Interactive technologies are increasingly being used as discursive objects for raising awareness about the environment in the cultural sector, but little is known about the user’s lived experience during an interaction. In this study, we present the development and evaluation of an interface designed to raise awareness about the environment within a speculative art installation. For this purpose, we drew on the concept of sentinel species, specifically the miner’s canary, to enable a multisensory experience with the state of the air. We then evaluated the interface with 14 participants while interacting in a prototypical arrangement in the laboratory. Overall, the findings indicate promising directions towards a sentinel-species-mimicking interface that communicates the state of the air through its physiological behavior and thus also engages with the user’s empathy on a cognitive and emotional level. Based on the findings, we highlight the implications of this study and point to further directions for human–atmosphere interactions.

Exploring spatial and temporal audience behavior around ambient displays is an important area of HCI research. It aids in, for instance, understanding better user appropriation in natural environments. However, there are only a few tools to capture said behavior, and simultaneously, little knowledge of the space around ambient display installations exists. In this research, we report on audience behavior observed during an in-the-wild study where we deployed our custom Ambient Surfaces solution in a professional, large-scale agile software development context for circa 5 years. Across 18 weeks in 2017, we collected skeletal data with two Microsoft Kinect v2 cameras resulting in behavior information of more than 30,000 passersby. Our results indicate, among others, that users did show the highest levels of engagement at quite some distance to the Ambient Surfaces and that people engaging in direct interaction did so rather purposely. Ultimately, this article encapsulates our research’s originality in four contributions including an approach to separate passersby from real users and an in-depth exploration of skeletal data. With the tools and methods illustrated, we hope to demonstrate manifold insights for future research on audience behavior tracking.

This research addresses an interdisciplinary problem area concerning the long-term deployment of socially embedded technology in authentic environments. It concentrates on the case of ambient displays, where long-term research in the real world is still scant and evidentially requires methodological development. This study seeks to advance on this situation at both findings and methodological levels. To this end, we introduce our Ambient Surfaces solution that was deployed in the agile software development department of a company for circa 5 years. Classic grounded theory was chosen to methodologically guide the evaluation, while the theoretical contribution of this work is a substantive theory exemplified by its core category of Spontaneous utilization. The theory reveals insights on how ambient displays are utilized by practitioners in professional and large-scale agile environments. We found, among others, that staff members used the Ambient Surfaces largely not on purpose, that our solution evolved toward having a strong emphasis on progress tracking information, and that inter-team awareness as well as intra-team communication were encouraged.

The use of VR in training groups for wind turbine engineers can cause didactic and practical problems. Integrating the whole group into the lesson and retaining attention and motivation while only one or two trainees wear a VR head mounted display (HMD) can be challenging for the trainer. Whereas VR HMDs isolate the users, engineering on wind turbines is a group effort. The problem is exacerbated when trainees need to use remote access to participate in the lesson, as can be the case under pandemic restrictions. We propose to use methods from asymmetrical game design and constructivist didactics to integrate participants without VR headsets into VR trainings for engineers.

This paper introduces a preliminary taxonomy to bring the condition of air into the foreground of human perception. To create this taxonomy, we drew on the foundations of atmospheric research and studies in the field of human-computer interaction to provide an overview of different inputs and outputs that enable an interaction with the air. In addition, we present a potential use case that could benefit from a taxonomy to allow the development of atmospheric interfaces and empower the transfer of knowledge. We discuss our findings and conclude with challenges that can be addressed in future research.

In this paper we explore human-environment interrelationships by utilizing both hybrid materially-oriented approaches and metaphorical representations. Inspired by the 'canary in a coalmine' metaphor we developed a tangible interface to sense the environment and provide a physical experience. The design utilizes life-like characteristics, like shape memory alloys and feathers to illustrate the metaphor. The aim of this approach is to propose a tangible interface as a mediator to provoke empathy for environmental issues. For that, the paper addresses an interdisciplinary field of design, society and technology through an embodied system.

VR environments with supernatural properties which expand or replace the laws of physics could be used to understand how the brain organises and interprets sensory stimulation. We built an application with a supernatural room that allows users to walk up the wall and on the ceiling. During preliminary tests, we optimised the application so that it rarely causes cybersickness. User reports and observed user reaction such as swaying indicate that users accepted the rotation as a self-rotation, as opposed to an animated rotation of the room around the user. Therefore the application is viable for future studies on spatial orientation, pathfinding and cognitive maps.

Context-aware systems for smart environments can be very complex and demanding for developers especially in distributed computing and communication environments. We propose a new development infrastructure, that targets this challenge by improving the general system's scalability and traceability. The infrastructure has been developed for and tested in two research labs for smart environments and human computer interaction. First measurements show that the platform has high scalability and low message latency that is perfectly suitable for interactive projects and virtual reality experiments.