Cross-reality is an emerging research area concerned with systems operating across different points on the reality-virtuality continuum. These systems are often complex, involving multiple realities and users, and thus there is a need for an overarching design framework, which, despite growing interest has yet to be developed. This paper addresses this need by presenting eleven design patterns for cross-reality applications across the following four categories: fundamental, origin, display, and interaction patterns. To develop these design patterns we analysed a sample of 60 papers, with the goal of identifying recurring solutions. These patterns were then described in form of intent, solution, and application examples, accompanied by a diagram and archetypal example. This paper provides designers with a comprehensive set of patterns that they can use and draw inspiration from when creating cross-reality systems.

The aim of this study is to develop an understanding of how virtual objects can be transitioned between 3D Augmented Reality and 2D standard monitor display spaces. The increased availability of Augmented Reality devices, in combination with the prevalence of conventional desktop setups with mouse and keyboard input, gives rise to future hybrid setups in which users may need to transition virtual objects between display spaces. We developed three virtual object transition techniques: Mouse-based, Hand-based, and a Modality Switch (where users can only use the input methods in their respective display spaces). The three techniques were evaluated in a user study (N=24) alongside a fourth condition in which participants could freely switch between Hand and Mouse-based techniques. Participants were tasked with transitioning virtual bricks from 3D space onto the screen, then using the mouse to make fine adjustments, such as choosing the colour of the brick and placing decorations, to then transition them back into 3D space to build with. The Modality Switch technique was not preferred due to higher mental demand. Participants preferred the mouse-based technique, which allowed them to transition the virtual bricks faster.

The metaverse is an immersive virtual realm that allows millions of users to interact with each other, both described by the social intricacies of the everyday and unrestrained by the physical limitations of reality. Yet despite the creative potential to disrupt how the built environment is represented, the metaverse tends to simulate the architectural conventions of physical reality. By visiting the virtual reality sites of 30 interiors, buildings, and plazas within popular metaverse platforms, we identified outliers in convention to curate a ‘Metaverse Design Catalogue’ of architectural features that were uncommon or unrealistic in physical reality. We thus challenged 21 architectural experts to use the catalogue as a catalyst to design an architecture that goes beyond convention to become ‘superarchitectural’. Based on their redesigned and reimagined floor plans and perspective drawings, we inform the design language of a superarchitectural metaverse through the dimensions of architectural diegesis, mutability, and asymmetry.

Cross-Reality Transitional Interfaces support tasks that require interactions at different levels of virtuality. However, there is little knowledge on how such capabilities can be scaled on vertical and life-sized surfaces, by offering haptic feedback, transitioning the surface between physical and virtual environments, and moving the surface at room-scale. The aim of our study is to generate an empirical understanding of which combinations of mixed reality and a user-controlled movable robotic surface (resulting in four virtuality levels) are better suited to execute five tasks, which differed in terms of haptic feedback. During our user study (N=24), physical environment-physical surface was used most due to its familiarity and haptic feedback, while the virtual environment mode was experienced as more relaxing and fun, and the virtual surface mode as more convenient and safer.

Thousands of people regularly meet, work and play in the architectural spaces that the metaverse offers today. Yet despite the creative potential to disrupt how the built environment is represented, there exists a prevalent belief that the architectural design of the metaverse is rather conventional and reliant on simulating physical reality. We investigated this claim by conducting a design critique study of the most apparent architectural design conventions within the current most popular metaverse platforms, as determined by a scoping review and Google Trends analysis. Based on the opinions of 21 architectural experts on the design of interiors, buildings, and plazas within these platforms, we elicited three overarching design conventions that capture the representation, engagement, and purpose of metaverse architecture. By discussing the impact of these conventions on architectural quality, we inform the future design of metaverse spaces to more purposefully, and perhaps less frequently, use realism to convey meaning.

In the domain of Human-Computer Interaction, focus groups represent a widely utilised yet resource-intensive methodology, often demanding the expertise of skilled moderators and meticulous preparatory efforts. This study introduces the “Focus Agent,” a Large Language Model (LLM) powered framework that simulates both the focus group (for data collection) and acts as a moderator in a focus group setting with human participants. To assess the data quality derived from the Focus Agent, we ran five focus group sessions with a total of 23 human participants as well as deploying the Focus Agent to simulate these discussions with AI participants. Quantitative analysis indicates that Focus Agent can generate opinions similar to those of human participants. Furthermore, the research exposes some improvements associated with LLMs acting as moderators in focus group discussions that include human participants.

