We chart the creative journeys of two groups of musicians as they explored how to engage with an AI system developed for the live performance of Irish Traditional Dance Music. A group of expert Irish musicians participated in an extended workshop to refine the system while a professional contemporary folk duo composed and rehearsed material for a public show. Drawing on the standard definition of creativity, we chart their creative journeys across a landscape we define by the two dimensions of originality and effectiveness. We reveal the importance of authenticity to a traditional practice as an opposing force to creativity and consider how the tension between these shaped their musical journeys. We generalise five strategies that move creative practitioners across this landscape in different directions: proving your chops, finding your place, perfecting the nuances, innovating, and glitching.

Co-designing with families for environmental sustainability relies on participatory imagination, yet habitual family roles and uneven participation, especially between adults and young children, often constrain it. A second challenge is continuity: workshop relationships and embodied ways of working do not easily survive into the final design, where artefacts travel more readily than roles or interactional dynamics. We report on a nationally toured mixed-reality installation developed through applied-theatre-led co-design with families. Across three workshops and user testing, applied theatre methods supported families to co-create narratives, artefacts, and interactional roles that shaped the public event. We show how theatrical co-design can rebalance child–adult participation through playful status shifts, and how selected workshop dynamics can be re-staged within a public mixed-reality installation. We contribute a theatrical account of participatory design in which designers work not only with artefacts and ideas, but with roles, rhythms, authority, and the social conditions that support collective imagination.

A Cabinet of Affective Touches (ACAT) represents an approach to generate tacit design knowledge and build a repository for creating, experiencing and reflecting on designing affective touch with soft robotic technology. Despite being increasingly recognised as a somaesthetic material for affective touch interactions, knowledge on technical parameters and the experiential quality of touch with soft robotic technology is investigated fragmentally in separate disciplines. Sixty four haptics design students used the ACAT platform and created a repository of seventeen designs intended for all primary affective dimensions, covering both positive and negative affective experience. We illustrate how this process cultivated tacit design knowledge and fostered critical reflection on novel design space, in particular, on how to facilitate the creation and sharing the designs of uncomfortable touch.

Current discussion on AI often presents binary for/against stances, making it difficult to foster nuanced discourse. But how can we as designers, developers, researchers, and artists communicate the nuances of our work to non-experts? Art can be a powerful medium for public engagement prompting reflection on complex topics. We examine audience engagement with Cat Royale, an artwork that invited audiences to reflect on AI, robotics, and the trust we place in them. We show that constructing and presenting an art installation as a deliberately ambiguous interface can provoke and encourage critical reflection, and we argue for the importance of making abstract technologies, such as AI, tangible and relatable through concrete examples, including artworks. Finally, we examine forms of ambiguity that arise at the intersection of AI and public engagement, and propose two new kinds relevant to the future of beyond-human interaction in HCI: moral ambiguity and ambiguity of species.

Friction – disagreement and breakdown – is an omnipresent aspect of conducting interdisciplinary research yet is rarely presented in formal research reporting. We analyse a performance-led research process where professional dancers with different disabilities explored how to improvise with an industrial robot, with the support of an interdisciplinary team of human-computer and human-robot interaction researchers. We focus on one site of friction in our research process; how to dance – safely – with robots? By presenting our research process, we exemplify the different ways in which we encountered this friction and how we reconfigured the research process around it. We contribute five ways in which we arrived at a generative ethical outcome, which may be helpful in productively engaging with friction in interdisciplinary collaboration.

Glitches – moments when technologies do not work as desired – will become increasingly common as industrially-designed robots move into complex contexts. Taking glitches to be potential sites of critical ethical reflection, we examine a glitch that occurred in the context of a collaborative research project where professional dancers with different disabilities improvised with a robotic arm. Through a first-person account, we analyse how the dancer, the robot, and the rest of the research team enacted ethics in the moment of glitch. Through this analysis, we discovered a deep and implicit ethical misalignment wherein our enactments of ethics in response to the glitch did not align with the values of the project. This prompted a critical re-engagement with our research process through which we forged a dialogue between different ethical perspectives that acted as an invitation to bring us back into ethical alignment with the project’s values.

Despite the prevalence of digital gifting, designing meaningful and emotionally engaging digital gifts remains a challenge. One promising approach is Hybrid gifting, which combines digital and physical elements to improve the perceived value of gifts and provide opportunities for interpersonalisation. However, there is limited understanding of how hybridity shapes the dynamics of gifting in everyday contexts. To explore this, we developed a connected coffee machine prototype as a technology probe to study how givers personalise hybrid gifts and how recipients experience them. A study with seven pairs in intimate relationships revealed key insights: hybridity fosters slow, deliberate engagement; supports personalisation aligned with daily routines; grants recipients autonomy in receiving gifts; and reveals tensions between giver anxiety and recipient enjoyment. We discuss design implications for hybrid gifting systems that encourage recipients to savour digital gifts through slow, reflective interactions.

As robots enter the messy human world so the vital matter of safety takes on a fresh complexion with physical contact becoming inevitable and even desirable. We report on an artistic-exploration of how dancers, working as part of a multidisciplinary team, engaged in contact improvisation exer-cises to explore the opportunities and challenges of dancing with cobots. We reveal how they employed their honed bodily senses and physical skills to engage with the robots aesthetically and yet safely, interleaving improvised physical manipulations with reflections to grow their knowledge of how the robots behaved and felt. We introduce somatic safety, a holistic mind-body approach in which safety is learned, felt and enacted through bodily contact with robots in addition to being reasoned about. We conclude that robots need to be better designed for people to hold them and might recognise tacit safety cues among people. We propose that safety should be learned through iterative bodily experience interleaved with reflection.

We reappraise the idea of colliding with robots, moving from a position that tries to avoid or mitigate collisions to one that considers them an important facet of human interaction. We report on a soma design workshop that explored how our bodies could collide with telepresence robots, mobility aids and a quadruped robot. Based on our findings, we employed soma trajectories to analyse collisions as extended experiences that negotiate key transitions of consent, preparation, launch, contact, ripple, sting, untangle, debris and reflect. We then employed these ideas to analyse two collision experiences, an accidental collision between a person and a drone and the deliberate design of a robot to play with cats, revealing how real-world collisions involve the complex and ongoing entanglement of soma trajectories. We discuss how viewing collisions as entangled trajectories, or ‘tangles’, can be used analytically, as a design approach, and as a lens to broach ethical complexity.

While ethical challenges are widely discussed in HCI, far less is reported about the ethical processes that researchers routinely navigate. We reflect on a multispecies project that negotiated an especially complex ethical approval process. Cat Royale was an artist-led exploration of creating an artwork to engage audiences in exploring trust in autonomous systems. The artwork took the form of a robot that played with three cats. Gaining ethical approval required an extensive dialogue with three Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) covering computer science, veterinary science and animal welfare, raising tensions around the welfare of the cats, perceived benefits and appropriate methods, and reputational risk to the University. To reveal these tensions we introduce beneficiary-epistemology space, that makes explicit who benefits from research (humans or animals) and underlying epistemologies. Positioning projects and IRBs in this space can help clarify tensions and highlight opportunities to recruit additional expertise.

We reflect on the design of a multispecies world centred around a bespoke enclosure in which three cats and a robot arm coexist for six hours a day during a twelve-day installation as part of an artist-led project. In this paper, we present the project’s design process, encompassing various interconnected components, including the cats, the robot and its autonomous systems, the custom end-effectors and robot attachments, the diverse roles of the humans-in-the-loop, and the custom-designed enclosure. Subsequently, we provide a detailed account of key moments during the deployment and discuss the design implications for future multispecies systems. Specifically, we argue that designing the technology and its interactions is not sufficient, but that it is equally important to consider the design of the ‘world’ in which the technology operates. Finally, we highlight the necessity of human involvement in areas such as breakdown recovery, animal welfare, and their role as audience.

Ongoing efforts to turn Machine Learning (ML) into a design material have encountered limited success. This paper examines the burgeoning area of AI art to understand how artists incorporate ML in their creative work. Drawing upon related HCI theories, we investigate how artists create ambiguity by analyzing nine AI artworks that use computer vision and image synthesis. Our analysis shows that, in addition to the established types of ambiguity, artists worked closely with the ML process (dataset curation, model training, and application) and developed various techniques to evoke the ambiguity of processes. Our finding indicates that the current conceptualization of ML as a design material needs to reframe the ML process as design elements, instead of technical details. Finally, this paper offers reflections on commonly held assumptions in HCI about ML uncertainty, dependability, and explainability, and advocates to supplement the artifact-centered design perspective of ML with a process-centered one.

We report on a six-year collaboration with a small community organisation to develop and deploy a permanent physical / digital locative media experience as part on an ongoing community regeneration project. We describe how this unfolded over four phases: approach and pilot; public deployment; supporting subsequent community-led spin-off experiences; and planning legacy and technology handovers. The project was distinctive for being a Knowledge Exchange project in which we were approached and formally contracted by the community to deliver the digital technology, rather than instigating and leading a research project. We identify seven considerations for handing over technologies that combine both digital and physical elements to communities of stakeholders that encompass businesses, councils, and volunteers, and how this illuminates the unique strengths and weaknesses of Knowledge Exchange projects within the wider design research landscape.

The recent release of the Apple Vision Pro has reignited interest in the metaverse, showcasing the intensified efforts of technology giants in developing platforms and devices to facilitate its growth. As the metaverse continues to proliferate, it is foreseeable that everyday environments will become increasingly saturated with its presence. Consequently, uncovering links to these metaverse items will be a crucial first step to interacting with this new augmented world. In this paper, we address the problem of establishing connections with virtual worlds within everyday environments, especially those that are not readily discernible through direct visual inspection. We introduce a vision-based approach leveraging Artcode visual markers to uncover hidden metaverse links embedded in our ambient surroundings. This approach progressively localises the access points to the metaverse, transitioning from coarse to fine localisation, thus facilitating an exploratory interaction process. Detailed experiments are conducted to study the performance of the proposed approach, demonstrating its effectiveness in Artcode localisation and enabling new interaction opportunities.

Binge-watching is of academic interest, not least for the potential links between ‘excessive’ media consumption and wellbeing. This study analyses binge-watching behaviours relating to ‘The Traitors US’ using BBC iPlayer viewing data and Twitter discourse. Findings show viewing engagement increased as the finale approached, with some consumers watching over nine hours of content in one day. Twitter sentiment analysis includes themes of excitement, compulsion, and concern for spoilers. As binge-watching proliferates globally, big data analysis of real-world data may offer valuable insights into viewers’ motivations and the binge-watching phenomenon.

This first workshop on explainable AI for the Arts (XAIxArts) brings together a community of researchers and creative practitioners in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), Interaction Design, AI, explainable AI (XAI), and Digital Arts to explore the role of XAI for the Arts. XAI is a core concern of Human-Centred AI and relies heavily on HCI techniques to explore how complex and difficult to understand AI models such as deep learning techniques can be made more understandable to people. However, XAI research has primarily focused on work-oriented and task-oriented explanations of AI and there has been little research on XAI for creative domains such as the Arts. This workshop will: i) build an XAIxArts research community; ii) map out the current and future possible landscapes of XAIxArts; iii) critically reflect on the potential of XAI for the Arts, forming the basis for an edited book on XAIxArts and an international network of researchers.

