Toys are play products designed for leisure and social play activities. Today, play products increasingly incorporate hardware and software computation, often connecting to online services and other ...computing devices, thus being commonly referred to as “smart toys.” Accordingly, such products can also be categorized as user interfaces as they allow human interaction with digital contents using the physical toys’ inputs and outputs. Here we propose the idea of Toy-User-Interfaces (ToyUI) and relate them to the domains of human-computer interaction, mixed reality, and the Internet of Things. We surveyed and categorized a multitude of ToyUIs, gathering information from research papers and toy companies by performing both a systematic mapping (covering research from 2008 to 2017) and an industrial mapping (covering releases from 2012 to 2017). The resulting 297 items were then analyzed according to our classification model, being divided into four categories, eight genres, and 22 setups, considering the play features and the interface features of such items. The classification model and the analysis of the results allowed us to identify six trends in design and technology for ToyUI. Ultimately, our research findings may guide the future of ToyUI projects for researchers, designers, educators, therapists, and end-users.
Can experimenting with three-dimensional (3D) physical objects in mixed-reality environments produce better learning and enjoyment than flat-screen two-dimensional (2D) interaction? We explored this ...question with EarthShake: a mixed-reality game bridging physical and virtual worlds via depth-camera sensing, designed to help children learn basic physics principles. In this paper, we report on a controlled experiment with 67 children, 4--8 years old, that examines the effect of observing physical phenomena and collaboration (pairs vs. solo). A follow-up experiment with 92 children tests whether adding simple physical control, such as shaking a tablet, improves learning and enjoyment. Our results indicate that observing physical phenomena in the context of a mixed-reality game leads to significantly more learning and enjoyment compared to screen-only versions. However, there were no significant effects of adding simple physical control or having students play in pairs vs. alone. These results and our gesture analysis provide evidence that children's science learning can be enhanced through experiencing physical phenomena in a mixed-reality environment.
We discuss and present design probes investigating how pervasive displays could offer unique opportunities for enhancing discovery and learning with “big data.” Our collaboration across three ...universities undertook a series of design exercises investigating approaches for collaborative, interactive, tangibles, and multitouch-engaged visualizations of genomic and related scientific datasets. These exercises led to several envisionments of tangible interfaces that employ active tokens and interactive surfaces to facilitate co-located and distributed engagement with large datasets. We describe some of the motivation and background for these envisioned interfaces; consider key aspects linking and distinguishing the designs; and relate these to the present and near-future state of the art for tangible and multitouch engagement with pervasive displays toward collaborative science.
In this article, we investigate the effectiveness of a purposely built Digital Tabletop Musical Instruments (DTMI) in helping novices and casual users to explore music composition. Our participants ...explored how melodic similarity and contrast can convey narrative through musical structure
in sessions involving one participant and one tutor to guide the session. We structured the sessions as a combination of open-ended discussions and increasingly open-ended music-making exercises, culminating in the main task: Invent a short story and compose a melody to describe it. We found
that the combination of a structured tutor-led activity and an approachable technology allowed our participants to explore the relationship between their ideas of similarity and contrast, the ways these concepts are manifested in melody, and the ways they can help describe a narrative. The
hands-on activities provided adequate scaffolding for discussing the concepts and contextualizing them within music. Lastly, by not requiring any formal musical or instrumental training, the DTMI allowed the participants to make music while discussing similarity and contrast in a comfortable
and continuous way.
Long-term stress is associated with a decline in global health, affecting social, intellectual, and economic development alike. Although comprehensive action plans have been implemented to provide ...people access to mental health services and promote mental well-being, employees' mental health generally takes second place to productivity and profit in business settings. This review paper offers an overview of the current interactive approaches used for relieving work-related stress associated with mental health. Results from the 38 included studies show that affective computing is used mainly for monitoring purposes and is usually combined with tangible interfaces that collect workers' physiological changes. Although the ability to sense and predict employees' affective states can potentially improve mental health in the workplace, there is a substantial disparity between monitoring one's health and the delivery of practical interventions to mitigate stress found in the surveyed studies. Designing systems that capitalize on embodied interaction principles is paramount, especially in the post-pandemic context, as the concepts of physical and mental safety take on new meanings that must be consciously and carefully addressed, particularly in workplace settings. Finally, this paper highlights the main design implications for the effective implementation of interfaces to help mitigate stress in the workplace.