The current state of Virtual Reality (VR) presents a limited and underwhelming user experience. Users are restricted from naturally walking beyond the physical boundaries of the real world, unable to fully explore large virtual environments. The virtual manifestation also often mirrors the physical features of the real world, neglecting the limitless possibilities of the virtual universe. In response to this limitation, this pictorial introduces Architectural Narrative VR, a generative environment that dynamically designs spaces on-the-fly. This approach enables users to roam freely within the constraints of their physical space, while the architectural proportions and rhythm of virtual spaces are designed to relate to external factors such as the sequential presentation of content and user behaviour. This work contributes to VR research by exploring new ways of generating virtual spaces that prioritise user-dependent rather than predefined manifestations of the architectural narrative, offering greater potential for immersive and multidimensional user experiences.

Locating out-of-view vehicles can help pedestrians to avoid critical traffic encounters. Some previous approaches focused solely on visualising out-of-view objects, neglecting their localisation and limitations. Other methods rely on continuous camera-based localisation, raising privacy concerns. Hence, we propose the ARcoustic system, which utilises a microphone array for nearby moving vehicle localisation and visualises nearby out-of-view vehicles to support pedestrians. First, we present the implementation of our sonic-based localisation and discuss the current technical limitations. Next, we present a user study (n = 18) in which we compared two state-of-the-art visualisation techniques (Radar3D, CompassbAR) to a baseline without any visualisation. Results show that both techniques present too much information, resulting in below-average user experience and longer response times. Therefore, we introduce a novel visualisation technique that aligns with the technical localisation limitations and meets pedestrians’ preferences for effective visualisation, as demonstrated in the second user study (n = 16). Lastly, we conduct a small field study (n = 8) testing our ARcoustic system under realistic conditions. Our work shows that out-of-view object visualisations must align with the underlying localisation technology and fit the concrete application scenario.

This work presents four possible designs for the handshake interaction in a Social VR-like virtual environment in which the user operates using hand-held controllers: a first design based on a graphics user interface (GUI), a second design leveraging a physical button on hand-held controllers, and two designs based on recreating the handshaking gesture by grabbing the other party’s hand and shaking it. The four designs were evaluated and compared through a user study which involved 24 participants, analyzing factors pertaining to embodiment, presence and social presence, usability, and handshake quality of experience. Results indicated that the gesture-based design was preferred, overall.

In this work, we describe our experience developing and evaluating the Cross-Reality Study Tool (CReST), which allows researchers to conduct and observe Virtual Reality (VR) user studies from an Augmented Reality perspective. So far, most research on conducting VR user studies has centred around tools for asynchronous setup, data collection and analysis, or (immersive) replays. Conversely, CReST is centred around supporting the researcher synchronously. We replicated three VR studies as example cases, applied CReST to them, and conducted an interview with one author of each case. We then performed a case study, and recruited 17 participants to take part in a user study where the researchers used CReST to observe participant interaction with virtual drawer and closet artefacts. We make CReST available for other researchers, as a tool to enable direct observation of participants in VR, and perform rapid, qualitative evaluations.

Shared Augmented Environments (AEs) introduce both opportunities and challenges in terms shared content and privacy. We present three abstraction techniques to balance privacy and context in collaborative Augmented Reality (AR) applications. We developed three abstraction techniques, polygon count reduction (PCR), blurring, and blurred PCR (BPCR). We conducted a study aimed to evaluate the effects of these techniques on object recognition in AR. Results indicate that altering shape and material significantly impacts the certainty and ability of object recognition, with variations observed across different object types. The implications of this research extend to the design and implementation of privacy-aware collaborative AR applications, emphasising the need to strike a balance between providing context and respecting user privacy.

In this paper we present Immersive Speculative Enactments (ISEs), a novel concept that extends conventional Speculative Enactments to Virtual Reality. Through ISEs, participants are immersed in a speculative world depicted by the designers and can engage with it in its truest envisioned form. We explore this concept via four scenarios with increasing technological uncertainty: a glimpse in the daily life of the parent of a newborn baby; a Mixed Reality experience supporting hybrid classrooms; two wearable devices that present a pet’s emotional state and needs; and an enactment on the effect of communication delay across interplanetary distances. We discuss the concept of ISEs and contrast them to other forms of speculation, provide guidelines on how to design them, as well as reflecting on the challenges, limitations, and potential associated with the role of ISEs in the HCI discourse.

