International audience

International audience

International audience

International audience

Traditionally, User eXperience (UX) design has focused on the experience of the individual user, often overlooking the influence that interactions with others can have on their overall experience. In addition, in recent years, the advancement of digital technologies has increasingly focused on social applications (e.g., social networks, videoconferencing tools, etc.). This evolution underscores the need to redefine the concept of UX towards a Multi-User eXperience (MUX). The aim of this research was to develop a measurement scale for the assessment of the Multi-User eXperience (MUX-S). Five dimensions (social presence, perceived quality of human-to-human interaction, matching user needs, matching user expectations, and a sense of belonging to a community) of MUX were identified in the initial phase of the study. The relevance of these dimensions was validated through exploratory interviews (N=7 participants) who use social digital applications. This initial work resulted in the formulation of a preliminary set of items which were subsequently refined following the pre-experiment (N=20 participants). A validation experiment (N = 211 participants) was conducted on the questionnaire items. This experiment enabled us to reduce the questionnaire to 16 items which were grouped into three factors: Social Presence/Interaction, Interactive co-experience and Alignment of other users with my expectations. This paper presents a preliminary validation; further studies will be needed to definitively validate the questionnaire.

This study investigates the effectiveness of Immersive Virtual Reality (IVR) compared to traditional slideshow lessons in teaching implicit knowledge. For this purpose, the research focuses on professional decision-making skills in viticulture. Most existing research on immersive learning concentrates on explicit learning strategies. In contrast, this study explores the potential of IVR to foster the transfer of implicit knowledge to real-world situations.Forty third-year engineering students were randomly assigned to an IVR or a traditional slideshow group. They learned to assess vine vigour through an implicit learning phase, followed by a real-world evaluation in an actual vineyard. Learning outcomes were measured by decision-making accuracy, response time, and intrinsic motivation.The findings show that the IVR group did not significantly outperform the slideshow group in decision-making accuracy. However, the IVR group took more time to make decisions. This observation suggests an impact of immersion during the transfer to real-world situations. Additionally, the IVR group showed a higher level of intrinsic motivation than the slideshow group.These results suggest that although the immersion effect does not directly enhance learning outcomes for this cognitive objective, it does affect how knowledge is transferred to the real world. They also confirm that the positive impact of immersion is difficult to generalize and may depend on the nature of the knowledge. Still, the immersion effect significantly improves learner motivation. This consistent finding could be a key factor in long-term educational success. Further research exploring the nuanced effects of immersion on different learning strategies and educational objectives could offer new practical perspectives for the future of educational technologies.

ABSTRACT This article presents the architecture of MemorIA, an integrative system that combines existing AI technologies into a coherent educational framework for creating interactive historical agents, with the aim of fostering students' learning interest. MemorIA generates animated digital portraits of historical figures, synchronizing facial expressions with synthesized speech to enable natural conversations with students. The system leverages NVIDIA Audio2Face for real‐time facial animation with first‐order motion model for portrait manipulation, achieving fluid interaction through low‐latency audio‐visual streaming. To assess our architecture in a field situation, we conducted a pilot study in middle school history classes, where students and teachers engaged in direct conversation with a virtual Julius Caesar during Roman history lessons. Students asked questions about ancient Rome, receiving contextually appropriate responses. While qualitative feedback suggests a positive trend toward increased student participation, some weaknesses and ethical considerations emerged. Based on this assessment, we discuss implementation challenges, suggest architectural improvements, and explore potential applications across various disciplines.

Creativity Support Tools (CSTs), like sketching tools, enable designers in their creative activities. As designers may have different needs during different thinking phases, accessing physiological responses in real-time would enable CSTs to better adapt to these different phases. Several studies have focused on either different phases on the same tool or the same phase on different tools. We investigate ways to discriminate divergent and convergent thinking phases using physiological response. We replicated the same experiment with thirty participants each on two different CSTs: in immersive virtual reality and on an interactive whiteboard (2D). We analyzed Heart Rate Variability (HRV) and Galvanic Skin Response (GSR) during a divergent thinking task followed by a convergent thinking task. Our results revealed significant changes in arousal, measured through HRV and GSR, which seem specific to each creative thinking phase. We discuss how each phase can be linked with specific reactions independently of the CST. We suggest that it may be possible to detect a favorable creative state depending on the task being performed.

