Ville Mäkelä

Information wall: evaluation of a gesture-controlled public display

Public displays that allow users to interact with them through mid-air gestures are still relatively rare, as many applications rely on touch-based interaction. This paper introduces Information Wall, a gesture-controlled public information display that provides multi-user access to contextually relevant local information using remote pointing and mid-air gestures. The application has been studied in two settings: a lab-based user study and several short-term deployments. Based on our results, we present practical guidelines for gesture-controlled public display design.

Guidelines for Designing Interactive Omnidirectional Video Applications

Interactive omnidirectional videos (iODV) can offer informative, entertaining, and immersive experiences, especially when combined with novel platforms such as head-mounted displays. However, omnidirectional videos, and interaction with them, present many unique challenges. In the absence of existing guidelines that accommodate for these challenges, we present dos and don’ts for designing and producing interactive omnidirectional videos. We base these guidelines on numerous interactive systems that we have produced in the recent years. Our work offers useful guidance for those working with omnidirectional videos, especially when designing interactivity and navigation within such systems.

Challenges in Public Display Deployments: A Taxonomy of External Factors

Public display deployments are often subjected to various surprising and unwanted effects. These effects are frequently due to external factors properties and phenomena that are unrelated to the deployment. Therefore, we conducted a literature review within the public display domain to investigate the causes behind the reported issues. This work presents a taxonomy of external factors affecting deployments, consisting of six categories: weather, events, surroundings, space, inhabitants, and vandalism. Apart from a few positive examples, we predominantly found negative effects arising from these factors. We then identified four ways of addressing the effects: ignoring, adapting, solving, and embracing. Of these, ignoring and adapting are substantially more frequent responses than solving and embracing emphasizing the need for researchers to adapt. We present real-world examples and insights on how researchers and practitioners can address the effects to better manage their deployments.

Investigating mid-air gestures and handhelds in motion tracked environments

Smart spaces with multiple interactive devices and motion tracking capabilities are becoming more common. However, there is little research on how interaction with one device affects the usage of other devices in the space. We investigate the effects of mobile devices and physical interactive devices on gestural interaction in motion-tracked environments. For our user study, we built a smart space consisting of a gesture-controlled large display, an NFC reader and a mobile device, to simulate a system in which users can transfer information between the space and personal devices. The study with 13 participants revealed that (1) the mobile device affects gesturing as well as passive stance; (2) users may stop moving completely when they intend to stop interacting with a display; (3) interactive devices with overlapping interaction space make unintentional interaction significantly more frequent. Our findings give implications for gestural interaction design as well as design of motion-tracked smart spaces.

Pocket Transfers: Interaction Techniques for Transferring Content from Situated Displays to Mobile Devices

We present Pocket Transfers: interaction techniques that allow users to transfer content from situated displays to a personal mobile device while keeping the device in a pocket or bag. Existing content transfer solutions require direct manipulation of the mobile device, making inter-action slower and less flexible. Our introduced tech-niques employ touch, mid-air gestures, gaze, and a mul-timodal combination of gaze and mid-air gestures. We evaluated the techniques in a novel user study (N=20), where we considered dynamic scenarios where the user approaches the display, completes the task, and leaves. We show that all pocket transfer techniques are fast and seen as highly convenient. Mid-air gestures are the most efficient touchless method for transferring a single item, while the multimodal method is the fastest touchless method when multiple items are transferred. We provide guidelines to help researchers and practitioners choose the most suitable content transfer techniques for their systems.

User Experience and Immersion of Interactive Omnidirectional Videos in CAVE Systems and Head-Mounted Displays

Omnidirectional video (ODV) is a medium that offers the viewer a 360-degree panoramic video view of the recorded setting. In recent years, various novel platforms for presenting such content have emerged. Many of these applications aim to offer an immersive and interactive experience for the user, but there has been little research on how immersive these solutions actually are. For this study, two interactive ODV (iODV) applications were evaluated: a CAVE system and a head-mounted display (HMD) application. We compared the users’ expectations and experience and the level of immersion between these systems. Both indoor and outdoor recorded environments were included. First, the results indicate that the user’s experiences with these applications exceed their expectations greatly. Second, the HMD application was found to be more immersive than the CAVE system. Based on the findings of this study, both systems seem to have a great potential for presenting ODV content, thus offering the user an immersive experience for both indoor and outdoor content.