Cross-Reality (CR) involves interaction between different modalities and levels of immersion such as Virtual and Augmented Reality, as we explore in this paper. Whereas previous work assumed similarity between their respective Virtual and Augmented Environment (VE and AE), we explore the case in which VE and AE are distinct. This gives rise to novel and critical problems, such as how to visualise and interact with the other environment. In this context we investigate the fundamental interaction of transitioning an object across environments, to which we contribute five interaction techniques. Two are inspired by literature: Virtual Magic Lens and Binary Transition; while the other three are entirely novel: Auto Blended Space, Manual Blended Space - Button Transition and Manual Blended Space - Touch Transition. In a study evaluating the first four techniques, we found that participants (N=20) performed a CR object manipulation and transition task significantly faster using our Auto Blended Space technique. We then modified Manual Blended Space - Button Transition into Manual Blended Space - Touch Transition in response to these results, and reassessed the four techniques in a more complex object manipulation task (N=16). We found that this type of task was better suited to manual transition methods rather than automatic methods. Taken together, our final contribution are five blended space design factors, and timely Cross-Reality transition design guidelines.

Overt redirection is a class of virtual reality locomotion that uses perceptible transformations to enable the user to naturally walk through a virtual environment larger than the physical tracking space. In this research, we propose Foldable Spaces, a novel redirection approach based on the idea of dynamically ‘folding’ the geometry of the virtual environment to reveal new locations depending on the trajectory of the virtual reality user. Based on this approach, we developed three distinct techniques for overt redirection: (1) Horizontal, which folds and reveals layers of virtual space like the pages in a book; (2) Vertical, which rotates virtual space towards the user along a vertical axis; and (3) Accordion, which corrugates and flattens virtual space to bring faraway places closer to the user. In a within-subjects user study, we compared our proposed foldable techniques against each other along with a similarly situated redirection technique, Stop & Reset. Our findings show that Accordion was the most well-received by participants in terms of providing a smooth, continuous, and ‘natural’ experience of walking that does not involve shifts in orientation and provides an overarching view through the virtual environment.

Supershapes are used in Parametric Design to model, literally, thou-sands of natural and man-made shapes with a single 6 parameter formula. However, users are left to probe such a rich yet dense collection of supershapes using a set of independent 1-D sliders. Some of the formula’s parameters are non-linear in nature, making them particularly difficult to grasp with conventional 1-D sliders alone. VR appears as a promising setting for Parametric Design with supershapes since it empowers users with more natural visual inspection and shape browsing techniques, with multiple solutions being displayed at once and the possibility to design more interesting forms of slider interaction. In this work, we propose VR shape widgets that allow users to probe and select supershapes from a multitude of solutions. Our designs take leverage on thumbnails, mini-maps, haptic feedback and spatial interaction, while supporting 1-D, 2-D and 3-D supershape parameter spaces. We conducted a user study (N = 18) and found that VR shape widgets are effective, more efficient, and natural than conventional VR 1-D sliders while also usable for users without prior knowledge on supershapes. We also found that the proposed VR widgets provide a quick overview of the main supershapes, and users can easily reach the desired solution without having to perform fine-grain handle manipulations.

When establishing a visual connection between a virtual reality user and an augmented reality user, it is important to consider whether the augmented reality user faces a surplus of information. Augmented reality, compared to virtual reality, involves two – not one – planes of information: the physical and the virtual. We propose SelectVisAR, a selective visualisation system of virtual environments in augmented reality. Our system enables an augmented reality spectator to perceive a co-located virtual reality user in the context of four distinct visualisation conditions: Interactive, Proximity, Everything, and Dollhouse. We explore an additional two conditions, Context and Spotlight, in a follow-up study. Our design uses a human-centric approach to information filtering, selectively visualising only parts of the virtual environment related to the interactive possibilities of a virtual reality user. The research investigates how selective visualisations can be helpful or trivial for the augmented reality user when observing a virtual reality user.

