What if we deliberately designed computers to be creepy? This pictorial explores using Design Fiction to create a collection of speculative creepy devices that we could imagine living with. We investigated how leveraging creepiness as a normalised design attribute could serve as a resource to reflect on what makes good user-centred design. During a span of nine weeks, we engaged in sharing our personal lived experiences as a prompt to imagine creepy futures and devices that could address our needs, albeit designed to be creepy. This approach enabled us to evoke experiences that have not happened with devices that do not exist, which facilitated a reflection on their impact on everyday choreographies and tensions on their usability through speculative autoethnographies. We contribute a set of imaginary devices from creepy futures that illustrate the exploration and adoption of creepy speculations to facilitate new critical discourses to rethink designing interactive systems.

Physicalizations represent data through their tangible and material properties. In contrast to screen-based visualizations, there is currently very limited understanding of how to label or annotate physicalizations to support people in interpreting the data encoded by the physicalization. Because of its spatiality, contextualization through labeling or annotation is crucial to communicate data across different orientations. In this paper, we study labeling approaches as part of the overall construction process of bar chart physicalizations. We designed a toolkit of physical tokens and paper data labels and asked 16 participants to construct and contextualize their own data physicalizations. We found that (i) the construction and contextualization of physicalizations is a highly intertwined process, (ii) data labels are integrated with physical constructs in the final design, and (iii) these are both influenced by orientation changes. We contribute with an understanding of the role of data labeling in the creation and contextualization of physicalizations.

This paper examines different gaze-based cue visualization techniques in a Virtual Reality (VR) exploration game. It is argued that gaze could be a valuable design tool for providing cues to players. However, little is known about how these elements could be visually presented and integrated to inform players and fit into the game world. An exploratory study was carried out to investigate four different design approaches (subtle, overlaid-virtual, integrated, emphasized) and their effects on aspects such as clarity, usefulness, and curiosity. In general, the visualizations led to different player impressions on all scales. While players perceived the subtle and emphasized variants as more aesthetically appealing, integrated and virtual-overlaid solutions received more positive ratings regarding tool-related aspects such as ease of extraction and accurateness. We anticipate future work could employ gaze-based cues in various application contexts based on their utility as eye input in VR games continues developing.

Gaze interaction has been growing fast as a compelling tool for control and immersion for gameplay. Here, we present a conceptual framework focusing on the aesthetic player experience and the potential interpretation (meaning) players could give to playing with gaze interaction capabilities. The framework is illustrated by a survey of state of the art research-based and commercial games. We complement existing frameworks by reflecting on gaze interaction in games as the attention relationship between the player (the subject) and the game (the object) with four dimensions: Identity; Mapping; Attention; and Direction. The framework serves as a design and inquiry toolbox to analyse and communicate gaze mechanics in games, reflect on the complexity of gaze interaction, and formulate new research questions. We visualise the resulting design space, highlighting future opportunities for gaze interaction design and HCI gaze research through the framework's lens. We deem, this novel approach advocates for the design of gaze-based interactions revealing the richness of gaze input in future meaningful game experiences.

Eye gaze is a fast and ergonomic modality for pointing but limited in precision and accuracy. In this work, we introduce BimodalGaze, a novel technique for seamless head-based refinement of a gaze cursor. The technique leverages eye-head coordination insights to separate natural from gestural head movement. This allows users to quickly shift their gaze to targets over larger fields of view with naturally combined eye-head movement, and to refine the cursor position with gestural head movement. In contrast to an existing baseline, head refinement is invoked automatically, and only if a target is not already acquired by the initial gaze shift. Study results show that users reliably achieve fine-grained target selection, but we observed a higher rate of initial selection errors affecting overall performance. An in-depth analysis of user performance provides insight into the classification of natural versus gestural head movement, for improvement of BimodalGaze and other potential applications.

As eye-tracking technologies become more affordable, the number of mainstream gaze-enabled games increases. These allow triggering in-game actions when the eyes focus on objects and locations of interest. Such gaze interactions follow the interaction paradigm ”what you look at is what you get”. We challenge this use of gaze interaction and propose to play without looking - with the eyes closed. We designed the game prototype KryptonEyed to introduce closing the eyes for eyes-only game control. Players are required to close their eyes and perform eye movements behind the eyelids before opening them to aim the teleportation of the main character. The game contains three levels integrating the proposed gaze mechanic in distinct game scenarios. These explore different challenges in their game dynamics and interaction metaphors to use the technique in various contexts of play.

In this work, we challenge the Gaze interaction paradigm "What you see is what you get" to introduce "playing with peripheral vision". We developed the conceptual framework to introduce this novel gaze-aware game dynamic. We illustrated the concept with SuperVision, a collection of three games that play with peripheral vision. We propose perceptual and interaction challenges that require players not to look and rely on their periphery. To validate the game dynamic and experience, we conducted a user study with twenty-four participants. Results show how the game concept created an engaging and playful experience playing with peripheral vision. Participants showed proficiency in overcoming the game challenges, developing clear strategies to succeed. Moreover, we found evidence that playing the game can affect our visual skills, with greater peripheral awareness.

Eye gaze for interaction is dependent on calibration. However, gaze calibration can deteriorate over time affecting the usability of the system. We propose to use motion matching of smooth pursuit eye movements and known motion on the display to determine when there is a drift in accuracy and use it as input for re-calibration. To explore this idea we developed Smooth-i, an algorithm that stores calibration points and updates them incrementally when inaccuracies are identified. To validate the accuracy of Smooth-i, we conducted a study with five participants and a remote eye tracker. A baseline calibration profile was used by all participants to test the accuracy of the Smooth-i re-calibration following interaction with moving targets. Results show that Smooth-i is able to manage re-calibration efficiently, updating the calibration profile only when inaccurate data samples are detected.