Luca Chittaro

Visualizing information on mobile devices

Visualization can make a wide range of mobile applications more intuitive and productive. The mobility context and technical limitations such as small screen size make it impossible to simply port visualization applications from desktop computers to mobile devices, but researchers are starting to address these challenges. From a purely technical point of view, building more sophisticated mobile visualizations become easier due to new, possibly standard, software APIs such as OpenGLES and increasingly powerful devices. Although ongoing improvements would not eliminate most device limitations or alter the mobility context, they make it easier to create and experiment with alternative approaches.

Web3D technologies in learning, education and training: Motivations, issues, opportunities

Web3D open standards allow the delivery of interactive 3D virtual learning environments through the Internet, reaching potentially large numbers of learners worldwide, at any time. This paper introduces the educational use of virtual reality based on Web3D technologies. After briefly presenting the main Web3D technologies, we summarize the pedagogical basis that motivate their exploitation in the context of education and highlight their interesting features. We outline the main positive and negative results obtained so far, and point out some of the current research directions.

MOPET: A context-aware and user-adaptive wearable system for fitness training

OBJECTIVE Cardiovascular disease, obesity, and lack of physical fitness are increasingly common and negatively affect peoples health, requiring medical assistance and decreasing peoples wellness and productivity. In the last years, researchers as well as companies have been increasingly investigating wearable devices for fitness applications with the aim of improving users health, in terms of cardiovascular benefits, loss of weight or muscle strength. Dedicated GPS devices, accelerometers, step counters and heart rate monitors are already commercially available, but they are usually very limited in terms of user interaction and artificial intelligence capabilities. This significantly limits the training and motivation support provided by current systems, making them poorly suited for untrained people who are more interested in fitness for health rather than competitive purposes. To better train and motivate users, we propose the mobile personal trainer (MOPET) system. METHODS AND MATERIAL MOPET is a wearable system that supervises a physical fitness activity based on alternating jogging and fitness exercises in outdoor environments. By exploiting real-time data coming from sensors, knowledge elicited from a sport physiologist and a professional trainer, and a user model that is built and periodically updated through a guided autotest, MOPET can provide motivation as well as safety and health advice, adapted to the user and the context. To better interact with the user, MOPET also displays a 3D embodied agent that speaks, suggests stretching or strengthening exercises according to users current condition, and demonstrates how to correctly perform exercises with interactive 3D animations. RESULTS AND CONCLUSION By describing MOPET, we show how context-aware and user-adaptive techniques can be applied to the fitness domain. In particular, we describe how such techniques can be exploited to train, motivate, and supervise users in a wearable personal training system for outdoor fitness activity.

Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services

The MOBILEHCI series provides a forum for academics and practitioners to discuss the challenges and potential solutions for effective interaction with mobile systems and services. It covers the design, evaluation and application of techniques and approaches for all mobile and wearable computing devices and services.

Information visualization and its application to medicine

This paper provides an introduction to the field of information visualization (IV) and a discussion of its application to medical systems. More specifically, it aims at: (i) defining what IV is and what are its goals (ii) highlighting the similarities and differences between IV and traditional medical imaging (iii) illustrating the potential of IV for medical applications by examining several examples of implemented systems and (iv) giving some general indications about the purposes and the effective exploitation of an IV component into a medical system.

Temporal representation and reasoning in artificial intelligence: Issues and approaches

Time is one of the most relevant topics in AI. It plays a major role in several areas, ranging from logical foundations to applications of knowledge‐based systems. In this paper, we survey a wide range of research in temporal representation and reasoning, without committing ourselves to the point of view of any specific application. The organization of the paper follows the commonly recognized division of the field in two main subfields: reasoning about actions and change, and reasoning about temporal constraints. We give an overview of the basic issues, approaches, and results in these two areas, and outline relevant recent developments. Furthermore, we briefly analyze the major emerging trends in temporal representation and reasoning as well as the relationships with other well‐established areas, such as temporal databases and logic programming.

Virtual reality in autism: state of the art

Autism spectrum disorders are characterized by core deficits with regard to three domains, i.e. social interaction, communication and repetitive or stereotypic behaviour. It is crucial to develop intervention strategies helping individuals with autism, their caregivers and educators in daily life. For this purpose, virtual reality (VR), i.e. a simulation of the real world based on computer graphics, can be useful as it allows instructors and therapists to offer a safe, repeatable and diversifiable environment during learning. This mini review examines studies that have investigated the use of VR in autism.

Navigation in 3D virtual environments: Effects of user experience and location-pointing navigation aids

In this paper, we describe the results of an experimental study whose objective was twofold: (1) comparing three navigation aids that help users perform wayfinding tasks in desktop virtual environments (VEs) by pointing out the location of objects or places; (2) evaluating the effects of user experience with 3D desktop VEs on their effectiveness with the considered navigation aids. In particular, we compared navigation performance (in terms of total time to complete an informed search task) of 48 users divided into two groups: subjects in one group had experience in navigating 3D VEs while subjects in the other group did not. The experiment comprised four conditions that differed for the navigation aid that was employed. The first and the second condition, respectively, exploited 3D and 2D arrows to point towards objects that users had to reach; in the third condition, a radar metaphor was employed to show the location of objects in the VE; the fourth condition was a control condition with no location-pointing navigation aid available. The search task was performed both in a VE representing an outdoor geographic area and in an abstract VE that did not resemble any familiar environment. For each VE, users were also asked to order the four conditions according to their preference. Results show that the navigation aid based on 3D arrows outperformed (both in terms of user performance and user preference) the others, except in the case when it was used by experienced users in the geographic VE. In that case, it was as effective as the others. Finally, in the geographic VE, experienced users took significantly less time than inexperienced users to perform the informed search, while in the abstract VE the difference was significant only in the control and the radar conditions. From a more general perspective, our study highlights the need to take into specific consideration user experience in navigating VEs when designing navigation aids and evaluating their effectiveness.

Location-aware visualization of VRML models in GPS-based mobile guides

In this paper, we present LAMP3D, a system for the location-aware presentation of VRML content on mobile devices. We explore the application of LAMP3D in tourist mobile guides: the system is used to provide tourists with a 3D visualization of the environment they are exploring, synchronized with the physical world through the use of GPS data; tourists can easily obtain information on the objects they see in the real world by directly selecting them in the VRML world. We discuss the design and development of the system and report about the feedback obtained from the informal user testing we carried out.

Bringing mobile guides and fitness activities together: a solution based on an embodied virtual trainer

Sports and fitness are increasingly attracting the interest of computer science researchers as well as companies. In particular, recent mobile devices with hardware graphics acceleration offer new, still unexplored possibilities. This paper investigates the use of mobile guides in fitness activities, proposing the Mobile Personal Trainer (MOPET) application. MOPET uses a GPS device to monitor users position during her physical activity in an outdoor fitness trail. It provides navigation assistance by using a fitness trail map and giving speech directions. Moreover, MOPET provides motivation support and exercise demonstrations by using an embodied virtual trainer, called Evita. Evita shows how to correctly perform the exercises along the trail with 3D animations and incites the user. To the best of our knowledge, our project is the first to employ a mobile guide for fitness activities. The effects of MOPET on motivation, as well as its navigational and training support, have been experimentally evaluated with 12 users. Evaluation results encourage the use of mobile guides and embodied virtual trainers in outdoor fitness applications.