The proliferation of distributed digital environments has shifted human–computer interaction from the use of isolated devices toward the configuration and design of systems composed of multiple, heterogeneous components. At the same time, the rapid obsolescence of consumer electronics has generated a growing ecosystem of legacy mobile devices that, despite being discarded, still provide valuable computational, sensing, and interaction resources. While some frameworks demonstrate the technical feasibility of repurposing these devices into unified distributed systems, designing and configuring such systems remains cognitively and technically challenging for non-expert users.

The rapid turnover of mobile devices, driven by social pressure and frequent market releases, leads to large numbers of smartphones becoming outdated yet still technically capable, retaining considerable computational power, memory, and sensing capabilities. We propose the Internet of Legacy Devices (I-oLD), an open framework designed to abstract the heterogeneity of old hardware, aiming to recycle and repurpose these devices, leveraging their residual computing power, sensors, and displays for distributed computing, modular interfaces, and pervasive sensing. This approach reduces electronic waste, promoting sustainable "green" computing, and provides low-cost hardware solutions for researchers, developers, and users worldwide.

The human gaze is increasingly used for different applications in interactive systems. It is used for explicit and implicit user input detection and is suitable for various purposes, such as activation commands, emotion detection, or user identification.

Abstract During the last decade, touchless gestural interfaces have been widely studied as one of the most promising interaction paradigms in the context of pervasive displays. In particular, avatars and silhouettes have proved to be effective in making the touchless capacity of displays self-evident. In this paper, we focus on a child–display interaction approach to avatar-based touchless gestural interfaces. We believe that large displays offer an opportunity to stimulate children’s experiences and engagement; for instance, learning about art is very engaging for children but can bring a number of challenges. Our study aims to contribute to the literature on both pervasive displays and child–computer interaction by reporting the results of a study involving 107 children aged 2 to 10 years. The main purposes of this study were to discover: (1) whether an avatar (movable or immovable) provides interactions that are intuitive for children and therefore help to overcome so-called “affordance blindness”; (2) whether an avatar-based touchless interface makes children’s experiences engaging and enjoyable therefore improving recall of content provided through the interaction (learning about art). The study unveiled relevant outcomes in terms of affordance blindness and two-handed interactions. We provide evidence indicating that chronological age influences the style of child–avatar interaction. Finally, it is suggested that avatars could facilitate the development of new effective educational technologies for young children.

Summary In the last decades, we have witnessed a growing interest toward touchless gestural user interfaces. Among other reasons, this is due to the large availability of different low‐cost gesture acquisition hardware (the so‐called “Kinect‐like devices”). As a consequence, there is a growing need for solutions that allow to easily integrate such devices within actual systems. In this paper, we present KIND‐DAMA, an open and modular middleware that helps in the development of interactive applications based on gestural input. We first review the existing middlewares for gestural data management. Then, we describe the proposed architecture and compare its features against the existing similar solutions we found in the literature. Finally, we present a set of studies and use cases that show the effectiveness of our proposal in some possible real‐world scenarios.

Public displays have lately become ubiquitous thanks to the decreasing cost of such technology and public policies supporting the development of smart cities. Depending on form factor, those displays might use touchless gestural interfaces that therefore are becoming more often the subject of public and private research. In this paper, we focus on touchless interactions with situated public displays, and introduce a pilot study on comparing two interfaces: an interface based on the Microsoft Human Interface Guidelines (HIG), a de facto standard in the field, and a novel interface, designed by us. Differently from the HIG-based one, our interface displays an avatar, which does not require any activation gestures to trigger actions. Our aim is to study how the two interfaces address the so-called interaction blindness --- the inability of the users to recognize the interactive capabilities of those displays. According to our pilot study, although providing a different approach, both interfaces has proven effective in the proposed scenario: a public display in a hall inside a University campus building.

This paper presents a novel method to reproduce in real time the opening and closing gestures of a human hand, animating a three-dimensional model of it. In other works, this result can be achieved by mapping a set of significant points of a real hand on the corresponding points of the model to animate. We propose an alternative way to produce the same effect without mapping points, but using a level-based estimation of the degree of opening of the hand. The experiments have been executed using Microsoft KinectTM, but the method would work on any other Kinect-like devices (as defined herein). The results obtained are particularly encouraging and demonstrate real-time performance of the system.

Pervasive systems are composed of a large variety of networked smart devices that supposedly enrich the environment they are deployed in. The access to services provided by a pervasive system should be as natural and "unconscious" as possible. In a large number of cases, the available interaction modality seems to be more oriented towards showing off technological wonders rather than to the actual usability of the interface. In this paper we evaluate and compare two different versions of an information provision system deployed in two editions of a large fair. In particular, we will focus on the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Computer-Mediated-Communication (CMC) points of view. The analysis of such case studies is essential to understand the social dynamics of groups of people remotely interacting. One can thus talk about social ergonomics, which together with cognitive ergonomics, sketch these contexts from a perspective of individual usability. This is characterized by rules and guidelines for an accurate design of the communication environments. Such discussions aim at the optimization of the interaction process in accordance with the goals of the information system, in terms of interfaces, user satisfaction, performance and efficiency produced by the correct CMC. The comparison we propose will allows us to infer some important conclusion that can be useful to anyone who want to develop and deploy similar systems within similar events.