It's Natural to Grab and Pull: Retrieving Content from Large Displays Using Mid-Air Gestures

Mid-air gestures have been largely overlooked for transferring content between large displays and personal mobile devices. To fully utilize the ubiquitous nature of mid-air gestures for this purpose, the authors developed SimSense, a smart space system that automatically pairs users with their mobile devices based on location data. Users can then interact with a gesture-controlled large display and move content onto their handheld devices. In a user study, the authors investigated two mid-air gestures for content transfer: grab-and-pull and grab-and-drop. Their results show that mid-air gestures are well suited for content-retrieval scenarios and offer an impressive user experience; grab-and-pull is the preferred for scenarios when content is transferred to the user, whereas grab-and-drop is presumably ideal when the recipient is another person or a device; and distinct gestures can be successfully combined with common point-and-dwell mechanics prominent in many gesture-controlled applications.

Creating Tutorials with Web-Based Authoring and Heads-Up Capture

Tutorials are one of the most fundamental means of conveying knowledge. Ideally, tutorials not only describe each step via text or audio narration but show it as well using photos or animation. In most cases, tutorial authors capture media from handheld mobile devices to import into these documents, but increasingly they use wearable devices as well. Here, the authors explore the use of head-mounted capture for authoring tutorials. They have developed a media capture tool for Google Glass that requires minimal attention to the capture device and instead allows the author to focus on creating the tutorial content. They describe a study comparing standalone (camera-on-tripod) versus wearable (Google Glass) capture, showing that tutorial authors prefer wearable capture devices, especially when recording activities involving larger objects in nontabletop environments. This article is part of a special issue on digitally enhanced reality.

Bladder Cancer Survival of Men Receiving 5α-Reductase Inhibitors

Purpose: Androgens may have a role in bladder carcinogenesis. We studied whether 5&agr;‐reductase inhibitors were associated with bladder cancer specific mortality in a population based cohort of men with bladder cancer. Materials and Methods: The study cohort consisted of 10,720 Finnish men with bladder cancer newly diagnosed in 1997 to 2012 who were identified in a national cancer registry. Median followup was 4.17 years after bladder cancer diagnosis. We analyzed the HR and 95% CI of the risk of bladder cancer death by 5&agr;‐reductase inhibitor administration using Cox regression adjusted for age, gender, comorbidities, primary bladder cancer treatment and tumor extent at diagnosis. Lag time analyses were performed to assess the long‐term risk association. Simultaneous administration &agr;‐blockers was considered to estimate possible confounding by indication. Results: Administering 5&agr;‐reductase inhibitors before bladder cancer diagnosis was associated with a lower risk of bladder cancer death (HR 0.84, 95% CI 0.73–0.97). The risk decrease became stronger with years of use. Conversely prediagnostic administration of &agr;‐blockers was not associated with bladder cancer survival (HR 1.02, 95% CI 0.91–1.13). Similarly 5&agr;‐reductase inhibitor administration after diagnosis was associated with a decreased risk of bladder cancer death (HR 0.77, 95% CI 0.68–0.88). Bladder cancer survival was not associated with &agr;‐blockers (HR 0.98, 95% CI 0.90–1.07). The risk decrease due to 5&agr;‐reductase inhibitors persisted up to 5 years. Conclusions: Patients who receive 5&agr;‐reductase inhibitors have improved disease specific survival after bladder cancer diagnosis compared to those who do not receive them while &agr;‐blockers were not associated with survival. This supports the benefits of 5&agr;‐reductase inhibitors in bladder cancer.

Bringing mobile into meetings: enhancing distributed meeting participation on smartwatches and mobile phones

Most teleconferencing tools treat users in distributed meetings monolithically: all participants are meant to be interconnected in more-or-less the same manner. In practice, people connect to meetings in different contexts, sometimes sitting in front of a laptop or tablet giving their full attention, but at other times mobile and concurrently involved in other tasks or as a liminal participant in a larger group meeting. In this paper, we present the design and evaluation of two applications, MixMeetWear and MixMeetMate, to help users in non-standard contexts flexibly participate in meetings.