Authoring 360 multisensory videos is a true challenge as the authoring tools available are scarce and restrictive. In this paper, we propose an authoring tool with three different authoring ...interfaces (desktop, immersive, and tangible interface) for creating multisensory 360 videos with the advantage of having a live preview of the multisensory content that is being produced. An evaluation of the three authoring tools having into account gender, system usability, presence, satisfaction, and effectiveness (time to accomplish tasks, number of errors, and number of help requests) is presented. The sample consisted of 48 participants (24 males and 24 females) evenly distributed between the different interfaces (8 males and 8 females for each interface).
The results revealed that gender does not have any impact in the studied interfaces regarding all the dependent variables; immersive and tangible interfaces have higher levels of satisfaction than desktop interface as it allows more interaction freedom, and desktop interface have the lowest time to accomplish the tasks because people are more familiar with keyboard and mouse.
We identify and present a major interaction approach for tangible user interfaces based upon systems of tokens and constraints. In these interfaces, tokens are discrete physical objects which ...represent digital information. Constraints are confining regions that are mapped to digital operations. These are frequently embodied as structures that mechanically channel how tokens can be manipulated, often limiting their movement to a single degree of freedom. Placing and manipulating tokens within systems of constraints can be used to invoke and control a variety of computational interpretations.We discuss the properties of the token+constraint approach; consider strengths that distinguish them from other interface approaches; and illustrate the concept with eleven past and recent supporting systems. We present some of the conceptual background supporting these interfaces, and consider them in terms of Bellotti et al.'s 2002 five questions for sensing-based interaction. We believe this discussion supports token+constraint systems as a powerful and promising approach for sensing-based interaction.
The use of tangible interfaces in teaching has been proved more effective, user -friendly and helpful in collaborative learning departments, when compared to traditional teaching approaches. In ...particular, the tangible interface “Makey Makey” is a modern tool that enhances collaboration between pupils, with positive results in education, despite the limited research done on this interface so far. “Makey Makey” succeeds in motivating and engaging young learners in the learning process, showing better performance and scoring results. In addition, its use in teaching has been shown to benefit the learning process in every age learning group.The development and use of such an innovative teaching/learning approach helps young learners perceive the educational process in a different way and assimilate new cognitive fields more effectively. Moreover, educators profit as well, as they can eliminate difficulties and teach more efficiently using examples based on their teaching approach, while enhancing young learners’ parallel skills as well. This study will confirm previous research results stating that assimilation of new concepts is easier with tangible interfaces than with graphical ones, as well as that young learners participating in the survey have shown significant progress in knowledge acquisition when compared to their prior knowledge.
This is an open access book that covers the complete set of experiences and results of the FemTech.dk research which we have had conducted between 2016-2021 – from initiate idea to societal ...communication. Diversity in Computer Science: Design Artefacts for Equity and Inclusion presents and documents the principles, results, and learnings behind the research initiative FemTech.dk, which was created in 2016 and continues today as an important part of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Copenhagen’s strategic development for years to come. FemTech.dk was created in 2016 to engage with research within gender and diversity and to explore the role of gender equity as part of digital technology design and development. FemTech.dk considers how and why computer science as a field and profession in Denmark has such a distinct unbalanced gender representation in the 21st century. This book is also the story of how we (the authors) as computer science researchers embarked on a journey to engage with a new research field – equity and gender in computing – about which we had only sporadic knowledge when we began. We refer here to equity and gender in computing as a research field – but in reality, this research field is a multiplicity of entangled paths, concepts, and directions that forms important and critical insights about society, gender, politics, and infrastructures which are published in different venues and often have very different sets of criteria, values, and assumptions. Thus, part of our journey is also to learn and engage with all these different streams of research, concepts, and theoretical approaches and, through these engagements, to identify and develop our own theoretical platform, which has a foundation in our research backgrounds in Human–Computer Interaction broadly – and Interaction Design & Computer Supported Cooperative Work specifically.
This paper discusses the design of a digital Chinese character composition game with the paper-interface named as ARC (Augmented Reality-based Chinese Characters) and its implementation in a ...Singapore primary school. The ARC game is designed to help beginning Chinese as second language (L2) learners to develop Chinese orthographic knowledge and improve quality of collaboration. Underlying sociocultural perspectives of learning, it seeks to enable learners to complete the game collaboratively in classrooms, and in this process to build a deep understanding of linguistic knowledge in solving in-situ language-related problems that emerge in language use. The results of a quasi-experiment indicate that ARC is an effective system for improving Chinese character learning performance and collaborative learning quality. It suggests that the augmented paper, enabling natural interactions, allow more and potentially young students to engage with educational content and collaboration. The problematizing scaffold should be embedded in the game design to elicit more opportunities for collaborative dialogue.
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