The vision of responsive architecture predicts that human experience can be evoked through the dynamic orchestration of space-defining elements. Whereas recent studies have robotically actuated furniture for functional goals, little is known how this capability can be deployed meaningfully on an architectural scale. We thus evaluated the spatial impact of a responsive wall on the inhabitants of ordinary apartments. To maintain safety during the COVID-19 pandemic, we developed a novel remote, semi-immersive cross-reality simulation evaluation methodology. Based on the orchestration of three space-defining operations, we define a theoretical framework that suggests how the position of a responsive wall can be determined through five distinct architectural qualities. This framework thus proposes how human-building interaction (HBI) could complement its functional goals with augmenting the well-being of occupants in the physical as well as the virtual realm.

We present two use cases of mobile displays in cross-reality interactions between users immersed in Virtual Reality (VR) and users present in the Physical Reality (PR) by using the mobile display to show select artefacts of interest. The first use case is the “Substitutional Display” where a display serves as a passive haptic for an artefact. Both VR and PR users can then move the artefact by physically moving the display. The second use case is a “Virtual Artefact Handover” which allows the VR user to pass artefacts onto the PR user’s display. We envision this handover as a natural interaction where the VR user moves the artefact onto a virtual proxy of the display the PR user is holding, after which the artefact is displayed for the PR user to see.

Previous works show that virtual reality itself can be used as a medium in which to stage an experimental evaluation. However, it is still unclear whether conventional usability evaluation methods can directly be applied to virtual reality evaluations and whether they will lead to similar insights when compared to equivalent real-world lab studies. Therefore, we conducted a user study with nine participants, comparing Heuristic Evaluation (HE) for the evaluations of a novel smart artefact. We asked participants to evaluate the physical prototype and their virtual counterparts in the real-world and the virtual environment, respectively. Results show the HE have similar performance when evaluating artefacts usability in VR and real-world in terms of identified usability problems. The VR implementation has an impact on the immersive VR evaluation result.

Virtual Reality (VR) holds the promise of providing engaging embodied experiences, but little is known about how people with disabilities engage with it. We explore challenges and opportunities of VR gaming for wheelchair users. First, we present findings from a survey that received 25 responses and gives insights into wheelchair users' motives to (non-) engage with VR and their experiences. Drawing from this survey, we derive design implications which we tested through implementation and qualitative evaluation of three full-body VR game prototypes with 18 participants. Our results show that VR gaming engages wheelchair users, though nuanced consideration is required for the design of embodied immersive experiences for minority bodies, and we illustrate how designers can create meaningful, positive experiences.

TV experiences are often social, be it at-a-distance (through text) or in-person (through speech). Mixed Reality (MR) headsets offer new opportunities to enhance social communication during TV viewing by placing social artifacts (e.g. text) anywhere the viewer wishes, rather than being constrained to a smartphone or TV display. In this paper, we use VR as a test-bed to evaluate different text locations for MR TV specifically. We introduce the concepts of wall messages, below-screen messages, and egocentric messages in addition to state-of-the-art on-screen messages (i.e., subtitles) and controller messages (i.e., reading text messages on the mobile device) to convey messages to users during TV viewing experiences. Our results suggest that a) future MR systems that aim to improve viewers’ experience need to consider the integration of a communication channel that does not interfere with viewers’ primary task, that is watching TV, and b) independent of the location of text messages, users prefer to be in full control of them, especially when reading and responding to them. Our findings pave the way for further investigations towards social at-a-distance communication in Mixed Reality.

Manipulating the appearance of a Virtual Environment to enable natural walking has so far focused on modifications that are intended to be unnoticed by users. In our research, we took a radically different approach by embracing the overt nature of the change. To explore this method, we designed the Space Bender, a natural walking technique for room-scale VR. It builds on the idea of overtly manipulating the Virtual Environment by "bending" the geometry whenever the user comes in proximity of a physical boundary. Our aim was to evaluate the feasibility of this approach in terms of performance and subjective feedback. We compared the Space Bender to two other similarly situated techniques: Stop and Reset and Teleportation, in a task requiring participants to traverse a 100 m path. Results show that the Space Bender was significantly faster than Stop and Reset, and preferred to the Teleportation technique, highlighting the potential of overt manipulation to facilitate natural walking.