The interaction ways made available by the evolution of the human-computer interfaces, led to novel Human-to-Human Interaction (HHI) modes, enabling people to cooperate for almost any task any time and any where. HHI nowadays is largely indirect and mediated by a wide variety of technologies and devices. This new and exciting field of design originates from the convergence of a few well-established research fields within the HCI area, such as traditional Graphical User Interfaces (GUI), Tangible User Interfaces (TUI), Touchless Gesture User Interface (TGUI), Voice User Interfaces (VUI), and Brain Computer Interfaces (BCI). We analyze and describe the evolution of the HCI in those fields, and how it paved the way for novel current and upcoming human-to human interaction ways.

People make more and more use of digital image acquisition devices to capture screenshots of their everyday life. The growing number of personal pictures raise the problem of their classification. Some of the authors proposed an automatic technique for personal photo album management dealing with multiple aspects (i. e., people, time and background) in a homogenous way. In this paper we discuss a solution that allows mobile users to remotely access such technique by means of their mobile phones, almost from everywhere, in a pervasive fashion. This allows users to classify pictures they store on their devices. The whole solution is presented, with particular regard to the user interface implemented on the mobile phone, along with some experimental results.

In recent years there has been a growing interest toward the development of pervasive and context-aware services, and RFID technology played a relevant role in the context sensing task. We propose the use of RFID technology together with a conversational agent in order to implement a multimodal information retrieval service we call sensor mesh. The information acquired from RFID tags about the nearest point of interest is processed by the conversational agent that carries a more natural interaction with the user, also exploiting a common sense ontology. The service is accessible using a multimodal browser on personal digital assistants (PDAs); the browser allows the user to interact with the conversational agent by means of spoken language instead of the traditional, keyboard- (or stylus-) based input systems. The resulting system offers a more natural interaction with respect to traditional pre-recorded, audio-visual services, and it is particularly suitable for non technology-skilled users.

PDAs are more and more used as advanced adaptive HEI (human-environment interaction) interfaces, thus enabling their users to easily operate applications remotely running in pervasive computing scenarios.Based on a previous implementation, in this paper we discuss the development of a new set of .NET-compliant Application Programming Interfaces to be used within the Visual Studio IDE. Our main goal is to provide programmers with a set of components to be used with the common drag-and-drop operation, in order to embed a remote application control within an application running on the PDA and vice-versa.The interaction relies on ad-hoc communication protocols over a framework devoted to pair PDAs and remote devices according to their relative position, with no need to use any connection software.

Bias artifact corrupts MRIs in such a way that the image is afflicted by illumination variations. Some of the authors proposed the exponential entropy-driven homomorphic unsharp masking ( E(2)D-HUM) algorithm that corrects this artifact without any a priori hypothesis about the tissues or the MRI modality. Moreover, E(2)D-HUM does not care about the body part under examination and does not require any particular training task. People who want to use this algorithm, which is Matlab-based, have to set their own computers in order to execute it. Furthermore, they have to be Matlab-skilled to exploit all the features of the algorithm. In this paper, we propose to make such algorithm available as a service on a grid infrastructure, so that people can use it almost from everywhere, in a pervasive fashion, by means of a suitable user interface running on smartphones. The proposed solution allows physicians to use the E(2)D-HUM algorithm (or any other kind of algorithm, given that it is available as a service on the grid), being it remotely executed somewhere in the grid, and the results are sent back to the user's device. This way, physicians do not need to be aware of how to use Matlab to process their images. The pervasive service provision for medical image enhancement is presented, along with some experimental results obtained using smartphones connected to an existing Globus-based grid infrastructure.

The increasing number of new applications for mobile devices in pervasive environments, do not cope with changes in the wireless communications. Developers of such applications have to deal with problems arising from the available wireless connections in the given environment. A middleware is a solution that allows to overcome some of these problems. It provides to the applications a set of functions that facilitate their development. In this paper we present a Java-based communication wrapper, called SmartTraffic, which allows programmers to seamlessly use TCP or UDP protocols over Bluetooth or any IP-based wireless network. Developers can use SmartTraffic within their Java applications, thus focusing on the application goals, and leaving out details about how it should interact with the available wireless connection.

This paper discusses the design of a PDA-driven remote display control system which was designed for a pervasive computing scenario. Our solution enables a PDA to perform as an interaction device (such as keyboard or mouse) to operate applications which are using remote displays. Our system consists of two components: one devoted to pair users and remote display according to their relative position, and one to provide the PDA with appropriate graphical interfaces and ad-hoc communication protocols. Besides a case study on the use of remote displays during a course within our department, this paper discusses system highlights, components, and experiments as for standard multimedia and office applications.

This paper discusses our approach to the problem of arranging a Bluetooth based positioning system capable of providing people coordinates in a given area with an accuracy as high as possible. Our strategy focuses on optimizing the disposition of a minimal number of available Bluetooth base stations in a subset of locations which are the only ones permitted by site characteristics and constraints. We used a genetic algorithm to this purpose and a layout chromosome whose best evolution suggested us how to deploy a minimal set of Bluetooth base stations. As a case study, we discuss our experiments and results which deal with a late middle age castle in Sicily where we carried out many trials.