This workshop uses the outputs of a two-year Research through Design project as a springboard for bringing together a community of researchers interested in Hybrid Gifting. We have discovered that the many creative and socio-psychological processes involved in choosing or making a gift inform a great deal about interactions with common digital technologies, especially when they are used to make a hybrid gift with both physical and digital components. This workshop will be a temporally extended opportunity to experience the full cycle of giving and receiving gifts, whether you use our outputs or prototypes or your own ideas, artworks, or design fictions. Let’s take this opportunity to use our research to celebrate and care for each other, and perhaps envision new ways of celebrating and caring for others.

There is a trend for handcrafting bespoke prostheses that embody their wearers’ aesthetic tastes and identities. We explore how this might be extended by enabling users to co-design with algorithms. We report a design-led exploration (Figure 1) in which professional disabled dancers danced with a generative design algorithm to create personalised designs called aesthetic seeds. Further algorithms applied these to prosthetic greaves, rendering them in various materials before optimising for additive manufacture. Interviews with our dancers revealed that the aesthetics of prosthetics reach beyond visual decoration to encompass form, function, bodily experience, body image, and identity; that interactions with generative design algorithms can harness people’s expressive and aesthetic skills; and that we must redesign supporting technologies for diverse bodies. We generalise our findings into a process for how people may co-design 3D printable products with algorithms.

Volunteering benefits recipients, volunteers, communities, and society, while digital technologies establish new opportunities for virtual volunteering. We describe how volunteers transitioned the UK's long-established Oxjam grassroots music festival online in response to the COVID pandemic, delivering a local pilot before scaling up nationwide. We adopt an infrastructural perspective to reveal how two teams of volunteers defined a flexible festival format, knitted together diverse technologies into a technical platform, and operated this to deliver the festival. We highlight the need for teams of volunteers to orchestrate both audience and performer trajectories through festivals. We argue for deliberately designing in volunteer labour rather than automating it out by translating traditional roles online while defining new digital ones. We propose to make these roles rewarding through a more social volunteer experience, including privileged backstage access. We highlight the challenges of using social media for such events, including complying with algorithmic policing of rights.

Human–computer integration is an HCI trend in which computational machines can have agency, i.e., take control. Our work focuses on a particular form of integration in which the user and the computational machine share agency over the user's body, that is, can simultaneously (in contrast to a traditional turn-taking approach) control the user's body. The result is a user experience where the agency of the user and the computational machine is so intertwined that it is often no more discernable who contributed what to what extent; we call this “intertwined integration”. Due to the recency of advanced technologies enabling intertwined integration systems, we find that little understanding and documented design knowledge exist. To begin constructing such an understanding, we use three case studies to propose two key dimensions (“awareness of machine's agency” and “alignment of machine's agency”) to articulate a design space for intertwined integration systems. We differentiate four roles that computational machines can assume in this design space (angel, butler, influencer, and adversary). Based on our craft knowledge gained through designing such intertwined integration systems, we discuss strategies to help designers create future systems. Ultimately, we aim at advancing the HCI field's emerging understanding of sharing agency.

Gifting is socially and economically important. Studies of gifting physical objects have revealed motivations, values, and the tensions between them, while HCI research has revealed weaknesses of digital gifting and explored possibilities of hybrid gifting. We report an “in the wild” study of a hybrid chocolate gift deployed as a commercial product. Interviews reveal the experiences of receivers and givers, as well as the producer's friction points and tangible benefits. We reveal how in hybrid gifts the digital elevates the physical while the physical grounds the digital. We discuss how hybrid gifts bridge the tension between receiver-preference and relationship-signalling motivations, the need to further strengthen the exchange and reveal stages of hybrid gifting, and to manage the privacy of sensitive personal messages. We propose to extend the concept of hybrid wrapping to include a finer-grained interleaving of digital into complex packaging and multi-layered wrappings to create more holistic gifting experiences.

Museums are interested in designing emotional visitor experiences to complement traditional interpretations. HCI is interested in the relationship between Affective Computing and Affective Interaction. We describe Sensitive Pictures, an emotional visitor experience co-created with the Munch art museum. Visitors choose emotions, locate associated paintings in the museum, experience an emotional story while viewing them, and self-report their response. A subsequent interview with a portrayal of the artist employs computer vision to estimate emotional responses from facial expressions. Visitors are given a souvenir postcard visualizing their emotional data. A study of 132 members of the public (39 interviewed) illuminates key themes: designing emotional provocations; capturing emotional responses; engaging visitors with their data; a tendency for them to align their views with the system's interpretation; and integrating these elements into emotional trajectories. We consider how Affective Computing can hold up a mirror to our emotions during Affective Interaction

The recent Facebook rebranding to Meta has drawn renewed attention to the metaverse. Technology giants, amongst others, are increasingly embracing the vision and opportunities of a hybrid social experience that mixes physical and virtual interactions. As the metaverse gains in traction, it is expected that everyday objects may soon connect more closely with virtual elements. However, discovering this “hidden” virtual world will be a crucial first step to interacting with it in this new augmented world. In this paper, we address the problem of connecting phys-ical objects with their virtual counterparts, especially through connections built upon visual markers. We propose a unified recognition framework that guides approaches to the metaverse access points. We illustrate the use of the framework through experimental studies under different conditions, in which an interactive and visually attractive decoration pattern, an Artcode, is used as the approach to enable the connection. This paper will be of interest to, amongst others, researchers working in Interaction Design or Augmented Reality who are seeking techniques or guidelines for augmenting physical objects in an unobtrusive, complementary manner.

HCI has recently increased its interest in the domains of museums and gifting. The former is often oriented primarily towards the past, while the latter is often oriented towards the future, in terms of anticipating the receiver’s reactions. Our article provides a sustained and well-evidenced new theoretical framework on the role of time-orientation on the design of forward-oriented (gifting) experiences in past-oriented (museum) settings. This Temporal Experience Design Framework develops from the analysis of two such studies, one smartphone app and one VR experience using passive haptics. Both interventions prompted the user to reflect on the past while planning a gift or donation for future consumption. We apply a novel combination of analyses to both projects using the lenses of conversational storytelling, performance, and human geography. Our analyses reveal the power of orienting users towards the past and the future – simultaneously – to enhance the present moment of a performative engagement. Our aim is to provide a conceptual framework that can help design researchers to identify, name, and understand how time-orientation can be used to enhance user and visitor experience. We also extrapolate design guidelines that we expect may be fruitful outside these contexts.

Losing Her Voice is a new opera which highlights the challenges of subtly interweaving digital technologies into established cultural forms. Audience members were encouraged to use their own mobile phones to interact with on-stage projections before, during and after the performance. We chart the trajectories of participation that were designed into the premiere performances of this work, and how these unfolded in practice. We identify the strategies that were effective to: encourage the adoption of the mobile app; interweave use with the other elements of the opera performance; make it consistent with the content; and ensure it complemented but was not essential to the show. We highlight the way in which three canonical trajectories must be woven together in this experience: the standard trajectory of “a night at the opera”; the dramatic arc of the specific work, and the audience member's use of their own device.

The global pandemic has driven musicians online. We report an ethnographic account of how two traditional folk clubs with little previous interest in digital platforms transitioned to online experiences. They followed very different approaches: one adapted their existing singaround format to video conferencing while the other evolved a weekly community-produced, pre-recorded show that could be watched together. However, despite their successes, participants ultimately remained unable to ‘sing in chorus’ due to network constraints. We draw on theories of liveness from performance studies to explain our findings, arguing that HCI might orientate itself to online liveness as being co-produced through rich participatory structures that dissolve traditional distinctions between live and recorded and performer and audience. We discuss how participants appropriated existing platforms to achieve this, but these in turn shaped their practices in unforeseen ways. We draw out implications for the design and deployment of future live performance platforms.

In this paper, we reflect on the applicability of the concept of trajectories to soma design. Soma design is a first-person design method which considers users’ subjective somatic or bodily experiences of a design. Due to bodily changes over time, soma experiences are inherently temporal. Current instruments for articulating soma experiences lack the power to express the effects of experiences on the body over time. To address this, we turn to trajectories, a well-known concept in the HCI community, as a way of mapping this aspect of soma experience. By showing trajectories through a range of dimensions, we can articulate individual experiences and differences in those experiences. Through analysis of a set of soma experience designs and a set of temporal dimensions within the experiences, this paper demonstrates how trajectories can provide a practical conceptual framing for articulating the temporal complexity of soma designs.

As computer interfaces spread across and even into our bodies, so we find ourselves engaged in ever more deeply connected bodily interactions. From the mouse and keyboard, to wearables and gestural...

We reflect on two museum visiting experiences that adopted the strategy of interpersonalization in which one visitor creates an experience for another. In the Gift app, visitors create personal mini-tours for specific others. In Never let me go, one visitor controls the experience of another by sending them remote instructions as they follow them around the museum. By reflecting on the design of these experiences and their deployment in museums we show how interpersonalization can deliver engaging social visits in which visitors make their own interpretations. We contrast the approach to previous research in customization and algorithmic personalization. We reveal how these experiences relied on intimacy between pairs of visitors but also between visitors and the museum. We propose that interpersonalization requires museums to step-back to make space for interpretation, but that this then raises the challenge of how to reintroduce the museum’s own perspective. Finally, we articulate strategies and challenges for applying this approach.

We report on a somaesthetic design workshop and the subsequent analytical work aiming to demystify what is entailed in a non-dualistic design stance on embodied interaction and why a first-person engagement is crucial to its unfoldings. However, as we will uncover through a detailed account of our process, these first-person engagements are deeply entangled with second- and third-person perspectives, sometimes even overlapping. The analysis furthermore reveals some strategies for bridging the body-mind divide by attending to our inner universe and dissolving or traversing dichotomies between inside and outside ; individual and social ; body and technology . By detailing the creative process, we show how soma design becomes a process of designing with and through kinesthetic experience, in turn letting us confront several dualisms that run like fault lines through HCI’s engagement with embodied interaction.

We explore how a combination of manipulations and transitions can extend Substitutional Reality to create a highly personal Virtual Reality experience. Our design aimed to meet two challenges faced by museums: the limitations of object handling and the desire for visitors to create their own interpretations. Using a Research-through-Design methodology, we built a performance-led Mixed Reality (MR) experience that lets museum visitors physically handle 3D prints or scans of museum objects to share personal stories about them. The stories are recorded and donated to the participating museum. We reflect on the complex design and the findings gained from a two-day in-the-wild deployment to explore engagement and disruption through manipulations of physicality, visuals, and scale; the transitions between spaces; and a trajectory of storytelling performance. We chart a wide scope for Performative Substitutional Reality and draw implications for VR, MR, and performance-led research in any context.

