Several studies assess the benefits, for mental and physical health, of accessing blue and green spaces. Some of these studies also suggest particular relevance for elders, with estimated benefits that also may include protection against degenerative diseases. Unfortunately, in many circumstances, people live in unhealthy conditions, separated from nature. Additionally, despite social initiatives aimed at bringing people into contact with green and blue spaces, in some cases, it is not possible to move seniors from their residences. This work describes an attempt to leverage technology to address these situations, giving seniors the opportunity to experience immersion in a marine natural environment through 360 videos. An initial pilot study, conducted in collaboration with a local association that manages retirement homes, outlines strengths and weaknesses that can inform a replicable setup and protocol for supporting social inclusion and mental health in retirement houses or similar contexts.

This paper describes the motivation, the conceptual structure, the initial contributions, and the expected results of a workshop organized in the context of the AVI ’26 Conference in Venice and targeted to critically discuss the possible role of digital tools within the context of citizen-Nature (in terms of blue spaces) reconnecting process. Blue spaces, like rivers, lakes, and seas, have accompanied human civilization as shelters, defense from dangers, and communication paths. Yet their value is bigger than that and relates to the connection of humans with the natural environment and the species inhabiting it. Recent studies suggest that this connection brings huge benefits for well-being as well as mental and physical health. Unfortunately, in many circumstances, this connection is lost, for different reasons, ranging from the urban structure of the cities, organizational needs, life choices, opportunities, and other issues. The workshop explores how digital technology, which in many circumstances has contributed to the disconnection itself, can support a process of reconnection with these spaces. In line with the approaches related to situated design, the workshop will be held on an old fishing boat that will travel through the lagoon of Venice, literally immersed in the environment that is the target of the study and design activities.

Data physicalization offers an exciting opportunity for engaging people with physical representations of data that can be examined and manipulated to gain a mental model of a set of variables and their relationships. This is of paramount importance not only for researchers and professionals but also for improving citizens’ awareness in different domains, impacting civil society, and pushing behavior change. Accessibility of data is another important issue that can benefit from the adoption of data physicalization. Despite this potential, several pitfalls prevent the wide adoption of this paradigm, including the lack of a methodology for guiding the design of the representations and toolkits permitting to engage citizens in their creation without requiring them to start from scratch. This paper intends to contribute to the discussion by presenting and evaluating Dataphys, a toolkit for creating physical representations of data. The toolkit is modular, conceived for the application to different scenarios and domains, printed with cheap technologies, and open to modifications to ease its adoption. The evaluation was carried out in the context of a workshop with the participation of 17 master students in computer science, and focused on the gathering of environmental data collected along a path and the construction of a physical representation. The study’s results confirm the interest in the approach and offer insights for improving it.

Access to data is becoming increasingly important to people, both professionals and non-professionals. With a proper representation, people can gain a mental model of the relations between entities related to different domains. The involvement in gathering data and creating representations can bring additional benefits in terms of awareness for all categories of people, as shown by the results of citizen science. As most data representations are designed for the visual channel, non-sighted people are not granted equal access opportunities. This represents a serious drawback in allowing everyone to gain an autonomous understanding of data and forces non-sighted people to rely only on interpretations provided by someone else. This paper contributes to improve this situation by proposing a physicalization toolkit for non-sighted persons that can be used to create and access data representations, starting from a tabular description. The toolkit is the result of the application of a methodology that begins with an initial mapping of the properties of physical objects to tasks associated with data understanding, arriving at a modular solution that can be applied to different use contexts. The physicalization toolkit is finally tested on an example related to the representation of environmental data gathered along a path.

This paper presents the results of a design activity targeted to create urban experiences based on the use of augmented reality and focused on the domain of digital humanities. While augmented reality provides the opportunity to link physical context to digital content and services, with benefits in terms of engagement and lower cognitive loads, it reduces easy access to content. The exploration of the alternatives to permitting users to access content, while maintaining a strong link with the context, led to a possible solution which may represent the core of a multifaceted approach useful for a large number of user experiences, increasing the number of situations where content can be communicated and services accessed. The final part of the paper, starting from the current design results, discusses some directions for offering comprehensive solutions targeted to improve the accessibility of urban user experiences for different categories of users.

This paper describes the development of Remembering the City, a digital and public humanities project on an urban scale, which takes advantage of augmented reality techniques in order to bring memories of the Holocaust victims to the surface of the urban fabric. The project has been built in conjunction with the Stolpersteine (Stumbling Stones), the largest decentralized monument in Europe dedicated to the Holocaust, allowing for the first time a contextual access to information related to the stones. The paper describes the conceptual design of the project, the technical challenge of tracking bi-dimensional objects in the outdoors and the ethical concerns. The iterative development led to prototypical implementations that were tested with two evaluation studies, performed respectively with 10 volunteers aged between 30 and 50 and 22 students from a local high school. Both studies provided valuable feedback and directions for future development.

