Abstract As global COVID-19 pandemic response has moved from full lockdowns and partial lockdowns in most parts of the world to a post-COVID era, an interesting new phenomenon that has emerged is the increased prevalence of hybrid meetings with a mixture of online and in-person attendees. The opportunity for remote participants to observe the responses and interactions of others in the meeting is generally accepted as being limited. An experimental prototype system, called Wedge Video, has been constructed as an attempt to improve the experience of remote participants in hybrid in-person/remote meetings. Wedge Video uses standard screen and camera equipment with existing video conferencing software (Zoom). An evaluation of the prototype system was conducted based on three simple games that each required players to interact rapidly and with some use of body language or gaze direction. Encouraging results led to the examination of the geometry of screen and camera placement in detail. A system that has a somewhat ‘virtual reality’ feeling to it has now been developed. The remote user is given a view of the in-person part of the meeting with participants at the same scale and location as they would be if the remote user were at the table themselves. Similarly, the local participants see the remote person in place at their table, at a realistic scale and with close to accurate gaze direction. A very preliminary evaluation of these concepts has been promising.

Personal collections, be they books, music, or artefacts have significance to the owner, and provide conversation and engagement with visitors. For example visitors of physical libraries may browse the spines, select a book, and begin a conversation. When the collection is digital it cannot be engaged with in the same manner and it becomes more difficult to share and explore with others. Physical data visualisation is becoming more popular, supported by new technologies, such as 3D printing, and the resurgence of crafting. This paper reports our investigation of digital library and eBook metadata visualisation using knitting. We report on our design considerations, a digital prototype to explore knitted library shawls, and a knitted prototype for a personal digital library.

Whilst the primary purpose of conferences is work --- formal exchange and sharing of information --- they almost always also include elements of play: informal social and entertainment elements, such as receptions, dinners, and tourism activities. These activities also provide the opportunity for 'serious' discussions, meeting people, and networking, and are an essential part of a good conference. Despite this, most virtual conferencing tools fail to provide support for such activities, instead focusing on austere goals related to saving money, time, and travel. This paper describes the concept of a Virtual Cocktail Party (VCP) tool to integrate into a virtual conference environment. In VCP the 'party' is presented as a mixture of individuals and small conversation groups 'circulating' at the virtual venue. Exploiting an automated speech-to-text system, words from conversations are shown in word-clouds displayed around conversation groups, sufficient to identify topics of conversation allowing participants to decide whether or not to join a group.

As a result of the large scale and diverse composition of modern compiled JavaScript applications, comprehending overall program structure for debugging is challenging. In this paper we present our solution: MetropolJS. By using a Treemap-based visualization it is possible to get a high level view within limited screen real estate. Previous approaches to Treemaps lacked the fine detail and interactive features to be useful as a debugging tool. This paper introduces an optimized approach for visualizing complex program structure that enables new debugging techniques where the execution of programs can be displayed in real time from a bird's-eye view. The approach facilitates highlighting and visualizing method calls and distinctive code patterns on top of code segments without a high overhead for navigation. Using this approach enables fast analysis of previously difficult-to-comprehend code bases.

Creating complex 3D models is a challenging process. One of the main reasons for this is that 3D models are usually created using software developed for conventional 2D displays which lack true depth perspective, and therefore do not support correct perception of spatial placement and depth-ordering of displayed content. As a result, modellers often have to deal with many overlapping components of 3D models (e.g. vertices, edges, faces, etc.) on a 2D display surface. This in turn causes them to have difficulties in distinguishing distances, maintaining position and orientation awareness, etc. To better understand the nature of these problems, which can collectively be defined as ‘focus and context awareness’ problems, we have conducted a pilot study with a group of novice 3D modellers, and a series of interviews with a group of professional 3D modellers. This article presents these two studies, and their findings, which have resulted in identifying a set of focus and context awareness problems that modellers face in creating 3D models using conventional modelling software. The article also provides a review of potential solutions to these problems in the related literature.