Hybrid gifting combines physical artefacts and experiences with digital interactivity to generate new kinds of gifts. Our review details how gifting is a complex social phenomenon and how digital gifting is less engaging than physical gifting for both givers and receivers. Employing a Research Through Design approach, we developed a portfolio of four hybrid gifting experiences: an augmented advent calendar; edible music tracks; personalized museum tours; and a narrated city walk. Our reflection addresses three concepts: hybrid wrapping where physical gifts become wrapped in digital media and vice versa; the importance of effortful interactions that are visible and pleasurable; and the need to consider social obligation, including opportunities for acknowledgement and reciprocation, dealing with embarrassment, and recognizing the distinction between giving and sharing. Our concepts provide guidance to practitioners who wish to design future gifting experiences while helping HCI researchers engage with the concept of gifting in a nuanced way.

The gap between research and design practice has long been a concern for the HCI community. In this article, we explore how different translations of HCI knowledge might bridge this gap. A literature review characterizes the gap as having two key dimensions—one between general theory and particular artefacts and a second between academic HCI research and professional UX design practice. We report on a 5-year engagement between HCI researchers and a major media company to explore how a particular piece of HCI research, the trajectories conceptual framework , might be translated for and with UX practitioners. We present various translations of this framework and fit them into the gap we previously identified. This leads us to refine the idea of translations , suggesting that they may be led by researchers, by practitioners or co-produced by both as boundary objects . We consider the benefits of each approach.

We explore how usage data captured from ideation cards can enable reflection on design. We deployed a deck of ideation cards on a Masters level module over two years, developing the means to capture the students' designs into a digital repository. We created two visualisations to reveal the relative co-occurrences of the cards as concept space and the relative proximity of designs (through cards used in common) as design space. We used these to elicit reflections from the perspectives of students, teachers and card designers. Our findings inspire ideas for extending the data-driven use of ideation cards throughout the design process; informing the redesign of cards, the rules for using them and their live connection to supporting materials and enabling stakeholders to reflect and recognise challenges and opportunities. We also identified the need, and potential ways, to capture a richer design rationale, including annotations, discarded cards and varying card interpretations.

Failure is a common artefact of challenging experiences, a fact of life for interactive systems but also a resource for aesthetic and improvisational performance. We present a study of how three professional pianists performed an interactive piano composition that included playing hidden codes within the music so as to control their path through the piece and trigger system actions. We reveal how apparent failures to play the codes occurred for diverse reasons including mistakes in their playing, limitations of the system, but also deliberate failures as a way of controlling the system, and how these failures provoked aesthetic and improvised responses from the performers. We propose that creative and performative interfaces should be designed to enable aesthetic failures and introduce a taxonomy that compares human approaches to failure with approaches to capable systems, revealing new creative design strategies of gaming, taming, riding and serving the system.

Interactive mirrors, typically combining semi-transparent mirrors, digital screens and interaction mechanisms have been developed for a variety of application areas. Drawing on existing techniques to create interactive mirror spaces, we investigated their performative qualities through artistic discovery and collaborative prototyping. We document a linked set of design explorations and two public, site-specific experiences that brought together artists, communities, and HCI researchers. We illustrate the abstracted interactive mirror space that practitioners in the performance art, theatre and museum sectors can work with. In turn, we also discuss six performative design strategies concerning the use of physical context, movement and narrative that HCI researchers who wish to deploy interactive mirrors in more mainstream settings need to consider.

When we use digital systems to stimulate the senses, we typically stimulate only a subset of users' senses, leaving other senses stimulated by the physical world. This creates potential for misalignment between senses, where digital and physical stimulation give conflicting signals to users. We synthesize knowledge from HCI, traditional entertainments, and underlying sensory science research relating to how senses work when given conflicting signals. Using this knowledge we present a design dimension of sensory alignment, and show how this dimension presents opportunities for a range of creative strategies ranging from full alignment of sensory stimulation, up to extreme conflict between senses.

Guitars are physical instruments that require skillful two-handed use. Their use is also supported by diverse digital and physical resources, such as videos and chord charts. To understand the challenges of interacting with supporting resources at the same time as playing we conducted an ethnographic study of the preparation activities of working musicians. We observe successive stages of individual and collaborative preparation, in which working musicians engage with a diverse range of digital and physical resources to support their preparation. Interaction with this complex ecology of digital and physical resources is finely interwoven into their embodied musical practices, which are usually encumbered by having their instrument in hand, and often by playing. We identify challenges for augmenting guitars within the rehearsal process by supporting interaction that is encumbered, contextual and connected, and suggest a range of possible responses.

Introducing interactivity to films has proven a longstanding and difficult challenge due to their narrative-driven, linear and theatre-based nature. Previous research has suggested that Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCI) may be a promising approach but also revealed a tension between being immersed in the film and thinking about control. We report a performance-led and in-the-wild study of a BCI film called The MOMENT covering its design rationale and how it was experienced by the public as controllers, non-controllers and repeat viewers. Our findings suggest that BCI movies should be designed to be credibly controllable, generate personal versions, be watchable as linear films, encourage repeat viewing and fit the medium of cinema. They also reveal how viewers appreciated the sense of editing their own personal cuts, suggesting a new stance on introducing interactivity into lean-back media in which filmmakers release editorial control to users to make their own versions.

This paper presents the GIFT smartphone app, an artist-led Research through Design project benefitting from a three-day in-the-wild deployment. The app takes as its premise the generative potential of combining the contexts of gifting and museum visits. Visitors explore the museum, searching for objects that would most appeal to the gift-receiver they have in mind, then photographing those objects and adding audio messages for their receivers describing the motivation for their choices. This paper charts the designers' key aim of creating a new frame of mind using voice, and the most striking findings discovered during in-the-wild deployment in a museum -- 'seeing with new eyes' and fostering personal connections. We discuss empathy, motivation, and bottom-up personalisation in the productive space revealed by this combination of contexts. We suggest that this work reveals opportunities for designers of gifting services as well as those working in cultural heritage.

Visual markers, in particular QR codes, have become widely adopted in museums to enable low cost interactive applications. However, visitors often do not engage with them. In this paper we explore the application of visual makers that can be designed to be meaningful and that can be created by visitors themselves. We study both the use of these markers as labels for portraits that link to audio recordings and as a mechanism for visitors to contribute their own reflections to the exhibition by drawing a marker and linking an audio comment. Our findings show visitors appreciated the use of the aesthetic markers and engaged with them at three levels -- physical placement, aesthetic content and digital content. We suggest that these different levels need to be considered in the design of future visiting systems, which make use of such markers, to ensure they are mutually supporting in shaping the experience.

We report on the design, premiere and public evaluation of a multifaceted audience interface for a complex non-linear musical performance called Climb! which is particularly suited to being experienced more than once. This interface is designed to enable audiences to understand and appreciate the work, and integrates a physical instrument and staging, projected visuals, personal devices and an online archive. A public premiere concert comprising two performances of Climb! revealed how the audience reoriented to the second performance through growing understanding and comparison to the first. Using trajectories as an analytical framework for the audience 'journey' made apparent: how the trajectories of a single performance are embedded within the larger trajectories of a concert and the creative work as a whole; the distinctive demands of understanding and interpretation; and the potential of the archive in enabling appreciation across repeated performances.

We explore how the convergence of the digital and physical into hybrid products leads to new possibilities for customization. We report on a technology probe, a hybrid advent calendar with both paper form and digital layers of content, both of which were designed to be customizable. We reveal how over two hundred active users adapted its physical and digital aspects in various ways, some anticipated and familiar, but others surprising. This leads us to contribute concepts to help understand and design for hybrid customization -- the idea of broad customization spanning physical and digital; end-to-end customization by different stakeholders along the value chain for a product; and the combination of these into customization maps.

As locative media and augmented reality spread into the everyday world so it becomes important to create aesthetic visual markers at scale. We explore a designer-centred approach in which skilled designers handcraft seed designs that are automatically recombined to create many markers as subtle variants of a common theme. First, we extend the d-touch topological approach to creating visual markers that has previously been shown to support creative design with two new techniques: area order codes and visual checksums. We then show how the topological structure of such markers provides the basis for recombining designs to generate many variations. We demonstrate our approach through the creation of beautiful, personalized and interactive wallpaper. We reflect on how technologies must enable designers to balance goals of scalability, aesthetics and reliability in creating beautiful interactive decoration.

We present our case study on gifting digital music, The Rough Mile, as an example of a Framework of Immersive Practice, intended for researchers and practitioners in HCI and interaction design. Although immersion is a frequently used term in the HCI and related literatures, we find no definitions or frameworks that are robust enough to capture the full range of multi-sensory, emotional, and cognitive engagement that the richest of these experiences can entail. We therefore turn to the theatrical performance literature to distil a theory-based framework of practices that can apply to interdisciplinary projects as well as works with an entirely aesthetic aim. The design choices and findings of The Rough Mile are presented in terms of this framework, leading to a discussion of the design guidelines that can shape its use in any HCI or interaction design project aiming for a deep, personal engagement through technology.

Virtual reality experiences typically isolate the user from the real world. Notions of immersion are conventionally associated with the idea of convincing users that they are in another place, disassociated from physical reality. Given the user is however situated in that physical reality, kinesthetic bodily sensations often conflict with the virtual reality. In this paper we seek to elucidate the challenges associated with developing Visual-Kinaesthetic Experiences - experiences which provide related visual and kinaesthetic spectacle. Rather than use complex motion platforms, we submit here that physical reality is replete with interesting kinaesthetic experiences, which may be repurposed by the application of new visuals to create engaging hybrid experiences. We approach this by describing the development and deployment of Oscillate - a virtual reality experience that takes place on a swing, using it as an example to draw out what makes such experiences intrinsically interesting, and to construct three design challenges for this space.

We report lessons from iteratively developing a music recognition system to enable a wide range of musicians to embed musical codes into their typical performance practice. The musician composes fragments of music that can be played back with varying levels of embellishment, disguise and looseness to trigger digital interactions. We collaborated with twenty-three musicians, spanning professionals to amateurs and working with a variety of instruments. We chart the rapid evolution of the system to meet their needs as they strove to integrate music recognition technology into their performance practice, introducing multiple features to enable them to trade-off reliability with musical expression. Collectively, these support the idea of deliberately introducing "looseness" into interactive systems by addressing the three key challenges of control, feedback and attunement, and highlight the potential role for written notations in other recognition-based systems.

This paper reflects on the dynamics and practices of building a maker community around a new hardware platform. We examine the factors promoting the successful uptake of a maker platform from two perspectives: first, we investigate the technical and user experience considerations that users identify as the most important. Second, we explore the specific activities that help attract a community and encourage sustained participation. We present an inductive approach based on the case study of Bela, an embedded platform for creating interactive audio systems. The technical design and community building processes are detailed, culminating in a successful crowdfunding campaign. To further understand the community dynamics, the paper also presents an intensive three-day workshop with eight digital musical instrument designers. From observations and interviews, we reflect on the relationship between the platform and the community and offer suggestions for HCI researchers and practitioners interested in establishing their own maker communities.