This paper presents the results of an educational experience targeted at understanding how interactive systems can support seniors. This experience builds on previous work, which included an extended set of interviews to seniors aged over 70, meant to understand their needs and wishes and to derive a set of design requirements. The paper proposes an additional exploration of the design space and widens the application of user-centered methodologies by associating a pilot study to each conceptual proposal. Besides, the paper has a special focus on a specific scenario, living on an island, characterized by peculiar difficulties for seniors, among which the danger of high tides. The experimentation led to some original results that will be described as a further contribution to the investigation of interactive systems appropriate and useful for seniors.

This paper describes the results of a three years educational design experience targeted at collecting seniors' needs and wishes and to identify some possible answers through the proposal of a set of conceptual projects. The interaction design experience involved more than 150 undergraduate students who interviewed about 60 seniors aged 70 or more and then worked on their proposals. This paper reports the most interesting conceptual projects, organized by topic and complemented by observations about the challenges faced by the young designers, with the final goal of sharing them for inspiring further design and development.

This work is focused on the design of a VR application for helping actors during the training phase of a play. The project starts from the analysis of a previous work and from additional research, involving real actors, for evaluating the parameters of interest in an actor's training. These results have been used as the starting point for the design of an immersive VR application, where different interaction techniques have been designed and experimented for supporting the actors. These techniques have been applied to a case study, a play written by the well-known Italian playwright Carlo Goldoni, and tested with a group of high-school students, considering for the evaluation a set of variables which are meaningful for VR experiences and for learning.

This paper describes the design of a system for supporting seniors, which may have limited physical and/or cognitive capabilities or sudden illnesses, in managing the access to their home, automating the process of opening the door in the case of trusted visitors, forbidding the entrance to untrusted visitors and notifying parents or social assistants about abnormal situations, such as repeated attempts of entering by strangers. The prototype is characterized by the simple interface, the low-cost hardware and the modularity of the approach, for simplifying the possible expansion of the system with additional functionalities. The proposal is also part of an educational project which involved students with different backgrounds. The project started with an initial conceptual design, based also on an initial survey with a group of seniors, which was iteratively refined and followed by a prototypical implementation, based on the face recognition services of the Microsoft Viso platform.

This paper describes the design of a VR educational experience focused on the world of theater. The PlayVR project explores several dimensions of this experience, corresponding to different levels of cognitive and emotional involvement: from the simple tour through the locations of an Italian theater to the possibility of exploring the different scenographies and to play with the characters of a comedy.

Storytelling is a powerful means for teaching, often used for engaging pupils while educating them. This paper describes an innovative web tool for creating engaging narrations for educational purposes that can be shared on the web. The tool is integrated with ToBoA-3D, a web platform for annotating 3D environments and taking advantage of the crowdsourced effort of its users for creating linear stories that can be shared on the web. An example focused on an educational narration about Renaissance architecture will be shown.

It is not easy for a growing artist to find his poetry. Smart materials could be an answer for those who are looking for new forms of art. Smart Material Interfaces (SMI) define a new interaction paradigm based on dynamic modifications of the innovative materials' properties. SMI can be applied in different domains and used for different purposes; functional, communicative and creative.

In this paper we present a novel tablet application for the delivery of narrations that uses an extended set of context dimensions (i.e., location, weather, season, time of the day and social context) for determining the availability of the content. The application is part of a software suite that has been designed for managing all the phases of creation and processing of context-aware stories, and that has been tailored and tested with a class of children aged 7. While many context-aware applications take advantage of the knowledge of the context for diminishing the cognitive load of the users or simply informing them, in this work context-awareness is used for augmenting the user engagement. The paper will present the results of an exploratory study of the application outdoors, focusing on two primary issues: the engagement, defined as the sum of six relevant parameters, and the relevance of the context dimensions as perceived by the children listening to the stories.

This paper describes the features of CASTOR, a novel software infrastructure and set of interfaces that has been designed for supporting all the cycle of creation, management and delivery of context-aware stories. CASTOR has been designed for managing an extended set of context dimensions, including the location, the weather, the season, the time of the day and the social context, that are used for creating and delivering engaging listening experiences. The software infrastructure and the user interfaces were tailored to the skills of children of the Primary School, for being used in the context of educational curricula targeted at teaching the structures of narration. In [8, 9] we gave a description of the experimentation of CASTOR with a class of children, focusing on the effects on engagement and learning. In this work we'll focus instead on the technical features of the whole infrastructure and the set of user interfaces supporting all the story lifecycle. In particular the paper will show how, using these interfaces, stories can be created on the locations where they are supposed to happen, how they can be refined in the classroom for improving the quality and how they can be delivered to listeners, respecting all the context conditions specified by the story creators. At the end we'll give some details about the future development of the platform.