Community-based healthcare strategies are becoming increasingly important in developing sustainable practices for prevention of neglected and emerging diseases in remote regions. In this paper, we discuss the use of "serious games" as one of the strategies for improving local populations' knowledge of the causes, preventive measures, and treatment options for neglected tropical diseases. We illustrate the potential of such a strategy for fostering engagement between local communities and healthcare workers by presenting a serious game architecture we have developed in collaboration with medical researchers and practitioners working in Amazonia. Although this first game focuses on Leishmaniases, it can be extended to easily include other similar diseases. This prototype game has been presented to a group of experts on neglected tropical diseases, and their opinions are reported here.

Creating complex 3D polygonal models using existing modelling software can be challenging. Most 3D Modelling software have been designed for 2D displays and lack support for effective perception of depth ordering. Studies have shown that users of these types of software encounter a range of focus and context awareness problems while performing their 3D modelling tasks. We have previously developed a number of visualization and interaction techniques to better support focus and context awareness using multi-layered displays. A user study of these techniques has demonstrated that they need further improvements. Here, we present three modified visualization techniques, which as shown by a user study, improve the effectiveness of these previous alternatives.

Abstract Most 3D modelling software have been developed for conventional 2D displays, and as such, lack support for true depth perception. This contributes to making polygonal 3D modelling tasks challenging, particularly when models are complex and consist of a large number of overlapping components (e.g. vertices, edges) and objects (i.e. parts). Research has shown that users of 3D modelling software often encounter a range of difficulties, which collectively can be defined as focus and context awareness problems. These include maintaining position and orientation awarenesses, as well as recognizing distance between individual components and objects in 3D spaces. In this paper, we present five visualization and interaction techniques we have developed for multi‐layered displays, to better support focus and context awareness in 3D modelling tasks. The results of a user study we conducted shows that three of these five techniques improve users' 3D modelling task performance.

Many developing regions around the world rely on community-based healthcare strategies and practices to deal with prevention and control of often neglected diseases, by educating the local population and healthcare professionals, on the mechanisms by which such diseases spread and how they can be controlled. In this paper we describe a multiplayer serious game designed to raise awareness, and foster adoption of preventive measures among local citizens and community-health professionals about Leishmaniosis. We also discuss how the underlying concept for this game and its mechanics have been iteratively designed and developed in collaboration with a group of people with relevant medical and research expertise as well as practical knowledge resulting from working with our target population.

Electric vehicle charging strategies rely on knowledge of future vehicle usage, or implicitly make assumptions about a vehicle's usage. For example, a naïve charging strategy may assume that a full charge is required as soon as possible and simply charge at the maximum rate when plugged in, whereas a smart strategy might make use of the knowledge that the vehicle is not needed for a number of hours and optimise its charging behaviour to minimise its impact on the electricity grid. These charging strategies may also offer vehicle-to-grid services.

It is estimated that global climate change and regional land use and cover changes in the Amazon region will contribute to the spread of vector-borne diseases such as bartonellosis and leishmaniasis. The large geographical distances and the sparsity of human settlements in the region pose challenges to the collaboration among health professionals whose goals range from diagnosing diseases to monitoring their spread. This paper presents work in progress on a system to support the tasks of local healthcare professionals and enabling collection, compilation, sharing and visualisation of data for purposes of epidemiological research and disease surveillance in remote regions.

Information visualisation methods can potentially be employed to assist the work of epidemiologists and other health care professionals in mapping the spread of communicable diseases in remote areas, where the task of disease surveillance encompasses temporal elements such as changes in climate, land use and population movements. This paper presents an investigation into the use of time-based visualisation techniques coupled with geographical maps and support for distributed mobile collection of patient data. This study has focused on the development of an information visualisation prototype designed for use by epidemiology researchers on mobile platforms (tablets and smart phones). The prototyping activity has involved the participation of prospective users working in the Amazon region. Initial results are presented and discussed.

The paper describes a pilot system for the detailed management of domestic electricity consumption aimed at minimizing demand peaks and consumer cost. Management decisions are made both interactively by consumers themselves, and where practical, automatically by computer. These decisions are based on realtime pricing and availability information, as well as current and historic usage data. The benefits of the energy strategies implied by such a system are elaborated, showing the potential for significant peak demand reduction and slowing of the need for growth in generation capacity. An overview is provided of the component technologies and interaction methods we have designed, but the paper focuses on the communication of real-time information to the consumer through a combination of specific and ambient visualizations. There is a need for both overview information (eg how much power is being used right now; how much energy have we used so far today; what does it cost?) and information at the point-of-use (is it OK to turn this dryer on now, or should I wait until later?). To assist the design of these visualizations, a survey is underway aimed at establishing people's understanding of power and energy concepts.