We present a case study of how Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) theory is reused within the field. We analyze the HCI literature in order to reveal the impact of one particular theory, the trajectories framework that has been cited as an example of both contemporary HCI theory and a strong concept that sits between theory and design practice. Our analysis of 60 papers that seriously engaged with trajectories reveals the purposes that the framework served and which parts of it they used. We compare our findings to the originally stated goals of trajectories and to subsequent claims of its status as both theory and strong concept. The results shed new light on what we mean by theory in HCI, including its relationship to practice and to other disciplines.

A myriad of digital artifacts are routinely exchanged online. While previous studies suggest that these are sometimes considered to be gifts, CSCW has largely overlooked explicit digital gifting where people deliberately choose to give digital media as gifts. We present an interview study that systematically analyzes the nature of digital gifting in comparison to conventional physical gifting. A five-stage gift exchange model, synthesized from the literature, frames this study. Findings reveal that there are distinctive gaps in people's engagement with the digital gifting process compared to physical gifting. Participants' accounts show how digital gifts often involve less labor, are sometimes not perceived as gifts by the recipient and are rarely reflected on and reciprocated. We conclude by drawing out design implications for digital gifting services and rituals.

In this paper we use results from two ethnographic studies of the music production process to examine some key issues regarding how work is currently accomplished in studio production environments. These issues relate in particular to workflows and how metadata is adapted to the specific needs of specific parts of the process. We find that there can be significant tensions between how reasoning is applied to metadata at different stages of production and that this can lead to overheads where metadata has to be either changed or created anew to make the process work. On the basis of these findings we articulate some of the potential solutions we are now examining. These centre in particular upon the notions of Digital/Dynamic Musical Objects and flexible metadata shells.

We explore the crafting of interactive decoration for everyday artefacts. This involves adorning them with decorative patterns that enhance their beauty while triggering digital interactions when scanned with cameras. These are realized using an existing augmented reality technique that embeds computer readable codes into the topological structures of hand-drawn patterns. We describe a research through design process that engaged artisans to craft a portfolio of interactive artefacts, including ceramic bowls, embroidered gift cards, fabric souvenirs, and an acoustic guitar. We annotate this portfolio with reflections on the crafting process, revealing how artisans addressed pattern, materials, form and function, and digital mappings throughout their craft process. Further reflection on our portfolio reveals how they bridged between human and system perceptions of visual patterns and engaged in a deep embedding of digital interactions into physical materials. Our findings demonstrate the potential for interactive decoration, distilling the craft knowledge involved in creating aesthetic and functional decoration, highlight the need for transparent computer vision technologies, and raise wider issues for HCI’s growing engagement with craft.

This paper responds to an increasing interest in how data-driven interactive artworks can support a greater understanding of the relationship between humans and data. This paper extends this work by focusing on the The Prediction Machine, an interactive and data-driven artwork that arose from collaborations between an artist, climate scientists, HCI researchers and the wider public. A study of the practice-led process reveals: (a) how the artist "performed" scientific data across multiple outputs; (b) how the artist walked a line between scientific and artistic process; (c) how the public experienced data across multiple components of the artwork; (d) how the artwork can be seen as process rather than a exhibition or artifact; and (e) how tensions between artistic strategies and scientific processes inherent in the creation of data-driven artworks might inform future work involving public engagement with scientific data.

This paper explores the design of digital musical instruments (DMIs) for exploratory play. Based on Gaver's principles of ludic design, we examine the ways in which people come to terms with an unfamiliar musical interface. We describe two workshops with the D-Box, a DMI designed to be modified and hacked by the user. The operation of the D-Box is deliberately left ambiguous to encourage users to develop their own meanings and interaction techniques. During the workshops we observed emergent patterns of exploration which revealed a rich process of exploratory play. We discuss our observations in relation to previous literature on appropriation, ambiguity and ludic engagement, and we provide recommendations for the design of playful and exploratory interfaces.

We present a research-through-design exploration of transforming large-scale public illustrations into interactive media. We collaborated with creative practitioners to extend an existing visual marker technology to support spatial and layered interaction with wall-sized images. We document how these techniques were used to design interactive illustrations and how visitors to an exhibition engaged with these. We conclude that it is feasible to combine spatial and layered interactions to attach complex narratives to public illustrations, and highlight challenges around instruction giving, sociality and repeat experiences.

We explore how physical artefacts can be connected to digital records of where they have been, who they have encountered and what has happened to them, and how this can enhance their meaning and utility. We describe how a travelling technology probe in the form of an augmented acoustic guitar engaged users in a design conversation as it visited homes, studios, gigs, workshops and lessons, and how this revealed the diversity and utility of its digital record. We describe how this record was captured and flexibly mapped to the physical guitar and proxy artefacts. We contribute a conceptual framework for accountable artefacts that articulates how multiple and complex mappings between physical artefacts and their digital records may be created, appropriated, shared and interrogated to deliver accounts of provenance and use as well as methodological reflections on technology probes.

This paper explores the design space of bio-responsive entertainment, in this case using a film that responds to the brain and blink data of users. A film was created with four parallel channels of footage, where blinking and levels of attention and meditation, as recorded by a commercially available EEG device, affected which footage participants saw. As a performance-led piece of research in the wild, this experience, named #Scanners, was presented at a week long national exhibition in the UK. We examined the experiences of 35 viewers, and found that these forms of partially-involuntary control created engaging and enjoyable, but sometimes distracting, experiences. We translate our findings into a two-dimensional design space between the extent of voluntary control that a physiological measure can provide against the level of conscious awareness that the user has of that control. This highlights that novel design opportunities exist when deviating from these two-dimensions - when giving up conscious control and when abstracting the affect of control. Reflection on of how viewers negotiated this space during an experience reveals novel design tactics.

This paper reports and discusses the findings of an exploratory study into collaborative user practice with a multiscreen television application. MarathOn Multiscreen allows users to view, share and curate amateur and professional video footage of a community marathon event. Our investigations focused on collaborative sharing practices across different viewing activities and devices, the roles taken by different devices in a viewing ecology, and observations on how users consume professional and amateur content. Our Work uncovers significant differences in user behaviour and collaboration when engaged in more participatory viewing activities, such as sorting and ranking footage, which has implications for awareness of other users' interactions while viewing together and alone. In addition, user appreciation and use of amateur video content is dependent not only on quality and activity but their personal involvement in the contents.

Visiting museums as part of a group poses the challenge of managing engagement with exhibits while preserving group cohesion. We respond to this by reconfiguring the social dynamic of visiting with an experience designed specifically for groups, that invites the group members themselves to design and 'gift' interpretations to one another. We present a trial of this experience with groups of family and friends at a museum. We show how groups managed and configured themselves during the visit, revealing the strategies involved in maintaining different group behaviors. We discuss how our design accommodated different visiting styles by making objects social and scaffolding rather than directing the group experience. We interpret our findings to frame group coherence as a flexible and configurable phenomenon within CSCW.

Listening to music on the move is an everyday activity for many people. This paper proposes geotracks and geolists, music tracks and playlists of existing music that are aligned and adapted to specific journeys. We describe how everyday walking journeys such as commutes to work and existing popular music tracks can each be analysed, decomposed and then brought together, using musical adaptations including skipping and repeating parts of tracks, dynamically remixing tracks and cross-fades. Using a naturalistic experiment we compared walking while listening to geotracks (dynamically adapted using GPS location information) to walking while listening to a fixed playlist. Overall, participants enjoyed the walk more when listening to the adaptive geotracks. However adapting the lengths of tracks appeared to detract from the experience of the music in some situations and for some participants, revealing trade-offs in achieving fine-grained alignment of music and walking journeys.

Augmenting navigation systems with landmarks has been posited as a method of improving the effectiveness of the technology and enhancing drivers’ engagement with the environment. However, good navigational landmarks are both laborious to collect and difficult to define. This research aimed to devise a game concept which could be played by passengers in cars, and would collect useful landmark data as a by-product. The paper describes how a virtual graffiti tagging game concept was created and tested during on-road trials with 38 participants. The data collected in the road trials were then validated using a survey, in which 100 respondents assessed the quality of the landmarks collected and their potential for reuse in navigation applications. Players of the game displayed a consensus in choosing where to place their graffiti tags, with over 30% of players selecting the same object to tag in 10 of the 12 locations. Furthermore, significant correlation was found between how highly landmarks were rated in the survey and how frequently they were tagged during the game. The research provides evidence that using crowdsourcing games to collect landmarks does not require large numbers of people, or extensive coverage of an area, to produce suitable candidate landmarks for navigation.

While HCI has a long tradition of formally modelling task-based interactions with graphical user interfaces, there has been less progress in modelling emerging ubiquitous computing systems due in large part to their highly contextual nature and dependence on unreliable sensing systems. We present an exploration of modelling an example ubiquitous system, the Savannah game, using the mathematical formalism of bigraphs, which are based on a universal process algebra that encapsulates both dynamic and spatial behaviour of autonomous agents that interact and move among each other, or within each other. We establish a modelling approach based on four perspectives on ubiquitous systems—Computational, Physical, Human, and Technology—and explore how these interact with one another. We show how our model explains observed inconsistencies in user trials of Savannah, and then, how formal analysis reveals an incompleteness in design and guides extensions of the model and/or possible system re-design to resolve this.

This paper investigates the playful photo taking behaviour of teenagers during group visits to two touristic public events (an airshow and a guided tour of a museum). These studies provide the feedback for the iterative development of a smartphone based anonymous image annotation and sharing application. The resulting implications for the design of such photo systems are examined, specifically the appropriateness of opportunistic upload for social media. Playfulness in photography has many implications regarding wider social behaviours. Comic annotations provide the ability to create humorous reinterpretations of photos, and the presence of humour and in-jokes affect the makeup of the audience with whom a group would like to share. It is counter-productive that an application encouraging such limiting behaviours may conflict with the open nature of touristic events. In addition, the shared images have an ephemeral quality and are therefore of transient value (compared to more tangible souvenirs), and their production through the application can ultimately distract from the experience of the visit itself.