This paper describes the design and the experimentation of a tablet-based authoring system for supporting the creation of stories in-situ, in the context of a learning path that has led 19 children aged 7 of the second class of a Primary School to learn how to build stories using different techniques, ranging from the traditional writing techniques exercised in class to the in-situ authoring with the tablet application. The project was characterized by a strong involvement of the teachers, that modeled a substantial part of the ordinary classroom work for embedding the in-situ experimentation and designing a smooth learning path.

The study was realized in the context of a project aimed at transferring University research results to industry and started from a request of designing an engaging gesture-based interface for permitting people to buy goods in a public environment. The project was an occasion for focusing on several issues related to gestural interfaces, that are becoming popular but often suffer from poor usability. The solutions adopted for designing the prototype reflect some of the most interesting trends in research related to gestural interfaces and ubiquitous computing. An evaluation with a group of users gave us interesting feedbacks for improving our work.

This work proposes a visual interface for querying sets of 3D worlds for the web, designed by different authors and annotated with both ontological top-down and social bottom-up styles. The goal is to overcome the current situation where most of these worlds are like independent islands that can be accessed only using the modalities that have been designed by their authors. Usually these worlds can't be searched, because there is no high level information associated to the 3D entities that compose them. Our proposal is based on a specification, a software architecture and a set of interfaces that permit a full exploitation of the geometric and textual information contained inside these 3D environments. The applications can be different, from the retrieval of single entities for localization purposes by end users to the retrieval of complex spatial patterns for functional or typological analyses by domain experts. A case study related to cultural heritage is presented.

This demo paper presents the set of visual interfaces designed by the authors in previous works as components of an ecosystem meant to accumulate and maximize the exploitation of annotated 3D information for the web. In particular the paper shows, through a case study related to cultural heritage, how the users can take advantage of this ecosystem of interfaces to shift seamlessly among different activities of searching, browsing and annotating a network of 3D worlds in the same work session. Such interweaving of activities characterizes the hypertextual web 2.0 but it is a novelty for the 3D domain and we expect that it may bring similar benefits in terms of information finding, reducing dead-ends during search and browsing, stimulating at the same time the users to contribute to the accumulation of further knowledge about the 3D entities stored.

Free-tagging is one of the leading mechanisms characterizing the so-called web 2.0, enabling users to define collaboratively the meaning of web data for improving their findability. Tagging is applied in several forms to hypermedia data, that represent the largest part of the information on the web. In spite of that, there is a growing part of web data made of 3D vectors representing real objects such as trees, houses and people that lacks any semantic definition. Such situation prevents any advanced use of the data contained inside these 3D worlds, including seeking, filtering and manipulation of the objects represented by vectors. This work proposes a bottom-up approach for adding semantics to such data, based on the collaborative effort of users navigating the web. This paper, after describing the similarities and the differences that characterize tagging for hypermedia and interactive 3D worlds, discusses the design choices that have guided the definition of a specification for associating tags to 3D objects. The proposed specification is based on X3D — the ISO standard for describing 3D interactive worlds for the net — and permits to tag a large part of the existing 3D worlds compliant with this standard. A client-software web architecture for tagging and navigating 3D worlds compliant with the specification presented is illustrated. Finally, a web-based user interface for tagging and browsing the result of the cooperative activity of users is presented and applied to a complex 3D world related to the cultural heritage domain.

This work is part of a research targeted at experimenting the use of physical artifacts for the retrieval of multimedia information. Tangible interfaces --- that couple physical artifacts to digital data --- are described in different research works, and a number of studies focus on tangibles for children. In spite of that, most of the work done for the kids is related to gaming or learning. This work is focused on a less explored domain, that of the access to information systems. We propose a tangible interface for enabling preschoolers to query and navigate multimedia information. The approach was tested with a class of 27 preschoolers, that where engaged in a game with the magical objects of the wizard Zurlino. The experiment gave us interesting insights about the suitability of the system for preschool children, its ease of use and the need for support by educators.

We present the results of an experience in design and evaluation of multimedia guides for art exhibitions based on Apple iPod-class devices, gesture based interaction and rich multimedia content. Design is based on decoupling between content, interface and interaction design, adaptation to different user skills, and reusability; the evaluation is based on logging users' actions, time spent in the visit and content access. We report about the lesson learned in building and testing on the field two different guides during a period of six months.

