Scott Bateman

Seeing things in the clouds: the effect of visual features on tag cloud selections

Tag clouds are a popular method for visualizing and linking socially-organized information on websites. Tag clouds represent variables of interest (such as popularity) in the visual appearance of the keywords themselves - using text properties such as font size, weight, or colour. Although tag clouds are becoming common, there is still little information about which visual features of tags draw the attention of viewers. As tag clouds attempt to represent a wider range of variables with a wider range of visual properties, it becomes difficult to predict what will appear visually important to a viewer. To investigate this issue, we carried out an exploratory study that asked users to select tags from clouds that manipulated nine visual properties. Our results show that font size and font weight have stronger effects than intensity, number of characters, or tag area; but when several visual properties are manipulated at once, there is no one property that stands out above the others. This study adds to the understanding of how visual properties of text capture the attention of users, indicates general guidelines for designers of tag clouds, and provides a study paradigm and starting points for future studies. In addition, our findings may be applied more generally to the visual presentation of textual hyperlinks as a way to provide more information to web navigators.

Calibration games: making calibration tasks enjoyable by adding motivating game elements

Interactive systems often require calibration to ensure that input and output are optimally configured. Without calibration, user performance can degrade (e.g., if an input device is not adjusted for the users abilities), errors can increase (e.g., if color spaces are not matched), and some interactions may not be possible (e.g., use of an eye tracker). The value of calibration is often lost, however, because many calibration processes are tedious and unenjoyable, and many users avoid them altogether. To address this problem, we propose calibration games that gather calibration data in an engaging and entertaining manner. To facilitate the creation of calibration games, we present design guidelines that map common types of calibration to core tasks, and then to well-known game mechanics. To evaluate the approach, we developed three calibration games and compared them to standard procedures. Users found the game versions significantly more enjoyable than regular calibration procedures, without compromising the quality of the data. Calibration games are a novel way to motivate users to carry out calibrations, thereby improving the performance and accuracy of many human-computer systems.

Personal Visualization and Personal Visual Analytics

Data surrounds each and every one of us in our daily lives, ranging from exercise logs, to archives of our interactions with others on social media, to online resources pertaining to our hobbies. There is enormous potential for us to use these data to understand ourselves better and make positive changes in our lives. Visualization (Vis) and visual analytics (VA) offer substantial opportunities to help individuals gain insights about themselves, their communities and their interests; however, designing tools to support data analysis in non-professional life brings a unique set of research and design challenges. We investigate the requirements and research directions required to take full advantage of Vis and VA in a personal context. We develop a taxonomy of design dimensions to provide a coherent vocabulary for discussing personal visualization and personal visual analytics. By identifying and exploring clusters in the design space, we discuss challenges and share perspectives on future research. This work brings together research that was previously scattered across disciplines. Our goal is to call research attention to this space and engage researchers to explore the enabling techniques and technology that will support people to better understand data relevant to their personal lives, interests, and needs.

Target assistance for subtly balancing competitive play

In games where skills such as targeting are critical to winning, it is difficult for players with different skill levels to have a competitive and engaging experience. Although several mechanisms for accommodating different skill levels have been proposed, traditional approaches can be too obvious and can change the nature of the game. For games involving aiming, we propose the use of target assistance techniques (such as area cursors, target gravity, and sticky targets) to accommodate skill imbalances. We compared three techniques in a study, and found that area cursors and target gravity significantly reduced score differential in a shooting-gallery game. Further, less skilled players reported having more fun when the techniques helped them be more competitive, and even after they learned assistance was given, felt that this form of balancing was good for group gameplay. Our results show that target assistance techniques can make target-based games more competitive for shared play.

E-Learning meets the Social Semantic Web

The social semantic Web has recently emerged as a paradigm in which ontologies (aimed at defining, structuring and sharing information) and collaborative software (used for creating and sharing knowledge) have been merged together. Ontologies provide an effective means of capturing and integrating knowledge for feedback provisioning, while using collaborative activities can support pedagogical theories, such as social constructivism. Both technologies have developed separately in the e-learning domain; representing respectively a teacher-centered and a learner-centered approach for learning environments. In this paper we bridge the gap between these two approaches by leveraging the social semantic Web paradigm, and propose a collaborative semantic-rich learning environment in which folksonomies created from studentspsila collaborative tags contribute to ontology maintenance, and teacher-directed feedback.