Studies involving collaboration in groups are frequently carried out under symmetrical conditions, meaning that all team members have the same role at the same time. In Virtual Reality, symmetrical collaboration often seems attractive as it allows all participants to be included in the VR environment, but it is not clear whether this provides any benefits over asymmetric forms of collaboration, such as when some team members are in VR while others are working on laptops. We conducted a study to compare the conditions of symmetric configurations (both team members use VR) and asymmetric configurations (one member in VR, and the other uses a laptop) when two participants performed a creativity task together. We found that there were differences in participant behaviour and the ideas generated. We conclude by proposing guidelines for future work in the area, particularly related to the use of Virtual Reality for creativity workshops.

Virtual reality (VR) provides users with the ability to substitute their physical appearance by embodying virtual characters (avatars) using head-mounted displays and motion-capture technologies. Previous research demonstrated that the sense of embodiment toward an avatar can impact user behavior and cognition. In this paper, we present an experiment designed to investigate whether embodying a well-known creative genius could enhance participants' creative performance. Following a preliminary online survey ( N = 157) to select a famous character suited to the purpose of this study, we developed a VR application allowing participants to embody Leonardo da Vinci or a self-avatar. Self-avatars were approximately matched with participants in terms of skin tone and morphology. 40 participants took part in three tasks seamlessly integrated in a virtual workshop. The first task was based on a Guilford's Alternate Uses test (GAU) to assess participants' divergent abilities in terms of fluency and originality. The second task was based on a Remote Associates Test (RAT) to evaluate convergent abilities. Lastly, the third task consisted in designing potential alternative uses of an object displayed in the virtual environment using a 3D sketching tool. Participants embodying Leonardo da Vinci demonstrated significantly higher divergent thinking abilities, with a substantial difference in fluency between the groups. Conversely, participants embodying a self-avatar performed significantly better in the convergent thinking task. Taken together, these results promote the use of our virtual embodiment approach, especially in applications where divergent creativity plays an important role, such as design and innovation.

The emergence and the development of digital technologies (social media, 3D scanners, virtual reality) offer new opportunities to develop more participative design approaches. The present study experiments with non-designer participants a co-creation and co-design process of furniture based on 3D scan, virtual reality sketching, and modeling tools. Questionnaires have been used to measure user experience related to the tools, the quality of co-creation experience and the acceptance of the process. This research validates the relevance of virtual reality in this process and provides some recommendations for the implementation and improvement of this process.

Innovation is defined by a range of activities having different goals but driven by the same purpose. For example, in the ending phases, the aim will be to put forward precise concepts, while upstream of innovation, the activities are defined by the will to investigate the subject and increase the area of knowledge and concepts helpful for the conception of new products. This study takes place in the latter contexts because these are the ones where tools are the most variable and de facto, the least normalised. Our aim was to study user experience felt by the usage of these tools as well as their impact on creativity and ideas’ communicability. To do this, we led an experimental study with 79 participants comparing four tools: pen & paper, Virtual-Reality (VR) drawing, VRCAD, and traditional CAD. Thanks to the UEQ (Laugwitz et al., 2008) and judges method of Cropley and Cropley (2008), we measured the user-exprience and the creativity. Then we compared the level of creativity, user-experience and communicability induced by each tool. The results reveal that the user experience arising from the tool influences the amount and the quality of the ideas. Moreover, we show that the fewer standardises interactions the tools have, the greater the communicability of ideas.

International audience

The present study was designed to ascertain how far flagging up potential errors can improve the automatic interpretation of technical documents. We used the resources model to analyze the supervised retro-conversion of architectural floor plans from the perspective of distributed cognition. Results showed that automated assistance helps users to correct errors spotted by the system and saves time. Surprisingly, they also showed that flagging up possible errors may make users less effective in identifying and correcting errors that go unnoticed by the system. Responses to a questionnaire probing the participants’ confidence in the system suggested that they were so trusting that they lowered their vigilance in those areas that had not been signaled by the system, leading to the identification of fewer errors there. Thus, although the participants’ confidence in the automated assistance system led to improved performances in those areas it highlighted, it also meant that areas to which the system did not draw attention were less thoroughly checked.

In this paper, we present the impact of user interaction in the recognition of off-line structured documents. This interaction requires solving two major problems: how interpretation results will be presented to the user, and how the user will interact with analysis process. We propose to study the effects of those two aspects in the context of an interactive method (IMISketch) for off-line handwritten 2D architectural floor plan recognition. The use tests are realized in collaboration with researchers in cognitive psychology (more than 100 persons participated in the tests). The experiments demonstrate that (i) a progressive presentation of the analysis results, (ii) user interventions during it and (iii) the user solicitation by the analysis process are an efficient strategy for interactive recognition of offline documents.