Museums aim at personalizing visits to offer tailored content and encourage visitors to come back. Unfortunately, museum professionals find it difficult to reflect on the vast number of visitor profiles when creating personalized visits. We propose Museo* a new concept to support their creation strategy by allowing the selection of visitor characteristics. Through an interactive design process, we instantiated this concept with MuseoTUI, that displays the progress of visit creation by illuminating physical tokens, and MuseoGUI that displays on a standard touchscreen. In an in-situ comparative structured observation, we evaluated both prototypes. The concept Museo* is well understood and accepted with both interaction styles. MuseoGUI was perceived as more efficient, while MuseoTUI provided better stimulation, higher user experience and the physical manipulation was described as a valuable support for empathy, reflection, and creation. Based on these findings, we present design implications for future systems supporting the creation of personalized visits.

In this work, we challenge the dominant use of logarithmic scales to communicate values spanning multiple orders of magnitude-Orders of Magnitude Values (OMVs)-to the general public. Focusing on bar charts, we incorporate cognitive insights into visualization design to better align with how humans perceive OMVs. Studies in cognitive psychology suggest that, for large numerical ranges such as millions and billions, people do not think logarithmically. Instead, they perceive numbers in a piecewise linear manner, grouping values into scale words (e.g., millions) and applying linear reasoning within each group. We build upon a recently introduced piecewise linear scale, EplusM, and validate its use in bar charts, which we refer to as EplusM bar charts. We also introduce two novel variants of the EplusM bar chart informed by findings in numerical perception: Bricks, which builds on the concepts of round numbers and subitizing, and Multi-Magnitude, which leverages categorical perception of large numbers. In a crowdsourced experiment, we evaluate four bar chart designs: 1) Log, 2) EplusM, 3) Bricks, and 4) Multi-Magnitude, across value retrieval and quantitative comparison tasks. Our results show that EplusM bar charts are significantly preferred over logarithmic designs, increase user confidence, and reduce perceived mental demand, while maintaining task performance. These findings suggest that EplusM bar charts can serve as effective alternatives to logarithmic ones when visualizing OMVs for general audiences.

Best Paper Award

Interaction in Augmented Reality primarily relies on raycast pointing and mid-air touch. An alternative consists of using the non-dominant hand as a touch-sensitive surface, enabling more comfortable, less fatiguing input. AR UI design guidelines have so far discouraged this alternative because of poor hand tracking performance when the hands overlap, favoring touchpads in the air near the hand, rather than on the hand. But significant improvements to the hand tracking capabilities of recent commodity headsets suggest that on-hand pads may now be feasible. We develop an on-hand touchpad prototype and conduct two studies that involve both discrete input and continuous control tasks. The first study compares such on-hand pads to baseline in-air and on-object pads, showing comparable performance despite some limitations in tracking accuracy. The second study quantifies the advantage of on-hand and in-air pads over on-object pads during transitions between touchpad input and other physical hand activities.

TriPad enables opportunistic touch interaction in Augmented Reality using hand tracking only. Users declare the surface they want to appropriate with a simple hand tap gesture. They can then use this surface at will for direct and indirect touch input. TriPad only involves analyzing hand movements and postures, without the need for additional instrumentation, scene understanding or machine learning. TriPad thus works on a variety of flat surfaces, including glass. It also ensures low computational overhead on devices that typically have a limited power budget. We describe the approach, and report on two user studies. The first study demonstrates the robustness of TriPad’s hand movement interpreter on different surface materials. The second study compares TriPad against direct mid-air AR input techniques on both discrete and continuous tasks and with different surface orientations. TriPad achieves a better speed-accuracy trade-off overall, improves comfort and minimizes fatigue.

In the context of an aging population, technological tools such as socially assistive robots (SARs) have made their appearance as tools to assist the work practices of care teams in contact with the elderly. We want to show the contribution of user tests in a Living Lab in the process of co-designing such tools. These tests allow both technical problems to be highlighted and Human-Robot Interactions (HRI) to be studied in an iterative way. We conducted tests with elderly users as well as teenagers, to analyze the strategies used by users of the system. This also allowed us to observe the first emotional reaction and the first interaction modality (tactile or vocal) provoked by robot. Based on these observations, we propose perspectives for a better HRI.

Museums aim at offering personalized visits to encourage visitors to visit more than once. Few approaches consider the specific skills of museum professionals when designing tools for this purpose. We conducted a three-step iterative and user-centered design process with 13 museum professionals from six museums. This analysis led us to a main finding: the most complicated task for museum professionals is to explore their design space, composed of all possible visitor profiles for which to create visits. We propose a visualization for this multidimensional design space and six potential interactions on this representation. In an exploration space, we classify them on two axes: the selection approach and the type of interface (GUI versus TUI). We analyze their benefits and limits and, based on a pilot study, we propose insights and questions for future design.

Museums compete with the entertainment industry to attract a large audience. One solution to make them more attractive is to personalize the visits according to visitors' preferences. Following a user centered design approach with visitors and museum professionals, we designed and implemented Build Your Own Hercules. This tangible prototype helps groups of visitors or individuals choose a visit based on their characteristics and desires. A pilot study in the museum provided first insights about the ease of use, satisfaction and interest within visitor groups.

We present the design concept of an accordion-fold interactive display to address the limits of touch-based interaction in airliner cockpits. Based on an analysis of pilot activity, tangible design principles for this design concept are identified. Two resulting functional prototypes are explored during participatory workshops with pilots, using activity scenarios. This exploration validated the design concept by revealing its ability to match pilot responsibilities in terms of safety, efficiency and collaboration. It provides an efficient visual perception of the system for real-time collaborative operations and tangible interaction to strengthen the perception of action and to manage safety through anticipation and awareness. The design work and insights enabled to specify further our needs regarding flexible screens. They also helped to better characterize the design concept as based on continuity of a developed surface, predictability of aligned folds and pleat face roles, embodied interactive properties, and flexibility through affordable reconfigurations.

In order to contribute to a design for future airline cockpits that can address the limitations of touch-based interfaces, we analyze tangible dimensions of cockpit activity based on observations and pilot interviews. Working from these data, using TEI theory and concepts of phenomenology, we discuss the implications for tangible design of our findings. We found that the status of sensation in perception, the required level of control in actions, the safety issues using physical objects and the restricted mode of externalization, raise challenges for tangible design. Accordingly, we discuss key concepts for the design of the future cockpit, such as the use of a protected space where interaction may involve compressed externalization, rhythmic structures and customized context-aware adaptations.