Every guitar tells a story, from the provenance of its tonewoods, to the craft of its making, to the players that own it, to the places it visits, to the many songs that it plays. I will tell you the story of a unique guitar, one that has been created with the express purpose of telling its own life story. My guitar is called Carolan in honour of the legendary composer Turlough O'Carolan, the famous itinerant harper who roamed Ireland at the turn of the 18th century. Like its namesake, Carolan is a roving bard; a performer that passes from place to place, learning tunes, songs and stories as it goes and sharing them with those it encounters along the way. This is made possible through interactive decorative patterns that are inlaid into the instrument?s wood and that can be scanned using mobile devices in order to reveal different facets of Carolan?s digital footprint. By reflecting on how Carolan was constructed by a luthier and graphic designer and subsequently experienced by players, I will explore the relationship between a valuable physical artefact and its digital footprint. What does such a footprint comprise? How might it add value to the artefact? And how can this digital footprint become permanently associated with the physical artefact? By reflecting on the challenges of making Carolan's interactive decorative inlay, I will explore the wider relationship between digital interactivity and traditional craft skills such as luthiery. I will draw on these reflections to inform an emerging research agenda for hybrid craft -- the skillful interleaving of physical materials and digital interactions to create valuable handmade artefacts. You can follow Carolan's story at: www.carolanguitar.com

Creating and utilizing simple links between items and locations in map-based systems has become a mainstream component of modern computing. In this paper, we explore support for "art mapping", an activity that requires consideration of more complex interpretations of spatial relationships as users engage with identifying locations of relevance to artworks. Through a user study of the ArtMaps platform, and an exploratory study with professional artists, we identify diverse interpretations of spatial meaning in relation to art. We find that art mapping highlights potential for more active engagement with art through technology, but challenges existing systems for spatial representation. Through connecting our findings with work on designing for interpretation, and on space and place in HCI, we contribute new understanding of creating engagement through the spatial interpretation of art, and define potential characteristics and uses of holistic "footprints" for artworks.

We present an ethnographic study of the practice of miniature wargaming in order to shed light onto the complex lives of physical things and the ways in which they acquire data footprints. We take an extended view of the practice, revealing how people invest great effort into crafting miniatures, playing with them, curating and telling stories about them, and passing them on. Throughout, we emphasise the use of both traditional and digital technologies to build rich data footprints. In discussing our findings, we adopt a "thing-centric" perspective that focuses on the extended lifetimes of the miniatures themselves. This enables us to identify opportunities for digital augmentation in support of capturing "life away from the table" and a need for HCI to focus on designing trajectories of things.

There has been a massive growth in the number of people who film and upload amateur footage of events to services such as Facebook and Youtube, or even stream live to services such as LiveStream. We present an exploratory study that investigates the potential of these spectators in creating footage en masse; in this case, during a live trial at a local marathon. We deployed a prototype app, RunSpotRun, as a technology probe to see what kinds of footage spectators would produce. We present an analysis of this footage in terms of its coverage, quality, and contents, and also discuss the implications for a) spectators enjoying the race, and b) extracting the stories of individual runners throughout the race. We conclude with a discussion of the challenges that remain for deploying such technology at a larger scale.

We present an in-the-wild project to design and study a mobile musical soundtrack that enhances the experience of visiting a sculpture park. As with soundtracks for films and games, the goal was to enhance the emotional and narrative aspects of the experience while remaining in the background. We describe a compositional approach in which we first established a broad musical landscape before treating specific exhibits with detailed musical trajectories. Our study reveals how our soundtrack dramatically shaped visitors' experiences while they remained largely unaware of its operation. We distil seven experiential factors to be addressed by mobile soundtracks alongside ten compositional guidelines.

This paper introduces FugaciousFilm, a soap film based touch display, as a platform for Attentive Interaction that encourages the user to be highly focused throughout the use of the interface. Previous work on ephemeral user interfaces has primarily focused on the development of ambient and peripheral displays. In contrast, FugaciousFilm is an ephemeral display that aims to promote highly attentive interaction. We present the iterative process of developing this interface, spanning technical explorations, prototyping and a user study. We report lessons learnt when designing the interface; ranging from the soap film mixture to the impact of frames and apertures. We then describe developing the touch, push, pull and pop interactions. Our user study shows how FugaciousFilm led to focused and attentive interactions during a tournament of enhanced Tic-Tac-Toe. We then finish by discussing how the principles of vulnerability and delicacy can motivate the design of attentive ephemeral interfaces.

We present a study of a mixed reality game called 'I'd Hide You' that involves live video streaming from the city streets. We chart the significant challenges facing performers on the streets who must simultaneously engage in the game, stream compelling video footage featuring themselves, and interact with a remote online audience. We reveal how these street performers manage four key tensions: between their body and camera; between the demands of online audiences and what takes place on-the-street; between what appears 'frontstage' on camera versus what happens 'backstage'; and balancing being a player of the game with being a performer. By reflecting on how they achieve this, we are able to draw out wider lessons for future interfaces aimed at supporting people broadcasting video of themselves to online audiences while engaged in games, sports and other demanding real-world activities.

We explore the ethical implications of HCI's turn to the ‘cultural’. This is motivated by an awareness of how cultural applications, in our case interactive performances, raise ethical issues that may challenge established research ethics processes. We review research ethics, HCI's engagement with ethics and the ethics of theatrical performance. Following an approach grounded in Responsible Research Innovation, we present the findings from a workshop in which artists, curators, commissioners, and researchers explored ethical challenges revealed by four case studies. We identify six ethical challenges for HCI's engagement with cultural applications: transgression, boundaries, consent, withdrawal, data, and integrity. We discuss two broader implications of these: managing tensions between multiple overlapping ethical frames; and the importance of managing ethical challenges during and after an experience as well as beforehand. Finally, we discuss how our findings extend previous discussions of Value Sensitive Design in HCI.

We present a study of how filmmakers collected and visualized physiological data—“biodata”—to construct a series of short promotional films depicting people undergoing “thrilling” experiences. Drawing on ethnographic studies of two major advertising campaigns, we highlight key concerns for integrating sensors and sensor data into film production. Our findings address the perceived benefits of using biodata within narratives; the nature of different on-screen representations of biodata; and the challenges presented when integrating biodata into production processes. Drawing on this, we reconsider the nature of information visualization in the filmmaking context. Further implications from our case studies provide recommendations for human--computer interaction (HCI) collaborations with filmmaking and broadcast industries, focusing both on the practical matters of fitting sensor technologies into and handling data within production workflows, as well as discussing the broader implications for managing the veracity of that data within professional media production.

The designers of mobile guides for museums and galleries face three major challenges: fostering rich interpretation, delivering deep personalization, and enabling a coherent social visit. We propose an approach to tackling all three simultaneously by inviting visitors to design an interpretation that is specifically tailored for a friend or loved one that they then experience together. We describe a trial of this approach at a contemporary art gallery, revealing how visitors designed personal and sometimes provocative experiences for people they knew well. We reveal how pairs of visitors negotiated these experiences together, showing how our approach could deliver intense experiences for both, but also required them to manage social risk. By interpreting our findings through the lens of 'gift giving' we shed new light on ongoing explorations of interpretation, personalization and social visiting within HCI.

Musical soundtracks will be important features of future locative experiences from tours to games. We present a study designed to uncover potential relationships between higher-level musical structures such as harmony, melody, timbre, dynamic intensity and punctuation and users' spatial experiences. We observed twenty-two participants exploring an open field while listening to four contrasting musical compositions, and then interviewed them afterwards. We report their different approaches to interpreting the music, strategies for mapping zones, choice of stopping destinations, and their awareness and appreciation of the music. Our discussion of these findings in relation to the literature leads us to propose six initial principles to guide the composition of mobile and locative soundtracks, and also to articulate a three-layer framework of global, regional and local attachment to help guide the attachment of musical features to different regions within a locative experience.

HCI is increasingly interested in amateurism, but the wider literature suggests that the amateur is a complex and distinctive phenomenon. An interview study reveals the nature of the amateur in the digital age. Even though operating non-professionally at a micro-scale, amateur musicians employ a plethora of online services to sustain local fanbases, reach out to new fans, collaborate internationally, and actively promote both digital and material products. Our findings lead to recommendations for event-oriented promotion tools; community-oriented analytics; tangible and embedded products; and limited-edition digital experiences. We conclude that HCI needs to recognise the amateur as an important class of user, one who is serious about their leisure, and who is also distinct from the professional as from the novice and hobbyist.

Ethnographic study in two contrasting museums highlights a widespread but rarely documented challenge for CSCW design. Visitors' engagement with exhibits often ends prematurely due to the need to keep up with or attend to fellow group members. We unpack the mechanics of these kinds of phenomena revealing how the behaviours of summoning, pressurizing, herding, sidelining, and rounding up, lead to the responses of following, skimming and digging in. We show how the problem is especially challenging where young children are involved. As an initial prompt we explore two ways in which CSCW could help address this challenge: enabling a more fluid association between information and exhibits; and helping reconfigure the social nature of visiting.

Participate was a 3-year collaboration between industry and academia to explore how mobile, Web and broadcast technologies could combine to deliver environmental campaigns. In a series of pilot projects, schools used mobile sensors to enhance science learning; visitors to an ecological attraction employed mobile phones to access and generate locative media; and the public played a mobile phone game that challenged their environmental behaviours. Key elements of these were carried forward into an integrated trial in which participants were assigned a series of environmental missions as part of an overarching narrative that was delivered across mobile, broadcast and Web platforms. These experiences use a three-layered structure for campaigns that draw on experts, local groups and the general public, who engage through a combination of playful characterisation and social networking.

There is a growing emphasis in many countries on matters such as participation in e-government, e-democracy, the provision of forums for online debate, and so on. A critical issue in all of these cases is one of encouraging engagement across a broad spectrum of potentially interested parties and stakeholders. In this paper, we use an ethnographic study of an online event, designed to encourage debate, to explore some critical issues in how the mechanisms productive of debate have shifted in company with the Web 2.0 phenomenon. By contrasting this with a prior study of how players managed their gameplay in a multiplayer pervasive game, we focus upon how different ways of constructing games and events can have serious implications for their ordinary everyday reportability in routine face-to-face interactions. We conclude that designing for reportability should be an active consideration when designing the resources for online debate and consider some ways in which that might be accomplished.

We apply the HCI concept of trajectories to the design of a sculpture trail. We crafted a trajectory through each sculpture, combining textual and audio instructions to drive directed viewing, movement and touching while listening to accompanying music. We designed key transitions along the way to oscillate between moments of social interaction and isolated personal engagement, and to deliver official interpretation only after visitors had been given the opportunity to make their own. We describe how visitors generally followed our trajectory, engaging with sculptures and making interpretations that sometimes challenged the received interpretation. We relate our findings to discussions of sense-making and design for multiple interpretations, concluding that curators and designers may benefit from considering \'18trajectories of interpretation'.

A study of an interactive artwork shows how artists engaged the public with scientific climate change data. The artwork visualised live environmental data collected from remote trees, alongside both historical and forecast global CO2 data. Visitors also took part in a mobile sensing experience in a nearby forest. Our study draws on the perspectives of the artists, visitors and a climate scientist to reveal how the work was designed and experienced. We show that the artists adopted a distinct approach that fostered an emotional engagement with data rather than an informative or persuasive one. We chart the performative strategies they used to achieve this including sensory engagement with data, a temporal structure that balanced liveness with slowness, and the juxtaposition of different treatments of the data to enable interpretation and dialogue.

We explore the idea of making aesthetic decorative patterns that contain multiple visual codes. We chart an iterative collaboration with ceramic designers and a restaurant to refine a recognition technology to work reliably on ceramics, produce a pattern book of designs, and prototype sets of tableware and a mobile app to enhance a dining experience. We document how the designers learned to work with and creatively exploit the technology, enriching their patterns with embellishments and backgrounds and developing strategies for embedding codes into complex designs. We discuss the potential and challenges of interacting with such patterns. We argue for a transition from designing 'codes to patterns' that reflects the skills of designers alongside the development of new technologies.