Current Virtual Reality systems only allow users to draw a rectangular perimeter to mark the room-scale area they intend to use. Domestic environments can include furniture and other obstacles that hinder the ease with which users can naturally walk. By leveraging the benefits of passive haptics, users can match physical objects with virtual counterparts, to create substitutional environments. In this paper we explore two visualisation modalities to aid in the creation of a coarse virtual representation of the physical environment, by marking out the volumes of space where physical obstacles are located, to support the substitution process. Our study investigates whether this process is better supported by an inside-looking-out 3D User Interface (that is, viewing the outside world while immersed in Virtual Reality) or from an outside-looking-in one (while viewing the Virtual Environment through an external device, such as a tablet). Results show that the immersive option resulted in better accuracy and was the one with the highest overall preference ratings.

In contrast to conventional retail stores, online shopping comes with many advantages, like unrestricted opening hours and is more focused on functionality. However, these pros often come at a cost of complex search and limited product visualization. Virtual Reality (VR) has the potential to create novel shopping experiences that combine the advantages of e-commerce sites and conventional stores. In this work, we propose a VR shop concept where product placement is not organized in shelves but through spatial placement in appropriate locations in an apartment environment. We thus investigated how the spatial arrangement of products in a non-retail environment affects the user, and how the actual shopping task can be supported in VR. In order to answer these questions, we designed two product selection and manipulation techniques (grabbing and pointing) and two VR shopping cart concepts (a realistic basket and an abstract one) and evaluated them in a user study. The results indicate that product interaction using pointing in combination with the abstract cart concept performs best with regard to error rate, user experience and workload. Overall, the proposed apartment metaphor provides excellent customer satisfaction, as well as a particularly high level of immersion and user experience, and it opens up new possibilities for VR shopping experiences that go far beyond mimicking real shop environments in VR.

This poster introduces the development of a recommender system to guide users in adapting a virtual environment into matching objects in the physical world. Emphasis is placed on avoiding cognitive overload resulting from providing options for substitution without considering the number of physical objects present. This is the first step towards a comprehensive recommender system for user-driven adaptation of Virtual Environments through immersive Virtual Reality systems.

In immersive Virtual Reality systems, users tend to move in a Virtual Environment as they would in an analogous physical environment. In this work, we investigated how user behaviour is affected when the Virtual Environment differs from the physical space. We created two sets of four environments each, plus a virtual replica of the physical environment as a baseline. The first focused on aesthetic discrepancies, such as a water surface in place of solid ground. The second focused on mixing immaterial objects together with those paired to tangible objects. For example, barring an area with walls or obstacles. We designed a study where participants had to reach three waypoints laid out in such a way to prompt a decision on which path to follow based on the conflict between the mismatching visual stimuli and their awareness of the real layout of the room. We analysed their performances to determine whether their trajectories were altered significantly from the shortest route. Our results indicate that participants altered their trajectories in presence of surfaces representing higher walking difficulty (for example, water instead of grass). However, when the graphical appearance was found to be ambiguous, there was no significant trajectory alteration. The environments mixing immaterial with physical objects had the most impact on trajectories with a mean deviation from the shortest route of 60 cm against the 37 cm of environments with aesthetic alterations. The co-existance of paired and unpaired virtual objects was reported to support the idea that all objects participants saw were backed by physical props. From these results and our observations, we derive guidelines on how to alter user movement behaviour in Virtual Environments.

The benefits of two-point interaction for tasks that require users to simultaneously manipulate multiple entities or dimensions are widely known. Two-point interaction has become common, e.g., when zooming or pinching using two fingers on a smartphone. We propose a novel interaction technique that implements three-point interaction by augmenting two-finger direct touch with gaze as a third input channel. We evaluate two key characteristics of our technique in two multi-participant user studies. In the first, we used the technique for object selection. In the second, we evaluate it in a 3D matching task that requires simultaneous continuous input from fingers and the eyes. Our results show that in both cases participants learned to interact with three input channels without cognitive or mental overload. Participants' performance tended towards fast selection times in the first study and exhibited parallel interaction in the second. These results are promising and show that there is scope for additional input channels beyond two-point interaction.

Experiencing Virtual Reality in domestic and other uncontrolled settings is challenging due to the presence of physical objects and furniture that are not usually defined in the Virtual Environment. To address this challenge, we explore the concept of Substitutional Reality in the context of Virtual Reality: a class of Virtual Environments where every physical object surrounding a user is paired, with some degree of discrepancy, to a virtual counterpart. We present a model of potential substitutions and validate it in two user studies. In the first study we investigated factors that affect participants' suspension of disbelief and ease of use. We systematically altered the virtual representation of a physical object and recorded responses from 20 participants. The second study investigated users' levels of engagement as the physical proxy for a virtual object varied. From the results, we derive a set of guidelines for the design of future Substitutional Reality experiences.