This paper presents an interactive visualisation system that assists users of semi-automatic speech transcription systems to assess alternative recognition results in real time and provide feedback to the speech recognition back-end in an intuitive manner. This prototype uses the OpenGL libraries to implement an animated 3D visual representation of alternative recognition results generated by the Sphinx automatic speech recognition system. It is expected that displaying alternatives dynamically will facilitate early detection of recognition errors and encourage user interaction, which in turn can be used to improve future recognition performance.

Although digital recording of speech is widespread, and an increasing range of applications allow recording and inclusion of speech data in documents, editing and retrieval of speech audio remains generally a challenging task. We have previously developed a speech audio editing and browsing application which utilizes imperfect transcripts of speech as a mechanism for text-based editing and retrieval of speech audio documents. This paper presents a second prototype, called TRAED, which enhances the functionality provided by our earlier prototype, and further facilitates the task of speech audio editing and access.

Word Processing software usually only displays paragraphs of text immediately adjacent to the cursor position. Generally this is appropriate, for example when composing a single paragraph. However, when reviewing or working on the layout of a document it is necessary to establish awareness of current text in the context of the document as a whole. This can be done by scrolling or zooming, but when doing so, focus is easily lost and hard to regain.We have developed a system called DeepDocument using a two-layered LCD display in which both focussed and document-wide views are presented simultaneously. The overview is shown on the rear display and the focussed view on the front, maintaining full screen size for each. The physical separation of the layers takes advantage of human depth perception capabilities to allow users to perceive the views independently without having to redirect their gaze. DeepDocument has been written as an extension to Microsoft Word™.

There are various software technologies that allow capture and redelivery of lectures. Most of these technologies however rely on the use of proprietary software, often requiring extra efforts from the lecturer in terms of the initial preparation of the lecture material, or in editing and annotating after the lecture to make the material suitable for the students. To review the material students then require access to the proprietary software. This paper describes a system for the lightweight capture of lecture presentations, based on the use of a low-cost large interactive display surface, together with standard Microsoft PowerPoint/spl trade/ presentation software. The captured version of the presentation includes the original lecture slides' graphical annotations made by the lecturer during the lecture, and the audio recording of the lecture; all saved as a PowerPoint file. In addition, the system adds some annotations and index slides to allow quick and easy access to different segments of the presentation. Presentations can be replayed in part or in full as required, preserving all of the content of the live lecture.

Copy and paste, or cut and paste, using a clipboard or paste buffer is the principal facility provided to users for transferring data between and within application software. This mechanism is clumsy to use where several pieces of information must be moved systematically, for example, when filling a form or building a table. We present an alternative, more natural user interface facility to make the task less onerous, and to provide improved visual feedback. Our mechanism — the stretchable selection tool (SST) — is a semi-transparent overlay augmenting the mouse pointer to automate paste operations and provide information to prompt the user. Two prototype implementations are described, one of which functions in a collaborative software environment allowing users to cooperate on multiple copy/paste operations. We also present the results of an informal user evaluation contrasting the SST with traditional cut and paste, and with another multiple copy/paste system.

We demonstrate a graphic visualisation of a travel itinerary, with special emphasis on time and time zones. A traditional itinerary is a text document, detailing locations, and arrival and departure times for travel and accommodation. It is usually written in diary form, showing the sequence of events to be followed on a trip. Many questions can be answered easily from such an itinerary. What time should the traveler check in at the airport? Which country are they visiting on a particular date? Other questions can be more difficult to answer. How long is the first flight? What time is it at home when the traveler reaches their hotel? The written form is also quite poor at providing a 'picture' of an entire trip. The reader cannot tell at a glance how many countries are being visited, or whether the stay in England is longer than the slay in France. The visualisation discussed here attempts to make answering such questions relatively simple. Usability studies are described which show the advantages of our visualisation.