Mathias Funk

Attractiveness of an Interactive Public Art Installation

Interaction experiences with public art installations are becoming ubiquitous recently, however, interaction is usually unidirectional and the actual experience not very rich. This work reports on an interactive public art installation aiming at increasing the level of social connectedness among visitors, and the results of evaluating the attractiveness of the installation. By connecting visitors and computers physiologically, the installation has clear impact on social interaction and it also shows the attractiveness to people from aspects such as creativity, novelty, inviting and motivating. In this work we also found that the AttrakDiff instrument to be useful and convenient in evaluating the attractiveness of public art installations.

LivingSurface: Biofeedback through Shape-changing Display

In this paper we describe the concept, design and implementation of LivingSurface, an interactive wall-like surface as a shape-changing display of biofeedback. The surface changes its shape responding to an individuals physiological data, reflecting the internal bodily processes. The surface design basically consists of two layers: the pattern layer (front layer) and the actuating layer (back layer). The first is a complex paper-based structure with repetitive incisions created by laser cutting. The actuating layer serves as a medium transforming the force from servomotors, vibration motors or fans into an action on the pattern layer. The cutout patterns are stimulated to vibrate, swing, bulge, or rotate which is used to display physiological information in dynamic physical form. This work has been exhibited on Milan Design Week 2015; we collected and analyzed the feedback from the visitors during the exhibition and discuss the possibilities of the proposed surfaces as a shape-changing interface of biofeedback or an ambient display of information.

Can machine learning explain human learning

Learning Analytics (LA) has a major interest in exploring and understanding the learning process of humans and, for this purpose, benefits from both Cognitive Science, which studies how humans learn, and Machine Learning, which studies how algorithms learn from data. Usually, Machine Learning is exploited as a tool for analyzing data coming from experimental studies, but it has been recently applied to humans as if they were algorithms that learn from data. One example is the application of Rademacher Complexity, which measures the capacity of a learning machine, to human learning, which led to the formulation of Human Rademacher Complexity (HRC). In this line of research, we propose here a more powerful measure of complexity, the Human Algorithmic Stability (HAS), as a tool to better understand the learning process of humans. The experimental results from three different empirical studies, on more than 600 engineering students from the University of Genoa, showed that HAS (i) can be measured without the assumptions required by HRC, (ii) depends not only on the knowledge domain, as HRC, but also on the complexity of the problem, and (iii) can be exploited for better understanding of the human learning process.

Participatory Public Media Arts for Social Creativity

New technologies and materials bring new opportunities to the forms of public arts. In this paper we look back to the three generations of public art forms, from traditional ones with static forms to newer ones with dynamic and then, interactive forms. We look forward to the fourth generation - participatory media arts, for which the artists and designers do not create the public media arts as a final result, but create them as platforms and growing systems for the public to participate and for social creativity to contribute to the artifact - the creation process, together with the results of this process, forms the dynamic media artifact that grows over time. The fourth generation is illustrated with an example of public media art installation designed for the Science and Education New Town, Taicang, China.

PULP scription: a DSL for mobile HTML5 game applications

As applications and especially games are moving to the web and mobile environments, different tools are needed to design these applications and their behavior. HTML5 in combination with JavaScript is a promising basis for such applications on a wide range of platforms. Content producers and designers often lack the tools for such developments, or the expertise to operate existing, but too complex tools. This paper presents work in progress about a novel domain-specific language (DSL) PULP that aims at closing this gap. The language allows tying content such as images and media files together by modeling the dynamic behavior, movements, and control flow. The DSL helps abstracting from asynchronous JavaScript, state machines, and access to cross-platform media playback, which is generated in a final model-to-text transformation. The DSL and tooling were created and evaluated in close cooperation with content authors.

Improving Product Usage Monitoring and Analysis with Semantic Concepts

Nowadays, complex electronic products, such as DVD players or mobile phones, offer a huge number of functions. As a consequence of the complexity of the devices, customers often have problems to use such products effectively. For example, it has been observed that an increasing number of technically sound products is returned due to, e.g., interaction problems. One possible root cause of this problem is that most product development processes are still too technology-driven, i.e., potential users are brought into contact with the product only at a very late stage. If early consumer tests are carried out, then these typically aim at abstract market evaluations rather than formulating concrete requirements towards the functionality of the product. As a result, products often have little meaning or relevance to the customers. Therefore, we need better ways to involve users in the development of such products. This can be achieved by observing product usage in the field and incorporating the gained knowledge in the product creation process. This paper proposes an approach to build automatic observation modules into products, collect usage data, and analyze these data by means of process mining techniques exploiting a novel semantic link between observation and analysis. This link yields two main benefits: (i) it adds focus to the potential mass of captured data items; and (ii) it reduces the need for extensive post-processing of the collected data. Together with the framework’s flexibility to change observation modules remotely on-the-fly, these benefits speed up the information feedback cycle towards development.

Breathe with Touch: A Tactile Interface for Breathing Assistance System

Breathing techniques have been widely used as an aid in stress-reduction and relaxation exercises. Most breathing assistance systems present breathing guidance in visual or auditory forms. In this study, we explored a tactile interface of a breathing assistance system by using a shape-changing airbag. We hypothesized that it would help users perform the breathing exercise more effectively and enhance their relaxing experience. The feasibility of the tactile interface was evaluated from three aspects: stress reduction, breathing training and interface usability. The results showed that for most participants, the overall heart rate variability were improved after breathing training. Moreover, “Breathe with Touch” brought users better satisfaction during the exercise. We discuss these results and future design implications for designing tactile interfaces for breathing guidance.

A learning analytics approach to correlate the academic achievements of students with interaction data from an educational simulator

This paper presents a Learning Analytics approach for understanding the learning behavior of students while interacting with Technology Enhanced Learning tools. In this work we show that it is possible to gain insight into the learning processes of students from their interaction data. We base our study on data collected through six laboratory sessions where first-year students of Computer Engineering at the University of Genoa were using a digital electronics simulator. We exploit Process Mining methods to investigate and compare the learning processes of students. For this purpose, we measure the understandability of their process models through a complexity metric. Then we compare the various clusters of students based on their academic achievements. The results show that the measured complexity has positive correlation with the final grades of students and negative correlation with the difficulty of the laboratory sessions. Consequently, complexity of process models can be used as an indicator of variations of student learning paths.

Designing interactive public art installations : new material therefore new challenges

The new materials in public art installations give the birth to interactivity and participation, which in turn, introduces new challenges, not only in the creative design process, but also in how to involve the participants in this process and in evaluating the targeted experience such as such as social connectedness and inclusion. Six design cases are presented, as examples for interactive and participatory forms of these installations. The design techniques and the user experience evaluation methods overlap in these cases and many of these techniques and methods have been found to be useful in our practice.

Interactive storytelling in a mixed reality environment: the effects of interactivity on user experiences

Interactive storytelling in a mixed reality environment merges digital and physical information and features. It usually uses an augmentation of the real-world and physically-based interaction to create an immersive experience that corresponds to the dramatic storyline of the interactive narrative influenced by the actions of the user. Immersiveness is a crucial aspect of such an installation, and can be influenced by multiple factors such as video, sounds, interaction and, finally, the density of all combined stimuli. We used one of the stages from our interactive ALICE installation to investigate immersiveness and its contributing factors in a between-group design with a special focus on the effects of interactivity, and the feedback and feedforward stimuli of the environment on the users’ experiences. The study was carried out with 41 participants and the results showed that immersiveness not necessarily depends on the modality of stimuli, but instead on their time-density.