The Social Semantic Web in Intelligent Learning Environments: state of the art and future challenges

Todays technology-enhanced learning practices cater to students and teachers who use many different learning tools and environments and are used to a paradigm of interaction derived from open, ubiquitous, and socially oriented services. In this context, a crucial issue for education systems in general, and for Intelligent Learning Environments (ILEs) in particular, is related to the ability of leveraging these new paradigms for creating, maintaining and sharing the knowledge that these systems embed. This will enable ILEs to benefit from shared information from disparate systems, which is related to learning content and student activities, so that the overall complexity of system development and maintenance would be reduced while at the same time improving the capability of personalization, context-awareness, and interaction. In this article, we investigate how the Social Semantic Web can be leveraged for enabling and easing this process. We first analyze each module of a typical ILE, showing how it can benefit from the Social Semantic Web paradigm and then proceed to investigate how this new paradigm can be leveraged for increasing interactivity level of ILEs.

Physio@Home: Exploring Visual Guidance and Feedback Techniques for Physiotherapy Exercises

Physiotherapy patients exercising at home alone are at risk of re-injury since they do not have corrective guidance from a therapist. To explore solutions to this problem, we designed Physio@Home, a prototype that guides people through prerecorded physiotherapy exercises using real-time visual guides and multi-camera views. Our design addresses several aspects of corrective guidance, including: plane and range of movement, joint positions and angles, and extent of movement. We evaluated our design, com-paring how closely people could follow exercise movements under various feedback conditions. Participants were most accurate when using our visual guide and multi-views. We provide suggestions for exercise guidance systems drawn from qualitative findings on visual feedback complexity.

Mechanics of Camera Work in Mobile Video Collaboration

Mobile video conferencing, where one or more participants are moving about in the real world, enables entirely new interaction scenarios (e.g., asking for help to construct or repair an object, or showing a physical location). While we have a good understanding of the challenges of video conferencing in office or home environments, we do not fully understand the mechanics of camera work-how people use mobile devices to communicate with one another-during mobile video calls. To provide an understanding of what people do in mobile video collaboration, we conducted an observational study where pairs of participants completed tasks using a mobile video conferencing system. Our analysis suggests that people use the camera view deliberately to support their interactions-for example, to convey a message or to ask questions-but the limited field of view, and the lack of camera control can make it a frustrating experience.

Analysis and comparison of target assistance techniques for relative ray-cast pointing

Pointing at displays from a distance is becoming a common method of interacting with computer applications and entertainment systems, using devices such as the Wii Remote, the PlayStation Move controller, or the Microsoft Kinect. These systems often implement relative forms of ray-cast pointing, in which the user simply points a hand-held input device towards targets on the screen. Ray-casting interaction is easy for novices to learn and understand, but this technique often suffers from accuracy problems: for example, hand jitter, arm fatigue, calibration drift, or lack of skill can all reduce peoples ability to acquire and select on-screen targets. In this paper, we analyse and evaluate the idea of target assistance as a way to address the accuracy problems of ray-cast pointing. Although several assistance schemes have been proposed for mouse-based pointing, these ideas have not been tested in distant-pointing settings, and there is little knowledge available to guide design in this increasingly common interaction scenario. To establish this basic design knowledge, we carried out four studies of relative ray-casting using three different target assistance techniques-two motor-space techniques (sticky targets and a novel form of target gravity), and one acquisition-feedback technique that combined visual, tactile, and auditory feedback. Our first three studies tested each assistance technique separately, to explore how different parameters for each method affected performance and perceptibility. Our fourth study carried out a direct comparison of the best versions of each technique, and also examined the effects of distractor objects placed in the path to the target. Our studies found that the two motor-space techniques were extremely effective in improving selection accuracy without being highly obvious to users, and that the new gravity-based technique (which attracts the cursor even when it is not over the target) performed best of all. There was no observed effect on performance when the combined acquisition-feedback technique was used. Our studies are the first to comprehensively explore the optimization, performance, and perceptibility of target assistance techniques for relative ray-casting-our results provide designers with clear guidelines about what methods to use, how to configure the techniques, and what effects can be expected from their use.

The effectiveness (or lack thereof) of aim-assist techniques in first-person shooter games

Aim-assistance techniques have been shown to work for player balancing in 2D environments, but little information exists about how well these techniques will work in a 3D FPS game. We carried out three studies of the performance of five different aim assists in an Unreal-based game world. The assists worked well in a target-range scenario (study 1), but their performance was reduced when game elements were introduced in a walkthrough map (study 2). We systematically examined the relationships between realistic game elements and assist performance (study 3). These studies show that two techniques -- bullet magnetism and area cursor -- worked well in a wide variety of situations. Other techniques that worked well were too perceptible, and some previously-successful techniques did not work well in any game-like scenario. Our studies are the first to provide empirical evidence of the performance of aim assist techniques in 3D environments, and the first to identify the complexities in using these techniques in real FPS games.