over-simplified stereotypical notions of what someone from another culture is like, or would like, when designing characters. My hope is that reading this chapter will eliminate this possibility for the reader, substituting instead a respect for the complexity and layers of culture and a desire to incorporate this understanding into character design.

At Play: Guest Editors' Introduction

Digital games have become a focal point for the popular press in recent years and, increasingly, have become an object of study in the halls of academe. In this special issue, you will find a collection of work that illustrates the wide scope of the intellectual dialogue that has been taking place around digital games. We are delighted to present articles from some of the founders of the game studies area, as well as work from younger researchers who are already making a mark in game studies. One can see from the geographic locations of these contributors (four countries represented in the five articles) that the study of games is a global phenomenon. Janet Murray of Georgia Institute of Technology, with the publication of her book Hamlet on the Holodeck in 1997 and her work since in building the games-related research program in the Department of Literature, Communication, and Culture (where she is Director of Graduate Studies), has been a pioneer of scholarship in this area in the United States. Espen Aarseth is cofounder and Editor-in-Chief of “Game Studies”—one of the primary peer-reviewed journals for game scholarship—and also is Head of Research at one of the premier research foci for game studies, the IT University of Copenhagen. Ian Bogost, a young faculty member at Georgia Institute of Technology, has been building a strong reputation in the area of political games research and development. He is the author of Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism as well as the forthcoming Persuasive Games: Videogames and Procedural Rhetoric, and has been a designer of persuasive games for political organizations. Joost Raessens is a film scholar and Associate Professor of New Media Studies at Utrecht University, The Netherlands. His edited volume, Handbook for Game Studies, a comprehensive scholarly treatment of digital games, has just been published by MIT Press. Florence Chee is a Ph.D. Candidate in the School of Communication and Researcher at the Centre for Policy Research on Science and Technology and the Applied Communication and Technology Lab at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada. Her approach to POPULAR COMMUNICATION, 4(3), 161–163 Copyright