Stereoscopic photography was one of the main forms of visual communication in the second half of the 19th century, leaving even today an important impact on our visual culture. In this work, we have re-imagined the classical stereoscope in order to take advantage of smartphone-VR technological capabilities, while still maintaining a viewing experience close to the original. This pictorial describes the design process, functionality, and evaluation of the Spectare device for experiencing stereoscopic photographs. Spectare has been used for experiencing Cultural Heritage content related to the virtual reconstruction of the Monastery of Santa Cruz, Coimbra, Portugal, as it was in 1834.

In this work we present three prototypes of the tangible VR Book: a visual marker-based solution to tangible interaction for smartphone-based Virtual Reality (VR). Smartphone-based VR represents a low barrier to entry in VR experiences given that many people nowadays own a smartphone device and that VR headsets for these devices are affordable and quick to set up when compared to desktop-based VR. Tangible interaction in smartphone-based VR has not been much explored, in our opinion, despite the fact that it can result in easy to use and engaging experiences. In this work, we explore a marker-based solution to object tracking that allows tangibles to be created in an easy and cheap way, maintaining the overall system accessible. We describe a design space for visual marker-based tangible interaction and three prototypes of a tangible VR Book that explore different aspects of the design space. We also present user feedback on their expectations regarding the interaction with the VR Book.

In this paper we present a VR locomotion technique based on the Leap Motion device and compare it to other often-used locomotion techniques --- gaze-directed locomotion and gamepad-based locomotion. We performed a user experiment to evaluate the three techniques based on their performance (time to complete the task), comfort (through the ISO 9241--9 ssessment of comfort questionnaire), and simulation sickness (through the Simulation Sickness Questionnaire). Results indicate that the gamepad technique is both faster and more comfortable than either the Leap Motion-based or the gaze-directed techniques.

Public displays are becoming increasingly interactive but we still need better programming tools that take the burden of adding interaction features to display applications. In this paper, we present a toolkit for web-based, remote, direct manipulation interaction with public display applications. O

Interaction is repeatedly pointed out as a key enabling element towards more engaging and valuable public displays. Still, most digital public displays today do not support any interactive features. We argue that this is mainly due to the lack of efficient and clear abstractions that developers can use to incorporate interactivity into their applications. As a consequence, interaction represents a major overhead for developers, and users are faced with inconsistent interaction models across different displays. This paper describes the results of the evaluation of a widget toolkit for generalized interaction with public displays. Our toolkit was developed for web-based applications and it supports multiple interaction mechanisms, automatically generated graphical interfaces, asynchronous events and concurrent interaction. We have evaluated the toolkit along various dimensions - system performance, API usability, and real-world deployment - and we present and discuss the results in this paper.

Interaction is repeatedly pointed out as a key enabling element towards more engaging and valuable public displays. Still, most digital public displays today do not support any interactive features. We believe that this is mainly due to the lack of efficient and clear abstractions that developers can use to incorporate interactivity into their applications. In this demo we present PuReWidgets, a toolkit that developers can use in their public display applications to support the interaction process across multiple display systems, without considering the specifics of what interaction modality will be used on each particular display. PuReWidgets provides high-level widgets to application programmers, and allows users to interact via various interaction mechanisms, such as graphical user interfaces for mobile devices, QR codes, SMS, etc.

In this paper we present the interactive video installation titled "The Garden of Time": a tangible interface designed specifically to emphasize the conceptual nature of the project and to provide a different and entertaining filmic experience to its users.