Revitalizing endangered minority languages is important from the perspective of preserving cultural diversity. Games and gamified application can provide ways to support learning minority languages and their dialects. We present user experience insights from a small-scale user study conducted for a selection of freely available Karelian language and culture related games. By sharing our findings, we want to raise discussion about how gamification and serious games can help in revitalizing minority languages such as Karelian language. It is important to find out different ways for co-creation and cooperation in minority language also from the perspective of game development. For this study we recruited five participants, whose age varied between 4 to 72. The reception of games depended on the previous experiences of Karelian language and personal history. We noticed that the expectations for learning games vary with different aged participants.

As the COVID-19 storms the globe, there are many efforts to battle it. This paper looks at the development of one such an effort in a form of a mobile game. The game is a 2D arcade game called Unus Terra. It is intended to be entertaining but aims to influence people to partake in social distancing through several mechanics. An early version of the game is evaluated by five usability and user experience experts using heuristics and a few other selected methods. In this paper, we present the results from these evaluations along with our findings from using this type of evaluation method. The use of heuristics is considered from the perspectives of academics and practitioners.

Living labs are environments for acquiring user feedback on new products and services. Virtual environments can complement living labs by providing dynamic immersive setup for depicting change. This paper describes implementation of Virtual and Augmented Reality clients as an extension to a user involvement tool for an existing living lab. We conducted a user experience study with 14 participants to compare the clients. According to our study, the virtual reality client was experienced as innovative, easy to use, entertaining and fun. Whereas the augmented reality client was perceived playful and empowering.

This paper introduces a new concept of interacting with mobile devices while on the move. The concept is using a combination of interaction techniques, like AR, touch, tilting and rotating the mobile device. The validation is done using some basic scenarios in which the users interact with various services available on the street. The user interface elements are represented by AR anchored objects (still pictures) and floating objects that are giving visual cues to where services are available. The users are aided in their actions by freezing the user interface when the device is down tilted so that they could easily manipulate the objects.

This paper describes an interactive 3D user interface which allows different real-time services to cooperate in order to complete a user task on a mobile tablet sized device. The UI is based on objectifying data and describing it in an ontological language and combing this with behavioral scripts. The 3D UI is used to visualize the different data and services, while providing a means for object selection and manipulation. Two use cases, a cinema and music service, have been implemented in a prototype, which demonstrates how a general 3D user interface can be used to provide added value to users. The prototype is also meant to advance the thinking of what 3D UIs can accomplish, for virtual environments and mobile augmented reality, by showing practical use cases in action.

This paper presents a context-aware mobile application for office-type working purposes. Via the user tests we have evaluated if this kind of application can support worker's daily life. In the experiments we had real users in real working environment. Our investigation illustrates that workers could utilize context-aware features to ease up their working routines such as keeping presentations. The results of this paper can help designers and developers to envision and implement future ubiquitous devices and environments.