With the development of pervasive computing, location-aware pervasive games have proliferated quickly. To counter the inefficiency of information adaptation based on a location and a radius, this article presents the design and implementation of Your Way Your Missions (YWYM), which is a location-aware pervasive game exploiting the routes of players. YWYM provides a Google Maps–based tool for players to predefine routes, and utilizes self-reporting method to obtain the planned routes of players. By such a design, missions are returned to players in terms of the location properties of missions and the planned routes of players. A field study was conducted to investigate the usage of YWYM, and the results indicate that route predefining and self-reporting methods are an effective approach to obtain the planned routes of players, and information adaptation based on the planned routes of players could help them find missions at any place and any time.

We explore the approach of performance-led research in the wild in which artists drive the creation of novel performances with the support of HCI researchers that are then deployed and studied at public performance in cultural settings such as galleries, festivals and on the city streets. We motivate the approach and then describe how it consists of three distinct activities -- practice, studies and theory -- that are interleaved in complex ways through nine different relationships. We present a historical account of how the approach has evolved over a fifteen-year period, charting the evolution of a complex web of projects, papers, and relationships between them. We articulate the challenges of pursuing each activity as well as overarching challenges of balancing artistic and research interests, flexible management of relationships, and finally ethics.

An ethnographic study uncovers the work of nightclub DJs, which extends far beyond the act of mixing tracks to also encompass collecting music, preparing for performances, and promotion and networking. We reveal how DJs value vinyl and digital formats in different ways, acquire music through 'crate digging', prepare physical and digital crates of music before gigs, and how these underpin improvised selections during their performances. We document how DJs interact with promoters, venues, dancers and other DJs, revealing an etiquette that governs how they select and share music, and manage an ongoing tension between revealing and hiding metadata so as to maintain a competitive edge. We raise implications for technologies to support DJs, while also shedding light on previous studies of music consumption and sharing in other settings.

We argue for deliberately and systematically creating uncomfortable interactions as part of powerful cultural experiences. We identify the potential benefits of uncomfortable interactions under the general headings of entertainment, enlightenment and sociality. We then review artworks and performances that have employed discomfort, including two complementary examples from the worlds of entertainment and performance. From this, we articulate a suite of tactics for designing four primary forms of discomfort referred to as visceral, cultural, control and intimate. We discuss how moments of discomfort need to be embedded into an overall experience which requires a further consideration of the dramatic acts of exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, and dénouement. Finally, we discuss an ethical framework for uncomfortable interactions which leads us to revisit key issues of consent, withdrawal, privacy and risk.

This paper uses a detailed ethnographic study of an ambulatory experience, where participants were invited to explore the perspective of two notorious terrorists, in order to discuss the nature of instruction-giving and, most particularly, the methodical ways in which such instructions are complied with. Four distinct layers of compliance are identified, as are three different kinds of accountability, all of which stand potentially at odds with one another. The paper examines the tensions created by this, tensions that are further aggravated by instructions usually being delivered down a thin channel, with considerable surrounding contextual complexity and little opportunity for repair, and uncovers some core challenges for future design in relation to providing instructions for, and orchestrating a range of possible activities.

An ethnographic study of Irish music sessions in pubs elaborates the collaborative work involved in making traditional music. Central to this distinctive achievement is the sequencing of tunes so that they hang together and combine to form discrete "sets", which rely on a shared knowledge of musical repertoires. Our study shows how musicians develop this musical knowledge through the use of digital resources and social networks. It also reveals how musicians construct and make use of various paper props to help bring their knowledge to bear in the actual in vivo course of a session so as to maintain the moral order of making music together in a demonstrably traditional way. The social demands of musical "etiquette" sensitise CSCW to the need to design technologies to support the "situated discretion" that is essential to traditional practices. We elaborate this notion through a discussion of requirements for technologies that bridge between online resources and the collaborative sequencing of tunes during performance.

Automics is a photo-souvenir service which utilises mobile devices to support the capture, sharing and annotation of digital images amongst groups of visitors to theme parks. The prototype service mixes individual and group photo-capture with existing in-park, on-ride photo services, to allow users to create printed photo-stories. Herein we discuss initial fieldwork in theme parks that grounded the design of Automics, our development of the service prototype, and its real-world evaluation with theme park visitors. We relate our findings on user experience of the service to a literature on mobile photoware, finding implications for the design of souvenir services.

Several emerging strands of HCI involve connecting physical exercise activity with digital interactive systems to create intense combined experiences, for example pervasive games, GPS based exercise games and 'exertion interfaces'. Many of these systems are mobile, used outside in public, whilst moving quickly through the environment. In this paper, we argue that the combination of moving fast and interacting with a digital system allows us to create a powerfully intense experience for participants, and that key to this is careful attention to the way in which movement is combined with digital content.

Emerging robotic technologies are enabling the control of individual seats on rollercoasters and other thrill rides. We explore the potential of breathing as an effective and engaging way of driving this. Observations and interviews from trials of an enhanced bucking bronco ride show that breath-control is fun, challenging and intelligible, and reveal riders-x tactics as they battled the machine. We conclude that breath control is feasible and appropriate for controlling rides, unpack its important characteristics, and consider how it might be built into future ride systems. We argue that the combination of voluntary and involuntary factors in breathing is especially appealing for controlling rides as it balances game-like elements of skill and learning against the thrill of surrendering control to the machine.

We investigate whether opportune moments to deliver notifications surface at the endings of episodes of mobile interaction (making voice calls or receiving SMS) based on the assumption that the endings collocate with naturally occurring breakpoint in the user's primary task. Testing this with a naturalistic experiment we find that interruptions (notifications) are attended to and dealt with significantly more quickly after a user has finished an episode of mobile interaction compared to a random baseline condition, supporting the potential utility of this notification strategy. We also find that the workload and situational appropriateness of the secondary interruption task significantly affect subsequent delay and completion rate of the tasks. In situ self-reports and interviews reveal complexities in the subjective experience of the interruption, which suggest that a more nuanced classification of the particular call or SMS and its relationship to the primary task(s) would be desirable.

An ethnographic study reveals how professional artists created a spectator interface for the interactive game Day of the Figurines, designing the size, shape, height and materials of two tabletop interfaces before carefully arranging them in a local setting. We also show how participants experienced this interface. We consider how the artists worked with a multi-scale notion of interactional trajectory that combined trajectories through individual displays, trajectories through a local ecology of displays, and trajectories through an entire experience. Our findings shed light on discussions within HCI concerning interaction with tangible and tabletop displays, spectator interfaces, ecologies of displays, and trajectories through cultural experiences.

We explore the ways in which interfaces can be designed to deceive users so as to create the illusion of magic. We present a study of an experimental performance in which a magician used a computer vision system to conduct a series of illusions based on the well-known 'three cups' magic trick. We explain our findings in terms of the two broad strategies of misdirecting attention and setting false expectations, articulating specific tactics that were employed in each case. We draw on existing theories of collaborative and spectator interfaces, ambiguity and interpretation, and trajectories through experiences to explain our findings in broader HCI terms. We also extend and integrate current theory to provide refined sensitising concepts for analysing deceptive interactions.

In this paper we investigate effects of the content of interruptions and of the time of interruption delivery on mobile phones. We review related work and report on a naturalistic quasi-experiment using experience-sampling that showed that the receptivity to an interruption is influenced by its content rather than by its time of delivery in the employed modality of delivery - SMS. We also examined the underlying variables that increase the perceived quality of content and found that the factors interest, entertainment, relevance and actionability influence people's receptivity significantly. Our findings inform system design that seeks to provide context-sensitive information or to predict interruptibility and suggest the consideration of receptivity as an extension to the way we think and reason about interruptibility.

The novel experience Anywhere allowed participants to explore an urban area, tying together information not normally available, new points of views and interaction embedded into physical places. Guided by 'unseen', on-the-street performers in an ongoing conversation maintained over mobile phones, they gained access to locative media and staged performances. Our analysis demonstrates how Anywhere produced engaging and uniquely personalised paths through a complex landscape of content, negotiated by the performer-participant pair around various conflicting constraints. We reflect our analysis through the lens of the key characteristics exhibited by mechanisms that support city exploration, before focussing on possible extensions to the technological support of teams of professional and amateur guides.

The idea of interactional trajectories through interfaces has emerged as a sensitizing concept from recent studies of tangible interfaces and interaction in museums and galleries. We put this concept to work as a lens to reflect on published studies of complex user experiences that extend over space and time and involve multiple roles and interfaces. We develop a conceptual framework in which trajectories explain these user experiences as journeys through hybrid structures, punctuated by transitions, and in which interactivity and collaboration are orchestrated. Our framework is intended to sensitize future studies, help distill craft knowledge into design guidelines and patterns, identify technology requirements, and provide a boundary object to connect HCI with Performance Studies.

We investigate the prediction of player engagement to address temporal issues arising from the long-term character of pervasive experiences such as interruptibility, mutual player state awareness, disengagement and synchronization on re-engagement. We introduce a model that operationalizes engagement in terms of the elapsed and response time in game messages. We designed and conducted an experiment based on the experience-sampling method to evaluate our model on the basis of a long-term SMS-based game called Day of the Figurines. Statistical analysis supports the hypothesis that player engagement can be predicted by the continuous data properties elapsed time and response time. Our findings point towards further research towards the adaptation of pervasive experiences to the player's temporal context.

We present two studies of participatory sensing in the wild, in which groups of young people used sensors to collect environmental data along with contextual information such as photographs and written observations. These studies reveal how participants focused their attention on key events of interest, providing detailed information over a background of less carefully gathered automatic readings. Participants responded to events in their surroundings, sudden changes in sensor data, and recorded details relevant to the process of gathering the data itself. Based on these studies a framework is described, highlighting the negotiation of five activities in the experiences; planning, testing, navigation, capture and reflection.

This paper charts the distinctive challenges of designing mobile experiences for cyclists and presents two studies of mobile cycle-based experiences: one a heritage tour; the other an exploration of a city at dusk involving recording and listening to personal stories. To understand the cyclists' experiences questionnaires, interviews and observations are drawn on to derive eight lessons for designing cycle-based interaction including: cycling proficiency, physicality, impact of the environment, media and hardware design, collaboration, and safety. The conclusion is that design has to respect the distinctive nature of cycling as a mode of transport and needs to carefully interweave moments of interaction with it.

In order to design tangible technologies that are effective in supporting children's learning, it is important to understand what advantages or limitations are afforded by physical manipulation. This paper highlights some of the perceptual and manipulative properties of physical representations with respect to their effect on the problem space and describes how, for certain problem types, these may benefit children's strategies and learning. These arguments are discussed in relation to ongoing research into children's use of physical materials to solve numerical problems, and comparative performance using virtual materials. The paper uses this research to suggest ways in which tangible designs may support learning in this area by building on the advantages of physical manipulation whilst avoiding limiting exploration by constraining the range of actions and possible learning opportunities provided.