We discuss the design and implementation environment of a family of multimedia guides for art exhibitions on Apple iPod touch devices. The project aims at developing a unique framework adaptable to different content types and presentation styles, while retaining a common interface model with consistent gestures and a fast development process based on standard environments and toolkits. Evaluation is based on automatic collection of information about the user behavior by logging user actions.

Content classification performed by end users is spreading through the web. Most of the work done so far is related to the hypermedia web. In spite of that, there is a growing mass of 3D content that is not associated to high-level information. This situation prevents any advanced use of the data available, such as searching, extraction or automatic manipulation of such content. In the last few years there have been a number of approaches for adding metadata to 3D content, but most of them use a top-down, designer driven, classification. This work proposes a different approach based on a bottom-up, user driven, classification. A web based architecture for tagging and browsing 3D objects and worlds is presented and applied to a case study related to the cultural heritage domain.

In this paper we discuss the problem of deploying appliances for interactive services in complex physical environments using a knowledge based approach to define the relations between the environment and the services, and a visual interface to check the associated constraints, in order to design a solution satisfactory for the user.

We discuss the design of interaction ambients, which are ambients populated with fixed and mobile services, accessible through distributed interfaces. To make the interaction effective, activities and services should be designed as a function of the ambient, giving the user a coherent and clear context. A design approach is discussed, based on ontologies describing ambients, activities and services.

Access to real environments is often conditioned by a number of issues, including the skills of the user (i.e. affected by aging, physical and psychological deficiencies, etc.) and the complexity of the real environment itself. This work proposes an approach for helping users with different skills, including elderly people, to navigate through complex real scenes; such approach is based on the semantic description of the objects and zones that characterize the environment itself and takes advantage of an implementation architecture based on web standards for generating navigational support. A case study related to the creation of a guided tour through the indoor and outdoor locations of the city of Venice, accessible through a multimodal web browser, is presented.

In a navigation-oriented interaction paradigm, such as desktop, mixed and augmented virtual reality, recognizing the user needs is a valuable improvement, provided that the system is able to correctly anticipate the user actions. Methodologies for adapting both navigation and content allow the user to interact with a customized version of the 3D world, lessening the cognitive load needed for accomplishing tasks such as finding places and objects, and acting on virtual devices.This work discusses adaptivity of interaction in 3D environments, obtained through the coordinated use of three approaches: structured design of the interaction space, distinction between a base world layer and an interactive experience layer, and user monitoring in order to infer interaction patterns. Identification of such recurring patterns is used for anticipating users actions in approaching places and objects of each experience class. An agent based architecture is proposed, and a simple application related to consumer e-business is analyzed.

This paper discusses a model-based approach to the design of complex interaction environments like virtual worlds, mixed and augmented reality. The environment a user interacts with is seen as a virtual environment populated by virtual entities, created and maintained active by a program interpreted by the computer, which can be described by specifying the behavior of the population. The specification of the behavior occurs along three dimensions; 1) programming languages to specify system computations; 2) user activity languages to specify user activities; 3) perceptual languages to deal with the physical characteristics of the messages from the machine to the user. These dimensions define an interaction modeling space which constitutes the frame in which the virtual environment is specified

The aim of our research is to provide GIS users with a visual environment where they can formulate spatial queries which implicitly capture the double nature of geographical data. In particular, in this paper we propose an extension to the MGISQL visual environment, where users may pose 3D queries about those phenomena where the third dimension is a relevant feature for data retrieving. The interaction between users and the visual environment is performed by manipulating 3D geometaphors. The underlying algebra for spatial operators is enriched accordingly. Visual queries are composed in a 3D environment, called the Sensitive Cube, characterized by the 3D geometaphors, visualized as 'floating objects'.

The development of desktop virtual reality cultural exhibitions on the web is a challenging process, because it requires a collection of skills, ranging from art to 3D Internet technologies, and involves a variety of tasks. The need of suited approaches able to support the development of such exhibitions has motivated the introduction of the approach proposed in the paper. Such an approach is characterized by a strong attention towards the content experts, by a clear identification of the actors involved in the development process, and by a set of visual modeling languages, which support the high-level design of the exhibition and allow a more effective communication between the heterogeneous members of the project. Such modeling languages have been embedded in an authoring system which profitably supports the main figures to carry out their tasks.

In this paper we describe the model and the prototype of an auditory and haptic interface for blind users, based on human capabilities to memorize and retrieve positions in a 3D auditory space; the proposal takes advantage of recent development in hardware and software in a prototype system to test different paradigms for interaction suitable for wide application by a large number of users.