Many interactions naturally extend across smart-phones and devices with larger screens. Indeed, data might be received on the mobile but more conveniently processed with an application on a larger device, or vice versa. Such interactions require spontaneous data transfer from a source location on one screen to a target location on the other device. We introduce a cross-device Drag-and-Drop technique to facilitate these interactions involving multiple touchscreen devices, with minimal effort for the user. The technique is a two-handed gesture, where one hand is used to suitably align the mobile phone with the larger screen, while the other is used to select and drag an object between devices and choose which application should receive the data.

We present the technical framework supporting a cross-device Drag-and-Drop technique designed to facilitate interactions involving multiple touchscreen devices. This technique supports users that need to transfer information received or produced on one device to another device which might be more suited to process it. Furthermore, it does not require any additional instrumentation. The technique is a two-handed gesture where one hand is used to suitably align the mobile phone with the larger screen, while the other is used to select and drag an object from one device to the other where it can be applied directly onto a target application. We describe the implementation of the framework that enables spontaneous data-transfer between a mobile device and a desktop computer.

Informing caregivers by providing them with contextual medical information can significantly improve the quality of patient care activities. However, information flow in hospitals is still tied to traditional manual or digitised lengthy patient record files that are often not accessible while caregivers are attending to patients. Leveraging the proliferation of pervasive awareness technologies (sensors, actuators and mobile displays), recent studies have explored this information presentation aspect borrowing theories from context-aware computing, i.e., presenting subtle information contextually to support the activity at hand. However, the understanding of the information space (i.e., what information should be presented) is still fairly abstruse, which inhibits the deployment of such real-time activity support systems. To this end, this paper first presents situated glyphs, a graphical entity to encode situation specific information, and then presents our findings from an in-situ qualitative study addressing the information space tailored to such glyphs. Applying technology probes using situated glyphs and different glyph display form factors, the study aimed at uncovering the information space pertained to both primary and secondary medical care. Our analysis has resulted in a large set of information types as well as given us deeper insight on the principles for designing future situated glyphs. We report our findings in this paper that we expect would provide a solid foundation for designing future assistive systems to support patient care activities.

The increasing adoption of video surveillance makes it possible to watch over sensitive areas and identify people responsible for damage, theft and violence. However, when such events are not detected immediately, the subsequent video analysis can be a long and tedious task. The aim of this paper is to present a technique that allows a human investigator to focus only on those parts of a video showing the event as it unfolds, and so helping to save on the time needed to identify and understand how it happened. The presented technique creates a single interactive image of the whole video that shows everything that happened m the scene. The human investigator can then select an area of interest and those parts of the video related to that specific area will start to play.

Cultural heritage assets keep alive the history of a territory and of its inhabitants. Several systems have been developed to support people during their visits to historical sites and museums, with the goal of improving the overall user experience. In many cases, people travelling together would appreciate the possibility of collaborating in gathering information and planning a personalized itinerary. Large sharable multitouch screens may offer this possibility. This paper is about ongoing research that is investigating possible applications of large multitouch screens in cultural heritage and tourism. In particular, an application is described, which aims at allowing tourists to get information about a territory and create itineraries for their visits by interacting together on a large screen.

Time series analysis is a process whose goal is to understand phenomena. The analysis often involves the search for a specific pattern. Finding patterns is one of the fundamental steps for time series observation or forecasting. The way in which users are able to specify a pattern to use for querying the time series database is still a challenge. We hereby propose an enhancement of the SearchBox, a widget used in TimeSearcher, a well known tool developed at the University of Maryland that allows users to find patterns similar to the one of interest.

Time-series forecasting has a large number of applications. Users with a partial time series for auctions, new stock offerings, or industrial processes desire estimates of the future behavior. We present a data driven forecasting method and interface called similarity-based forecasting (SBF). A pattern matching search in an historical time series dataset produces a subset of curves similar to the partial time series. The forecast is displayed graphically as a river plot showing statistical information about the SBF subset. A forecasting preview interface allows users to interactively explore alternative pattern matching parameters and see multiple forecasts simultaneously. User testing with 8 users demonstrated advantages and led to improvements.