Householders are increasingly adopting home networking as a solution to the demands created by the presence of multiple computers, devices, and the desire to access the Internet. However, current network solutions are derived from the world of work (and initially the military) and provide poor support for the needs of the home. We present the key findings to emerge from empirical studies of home networks in the UK and US. The studies reveal two key kinds of work that effective home networking relies upon: one, the technical work of setting up and maintaining the home network, and the other, the collaborative and socially organized work of the home which the network is embedded in and supports. The two are thoroughly intertwined and rely upon one another for their realization, yet neither is adequately supported by current networking technologies and applications. Explication of the “work to make the home network work” opens up the design space for the continued integration of the home network in domestic life and elaboration of future support. Key issues for development include the development of networking facilities that do not require advanced networking knowledge, that are flexible and support the local social order of the home and the evolution of its routines, and which ultimately make the home network visible and accountable to household members.

Temporal trajectories can represent the complex mappings between story time and clock time that are to be found in shared interactive narratives such as computer games and interactive performances. There are three kinds. Canonical trajectories express an author's intended mapping of story time onto clock time as part of the plot and schedule of an experience. Participant trajectories reflect a participant's actual journey through story time and clock time as they interact with the experience. Historic trajectories represent the subsequent selection and reuse of segments of recorded participant trajectories to create histories of past events. We show how temporal trajectories help us analyse the nature of time in existing experiences and can also generate new approaches to dealing with temporal issues such as: disengagement and reengagement, adapting to different paces of interaction, synchronising different participants, and enabling encounters and travel across time.

Fairground: Thrill Laboratory was a series of live events that augmented the experience of amusement rides. A wearable telemetry system captured video, audio, heart-rate and acceleration data, streaming them live to spectator interfaces and a watching audience. In this paper, we present a study of this event, which draws on video recordings and post-event interviews, and which highlights the experiences of riders, spectators and ride operators. Our study shows how the telemetry system transformed riders into performers, spectators into an audience, and how the role of ride operator began to include aspects of orchestration, with the relationship between all three roles also transformed. Critically, the introduction of a telemetry system seems to have had the potential to re-connect riders/performers back to operators/orchestrators and spectators/audience, re-introducing a closer relationship that used to be available with smaller rides. Introducing telemetry to a real-world situation also creates significant complexity, which we illustrate by focussing on a moment of perceived crisis.

A proliferation of mobile devices in everyday life has increased the likelihood of technologically mediated interruptions. We examine ethnographic data from an SMS-based pervasive game in order to explicate the situated character of interruption. Ethnomethodological analysis of gameplay in the context of participants' everyday lives shows that interruption handling is shaped by its accountability to the various people or 'cohorts' whose concerns participants need to juggle simultaneously. Findings inform existing approaches to design where certain presuppositions regarding the nature of interruption prevail. Accordingly, we propose an approach to interruption handling that respects the ways in which people orient to and reason about interruptions locally in the conduct of situated action.

The development of multimedia annotation technique provides the possibility to redesign the interfaces of widely used media players, and EmoPlayer is such a media player that can be used to play video clips with affective annotations. A user can select a character in a video clip and view the distribution of his/her emotions along the video timeline through a colour bar based interface. Two experiments were conducted to evaluate the efficiency of affective annotation. The results of these experiments indicate that affective annotation is effective in both improving the speed of locating a specific scene within a video clip and helping comprehend a video clip in a limited viewing time period. Based on the analysis of recorded operations of participants, the strategies employed by participants and the factors that might influence the utilization of affective annotation are also highlighted.

The authors will introduce and demonstrate a novel computer vision based system for augmented performance. Unlike previous systems, which have primarily focused on 'high art' forms such as modern dance, this system is designed for use during a juggling performance. The system allows a juggler to interact with a computer through their movements, and the movements of the balls, to create audio and visual projections which respond to their performance. This system has been designed in an iterative process involving amateur and professional performers, in order to create a system which is truly accessible. In particular, this project takes inspiration from mass market interactive entertainment and has been developed to only use commodity hardware and to be easily distributable, in order to allow it to be used within the small, self funded groups common in the circus arts community.

Local-lag mechanism can maintain consistency for replicated continuous applications, but with a tradeoff of adding delay to local operations. To relieve the negative effects of the delay, this paper proposes an HCI method named echo. With the help of the echo method users can immediately perceive the results of their operations and how large the lag is. In order to evaluate the proposed method, a desktop collaborative virtual environment (CVE) system and a virtual object control task were employed to study the effects of the echo method on human performance (including task completion time, error count, and interaction quality). Experimental results indicate that when the lag exceeds 100 ms the echo method can improve human performance with the effects becoming more evident when a larger lag is used.

Ethnography has become a staple feature of IT research over the last twenty years, shaping our understanding of the social character of computing systems and informing their design in a wide variety of settings. The emergence of ubiquitous computing raises new challenges for ethnography however, distributing interaction across a burgeoning array of small, mobile devices and online environments which exploit invisible sensing systems. Understanding interaction requires ethnographers to reconcile interactions that are, for example, distributed across devices on the street with online interactions in order to assemble coherent understandings of the social character and purchase of ubiquitous computing systems. We draw upon four recent studies to show how ethnographers are replaying system recordings of interaction alongside existing resources such as video recordings to do this and identify key challenges that need to be met to support ethnographic study of ubiquitous computing in the wild.

By considering the spatial character of sensor-based interactive systems, this paper investigates how discussions of seams and seamlessness in ubiquitous computing neglect the complex spatial character that is constructed as a side-effect of deploying sensor technology within a space. Through a study of a torch (aka 'flashlight') based interface, we develop a framework for analysing this spatial character generated by sensor technology. This framework is then used to analyse and compare a range of other systems in which sensor technology is used, in order to develop a design spectrum that contrasts the revealing and hiding of a system's structure to users. Finally, we discuss the implications for interfaces situated in public spaces and consider the benefits of hiding structure from users.

This paper describes and evaluates a novel set of approaches to handle situations where multiple distinct and visually differing objects are tracked, such as tracking of people and objects they are manipulating. Unlike tracking of multiple similar objects, visually different interacting objects can provide an opportunity to improve the tracking accuracy. These approaches are designed for use with Condensation/Particle Filter based algorithms, and allow drop-in replacement of tracker modules for each object type tracked. They use information about the relationships and interactions between objects to improve the tracking, rather than in order to distinguish between the objects, as in current algorithms. They are also designed to be highly efficient, for real time use. The approaches are tested on a challenging set of real data and achieve tracking performance similar to using a single very high dimensional tracker, but with vastly reduced complexity and hence much better time performance. 1

We introduce a location--based game called Feeding Yoshi that provides an example of seamful design, in which key characteristics of its underlying technologies-the coverage and security characteristics of WiFi-are exposed as a core element of gameplay. Feeding Yoshi is also a long--term, wide--area game, being played over a week between three different cities during an initial user study. The study, drawing on participant diaries and interviews, supported by observation and analysis of system logs, reveals players' reactions to the game. We see the different ways in which they embedded play into the patterns of their daily lives, augmenting existing practices and creating new ones, and observe the impact of varying location on both the ease and feel of play. We identify potential design extensions to Feeding Yoshi and conclude that seamful design provides a route to creating engaging experiences that are well adapted to their underlying technologies.

Mobile experiences that take place in public settings such as on city streets create new opportunities for interweaving the fictional world of a performance or game with the everyday physical world. A study of a touring performance reveals how designers generated excitement and dramatic tension by implicating bystanders and encouraging the (apparent) crossing of normal boundaries of behaviour. The study also shows how designers dealt with associated risks through a process of careful orchestration. Consequently, we extend an existing framework for designing spectator interfaces with the concept of performance frames, enabling us to distinguish audience from bystanders. We conclude that using ambiguity to blur the frame can be a powerful design tactic, empowering players to willingly suspend disbelief, so long as a safety-net of orchestration ensures that they do not stray into genuine difficulty.

Mixed Reality Architecture (MRA) supports distributed teams in their everyday work activities by linking multiple physical spaces across a shared three-dimensional virtual world. User configurable audio-visual connections give the inhabitants of MRA full control over whom they want to be in contact with and when they make themselves available, as well as over the overall configuration. We report on the design of MRA, its deployment in an office environment and results from a long-term observational study. The study shows that MRA supports the management of awareness, social interaction and privacy well, that the architectural design features are crucial for this process and that the dynamic architectural topology of MRA and social interaction within it are linked in a fundamental way.

Summary form only given. Pervasive games are an emerging form of distributed real-time application that extend computer gaming out into the real world. From the city streets to the remote wilderness, players with mobile computing devices move through the world, sensors capture information about their current context, including their location, and this is used to deliver a gaming experience that adapts to where they are, what they are doing, and even how they are feeling. Players becomes unchained from their consoles and experience a game that is interwoven with the real world and that is potentially available at any place and any time. Pervasive games raise significant new challenges for the designers of distributed real-time applications, many of which arise from the distinctive characteristics of the underlying fabric of sensing and wireless communications technologies that constitute the ubiquitous computing infrastructure. Drawing on a series of recent collaborations with artists to develop, tour and study pervasive games, the author articulates these distinctive design challenges, exploring issues such as support for location-based play, revealing the nature of the ubiquitous infrastructure to designers, and adapting long-term persistent games with patterns of daily life

We present a study of a mobile mixed reality game calledCan You See Me Now?in which online players are chased through a virtual model of a city by ‘runners’ (professional performers equipped with GPS and WiFi technologies) who have to run through the actual city streets in order to catch the players. We present an ethnographic study of the game as it toured through two different cities and draws upon video recordings of online players, runners, technical support crew, and also on system logs of text communication. Our study reveals the diverse ways in which online players experienced the uncertainties inherent in GPS and WiFi, including being mostly unaware of them, but sometimes seeing them as problems, or treating the as a designed feature of the game, and even occasionally exploiting them within gameplay. In contrast, the runners and technical crew were fully aware of these uncertainties and continually battled against them through an ongoing and distributed process of orchestration. As a result, we encourage designers to deal with such uncertainties as a fundamental characteristic of location-based experiences rather than treating them as exceptions or bugs that might be ironed out in the future. We argue that designers should explicitly consider four potential states of being of a mobile participant: connected and tracked, connected but not tracked, tracked but not connected, and neither connected nor tracked. We then introduce five strategies that might be used to deal with uncertainty in these different states for different kinds of participant: remove it, hide it, manage it, reveal it, and exploit it. Finally, we present proposals for new orchestration interfaces that reveal the ‘seams’ in the underlying technical infrastructure by visualizing the recent performance of GPS and WiFi and predicting the likely future performance of GPS.

