Personality characteristics can affect how much presence an individual experiences in virtual reality, and researchers have explored how it may be possible to prime users to increase their sense of presence. A personality characteristic that has yet to be explored in the VR literature is imaginative suggestibility, the ability of an individual to successfully experience an imaginary scenario as if it were real. In this paper, we explore how suggestibility and priming affect presence when consulting an ancient oracle in VR as part of an educational experience – a common VR application. We show for the first time how imaginative suggestibility is a major factor which affects presence and emotions experienced in VR, while priming cues have no effect on participants’ (n=128) user experience, contrasting results from prior work. We consider the impacts of these findings for VR design and provide guidelines based on our results.

We evaluate AR for Plant maintenance by measuring how a prototype guidance system, tested under representative conditions, impacts performance. We are motivated to determine the cost-benefit of interactive guidance for hazardous, repetitive tasks and we observe an improvement of 21% efficiency, 50% accuracy and 19% reduced task load. AR has already been shown to deliver improvements in task performance, however, there is limited research exploring the integration of AR into complete task routines which presents a barrier to adoption. We apply mixed reality guidance via two within-group experiments. We measure efficiency and accuracy over a complete routine conducted under simulated conditions. Results compare AR versus Static and AR versus Adaptive. We conclude AR is best suited to demanding spatial translation and completion under pressure. We suggest AR offers potential in similar routines and propose further work to integrate in a live setting.

This paper presents a novel mobile serious game, "Space Vision", which uses a hidden-object mechanic with fiducial marker detection to gamify a clinical test of visual acuity - a key marker of childhood eye disease. For Space Vision to become a credible clinical tool that can facilitate the screening and home-monitoring of children's visual acuity, it must be able to sustain player engagement over the extended durations required to detect vision abnormalities. Hence, we pay particular attention to developing effective game characters - a crucial aspect of children's game design. Using an early prototype with 13 school children (aged 5-6 years), we investigate player experiences through a series of evaluation sessions, involving a single one-to-one observational playtest, semi-structured interview, and ideation activity with each child. Thematic analysis of our session video recordings, written observations, and ideation artefacts, found that future game iterations must: increase resonance between players and game characters by providing aesthetic and behavioural customisation, embrace more anthropomorphic styling, better imbue narratives pertaining to children's life scripts, and feature fantasy character powers as a form of self-expression. Meanwhile, greater physical device support and digital incentivisation of body posture and head position are key to improving the reliability of the visual acuity measurement.

Virtual Reality nonfiction (VRNF) is an emerging form of immersive media experience created for consumption using panoramic "Virtual Reality" headsets. VRNF promises nonfiction content producers the potential to create new ways for audiences to experience "the real"; allowing viewers to transition from passive spectators to active participants. Our current project is exploring VRNF through a series of ethnographic and experimental studies. In order to document the content available, we embarked on an analysis of VR documentaries produced to date. In this paper, we present an analysis of a representative sample of 150 VRNF titles released between 2012-2018. We identify and quantify 64 characteristics of the medium over this period, discuss how producers are exploiting the affordances of VR, and shed light on new audience roles. Our findings provide insight into the current state of the art in VRNF and provide a digital resource for other researchers in this area.

This study examined whether the high level of immersion provided by HMDs encourages participants to synchronise their attention during viewing. 39 participants watched the 360° documentary “Clouds Over Sidra” using either a HMD or via a flat screen tablet display. We found that the HMD group showed significantly greater overall ISC did the tablet group and that this effect was strongest during transition between scenes.

Research suggests that the rate at which humans spontaneously blink their eyes over time is strongly related to their underlying cognitive state. The ability to present the real time blinking behaviour of a human teleoperator via a robot proxy therefore potentially offers observers a low bandwidth - yet salient - cue as to the cognitive state of the teleoperator.

Anthropometrics show that the lengths of many human body segments follow a common proportional relationship. To know the length of one body segment – such as a thumb – potentially provides a predictive route to other physical characteristics, such as overall standing height. In this study, we examined whether it is feasible that the length of a person׳s thumb could be revealed from the way in which they complete swipe gestures on a touchscreen-based smartphone. From a corpus of approx. 19,000 swipe gestures captured from 178 volunteers, we found that people with longer thumbs complete swipe gestures with shorter completion times, higher speeds and with higher accelerations than people with shorter thumbs. These differences were also observed to exist between our male and female volunteers, along with additional differences in the amount of touch pressure applied to the screen. Results are discussed in terms of linking behavioural and physical biometrics.

Touch and multi-touch gestures are becoming the most common way to interact with technology such as smart phones, tablets and other mobile devices. The latest touch-screen input capacities have tremendously increased the quantity and quality of available gesture data, which has led to the exploration of its use in multiple disciplines from psychology to biometrics. Following research studies undertaken in similar modalities such as keystroke and mouse usage biometrics, the present work proposes the use of swipe gesture data for the prediction of soft-biometrics, specifically the user's sex. This paper details the software and protocol used for the data collection, the feature set extracted and subsequent machine learning analysis. Within this analysis, the BestFirst feature selection technique and classification algorithms (naïve Bayes, logistic regression, support vector machine and decision tree) have been tested. The results of this exploratory analysis have confirmed the possibility of sex prediction from the swipe gesture data, obtaining an encouraging 78% accuracy rate using swipe gesture data from two different directions. These results will hopefully encourage further research in this area, where the prediction of soft-biometrics traits from swipe gesture data can play an important role in enhancing the authentication processes based on touch-screen devices.

A 3 x 2 between subjects design examined the effect of shaking hands prior to engaging in a single issue distributive negotiation, where one negotiator performed their role tele-presently through a `Nao' humanoid robot. An additional third condition of handshaking with feedback examined the effect of augmenting the tele-present handshake with haptic and tactile feedback for the non tele-present and tele-present negotiators respectively.

This paper concerns the problem of phishing attacks in ubiquitous computing environments. The embedding of ubiquitous services into our everyday environments may make fake services seem plausible but it also enables us to authenticate them with respect to those environments. We propose physical and virtual linkage as two types of authenticating evidence in ubiquitous environments and two protocols based on them. We describe an experiment to test hypotheses concerning user responses to physical and virtual linkage with respect to fake Wi-Fi hotspots. Based on our experience we derive an improved protocol for authenticating spontaneously accessed ubiquitous services.

Users of public Wi-Fi networks risk being tricked into connecting to `evil twin' access points set up by attackers to launch man-in-the-middle attacks. We present a system which employs post hoc validation of an anonymous Diffie-Hellman key exchange undertaken as part of an 802.1X/EAP-TTLS network association process. Our system utilises an additional secure auxilliary channel to run a modified version of the interlock protocol based on physical evidence in the network location. By using keying information generated during the network joining process, we allow spontaneous network users to detect man-in-the-middle attacks as well as avoiding the need for pre-shared keys. We report on implementations of our system which utilise physical evidence of authenticity in the alternative forms of public displays and 2D barcodes embedded in the environment and read by mobile phones.