We study a collaborative location-based game in which groups of 'lions' hunt together on a virtual savannah that is overlaid on an open playing field. The game implements a straight-forward approach to location-based triggering in which players must be in the same spatial locale in order to share information and act together. Comparison of video recordings of physical play with system recordings of game events reveals subtle and complex interactions between highly dynamic player behavior and the underlying technology. While players exhibit a fluid approach to group formation, the system embodies a more rigid view, leading to difficulties with sharing context and coordinating actions, most notably when groups of players span virtual locale boundaries or initiate actions while on the move. We propose techniques for extending locales to support more flexible grouping and also discuss the broader implications of our findings for location-based applications in general.

Interaction is increasingly a public affair, taking place in our theatres, galleries, museums, exhibitions and on the city streets. This raises a new design challenge for HCI - how should spectators experience a performer's interaction with a computer? We classify public interfaces (including examples from art, performance and exhibition design) according to the extent to which a performer's manipulations of an interface and their resulting effects are hidden, partially revealed, fully revealed or even amplified for spectators. Our taxonomy uncovers four broad design strategies: 'secretive,' where manipulations and effects are largely hidden; 'expressive,' where they tend to be revealed enabling the spectator to fully appreciate the performer's interaction; 'magical,' where effects are revealed but the manipulations that caused them are hidden; and finally 'suspenseful,' where manipulations are apparent but effects are only revealed as the spectator takes their turn.

Pervasive gaming is a new form of multimedia entertainment that extends the traditional computer gaming experience out into the real world. Through a combination of personal devices, positioning systems and other multimedia sensors, combined with wireless networking, a pervasive game can respond to a player's movements and context and enable them to communicate with a game server and other players. We review recent examples of pervasive games in order to explain their distinctive characteristics as multimedia applications. We then consider the challenge of scaling pervasive games to include potentially very large numbers of players. We propose a new approach based upon a campaign model in which individuals, local groups and experts draw on a combination of pervasive games, online services and broadcasting to take part in national or even global events. We discuss the challenges that this raises for further research.

Movements of interfaces can be analyzed in terms of whether they are expected, sensed, and desired. Expected movements are those that users naturally perform; sensed are those that can be measured by a computer; and desired movements are those that are required by a given application. We show how a systematic comparison of expected, sensed, and desired movements, especially with regard to how they do not precisely overlap, can reveal potential problems with an interface and also inspire new features. We describe how this approach has been applied to the design of three interfaces: pointing flashlights at walls and posters in order to play sounds; the Augurscope II, a mobile augmented reality interface for outdoors; and the Drift Table, an item of furniture that uses load sensing to control the display of aerial photographs. We propose that this approach can help to build a bridge between the analytic and inspirational approaches to design and can help designers meet the challenges raised by a diversification of sensing technologies and interface forms, increased mobility, and an emerging focus on technologies for everyday life.

Successfully staging a mixed reality game in which online players are chased through a virtual city by runners located in the real world requires extensive orchestration work. An ethnographic study shows how this concerted achievement extends beyond the control room to the runners on the street. This, in turn, suggests the need to 'decentralize' orchestration and develop support for collaboration 'on the ground'. The study leads to design proposals for orchestration interfaces for mobile experiences that augment situational awareness and surreptitious monitoring among mobile participants and support troubleshooting in situations where participants are disconnected or are unable to access positioning systems such as GPS.

Delay is an unavoidable reality in collaborative environments. We propose an approach to dealing with delay in which 'decorators' are introduced into the interface. Decorators show the presence, magnitude and effects of delay so that participants can better understand its consequences and adopt their own natural coping strategies. Two experiments with different decorators show that this approach can significantly reduce errors in specific collaborative activities. We conclude that revealing delays is one way in which groupware can benefit from accepting and working with the reality of distributed systems, rather than trying to maintain the illusion of copresent interaction.

We describe two games in which online participants collaborated with mobile participants on the city streets. In the first, the players were online and professional performers were on the streets. The second reversed this relationship. Analysis of these experiences yields new insights into the nature of context. We show how context is more socially than technically constructed. We show how players exploited (and resolved conflicts between) multiple indications of context including GPS, GPS error, audio talk, ambient audio, timing, local knowledge and trust. We recommend not overly relying on GPS, extensively using audio, and extending interfaces to represent GPS error.

Ambiguity is usually considered anathema in Human Computer Interaction. We argue, in contrast, that it is a resource for design that can be used to encourage close personal engagement with systems. We illustrate this with examples from contemporary arts and design practice, and distinguish three broad classes of ambiguity according to where uncertainty is located in the interpretative relationship linking person and artefact. Ambiguity of information finds its source in the artefact itself, ambiguity of context in the sociocultural discourses that are used to interpret it, and ambiguity of relationship in the interpretative and evaluative stance of the individual. For each of these categories, we describe tactics for emphasising ambiguity that may help designers and other practitioners understand and craft its use.

This paper considers how we may realize future ubiquitous domestic environments. Building upon previous work on how buildings evolve by Stewart Brand, we suggest the need to broaden existing considerations of interactive design for domestic environments. We identify a number of classes of research activity and the issues associated with these. We then consider the ways in which current buildings undergo continual change. In doing so we outline the stakeholders involved, the representations used and the way change is managed. We contrast our understanding of how buildings change with research activities before identifying new challenges that will need to be addressed by those involved in designing ubiquitous technologies for domestic environments.

The augurscope is a portable mixed reality interface for outdoors. A tripod-mounted display is wheeled to different locations and rotated and tilted to view a virtual environment that is aligned with the physical background. Video from an onboard camera is embedded into this virtual environment. Our design encompasses physical form, interaction and the combination of a GPS receiver, electronic compass, accelerometer and rotary encoder for tracking. An initial application involves the public exploring a medieval castle from the site of its modern replacement. Analysis of use reveals problems with lighting, movement and relating virtual and physical viewpoints, and shows how environmental factors and physical form affect interaction. We suggest that problems might be accommodated by carefully constructing virtual and physical content

Temporal links allow recordings of multi-user sessions to be dynamically inserted into current virtual worlds in a flexible and principled way. We explore key applications of temporal links, showing how they can add new content to virtual worlds, support usability and system evaluation, and link VR to other media such as film and television. These applications illustrate just some of the possibilities of a ubiquitous and flexible record and replay facility such as temporal links. Building on our experience of implementing temporal links in the MASSIVE-3 system, we identify key requirements for system architectures that wish to support an equivalent mechanism.

We describe an audio service for CVEs, designed to support many people speaking simultaneously and to operate across the Internet. Our service exploits a technique called Distributed Partial Mixing (DPM) to dynamically adapt to varying numbers of speakers and network congestion. Our DPM implementation dynamically manages the trade-off between congestion and audio quality when compared to the approaches of peer-to-peer forwarding and total mixing in a way that is fair to the TCP protocol and so operates as a "good Internet citizen". This paper focuses on the large-scale deployment of DPM over wide area networks. In particular we raise and examine the issues when deploying DPM within the context of large dynamic environments. We argue that DPM paradigm remains feasible and desirable in such environments.

We present four contrasting interfaces to allow multiple viewers to explore 3D recordings of dramas in on-line virtual worlds. The first is an on-line promenade performance to an audience of avatars. The second is a form of immersive cinema, with multiple simultaneous viewpoints. The third is a tabletop projection surface that allows viewers to select detailed views from a bird's-eye overview. The fourth is a linear television broadcast created by a director or editor. A comparison of these examples shows how a viewing audience can exploit four general resources - interactivity, influence, space, and time - to make sense of complex, non-linear virtual drama. These resources provide interaction designers with a general framework for defining the relationship between the audience and the 3D content.

A study of a professional touring mixed reality performance called Desert Rain yields insights into how performers orchestrate players' engagement in an interactive experience. Six players at a time journey through an extended physical and virtual set. Each sees a virtual world projected onto a screen made from a fine water spray. This acts as a traversable interface, supporting the illusion that performers physically pass between real and virtual worlds. Live and video-based observations of Desert Rain, coupled with interviews with players and the production team, have revealed how the performers create conditions for the willing suspension of disbelief, and how they monitor and intervene in the players experience without breaking their engagement. This involves carefully timed performances and “off-face” and “virtual” interventions. In turn, these are supported by the ability to monitor players' physical and virtual activity through asymmetric interfaces.

We describe the design of tangible interfaces to the KidPad collaborative drawing tool. Our aims are to support the re-enactment of stories to audiences, and integration within real classroom environments. A six-month iterative design process, working with children and teachers in school, has produced the “magic carpet”, an interface that uses pressure mats and video-tracked and barcoded physical props to navigate a story in KidPad. Reflecting on this process, we propose four guidelines for the design of tangible interfaces for the classroom. (1) Use physical size and shysical props to encourage collaboration. (2) Be aware of how different interfaces emphasize different actions. (3) Be aware that superficial changes to the design can produce very different physical interactions. (4) Focus on open low-tech technologies rather than (over) polished products.

We describe a pilot study of the use of a mixed reality environment for distributed presentations involving virtual and physical audiences and speakers. Our aims were to establish mutual awareness between all participants; to present physical and virtual worlds as being spatially integrated; and to support moderate sized audiences. We used a mixed reality boundary to join a physical space to a collaborative virtual environment so that the two appeared to be adjacent but distinct components of a single space. Two presentations were staged to a mixed physical and virtual audience, one by a virtual speaker and one by a physical speaker. Each presentation was followed by a question and answer session. Qualitative analysis of semi-structured interviews and video recordings revealed that some degree of mutual awareness was established between participants and that physical participants may have viewed the environment as being more spatially integrated than virtual participants. We propose that improving avatars and video textures in the virtual environment may further enhance the experience.

We describe the iterative design of two collaborative storytelling technologies for young children, KidPad and the Klump. We focus on the idea of designing interfaces to subtly encourage collaboration so that children are invited to discover the added benefits of working together. This idea has been motivated by our experiences of using early versions of our technologies in schools in Sweden and the UK. We compare the approach of encouraging collaboration with other approaches to synchronizing shared interfaces. We describe how we have revised the technologies to encourage collaboration and to reflect design suggestions made by the children themselves.

Traversable interfaces establish the illusion that virtual and physical worlds are joined together and that users can physically cross from one to the other. Our design for a traversable interface combines work on tele-embodiment, mixed reality boundaries and virtual environments. It also exploits non-solid projection surfaces, of which we describe four examples. Our design accommodates the perspectives of users who traverse the interface and also observers who are present in the connected physical and virtual worlds, an important consideration for performance and entertainment applications. A demonstrator supports encounters between members of our laboratory and remote visitors.

No abstract available.

Virtual reality (VR) currently lacks the kinds of sophisticated production technologies that are commonly available for established media such as video and audio. This paper introduces the idea of temporal links, which provide a flexible mechanism for replaying past or recent recordings of virtual environments within other real-time virtual environments. Their flexibility arises from a combination of temporal, spatial and presentational properties. Temporal properties determine the relationship between time in a live environment and time in a recording, including the apparent speed and direction of replay. Spatial properties determine the spatial relationship between the environment and the recording. Presentational properties determine the appearance of the recording within the environment. These properties may be fixed, dynamically varied by an application, or directly controlled in real-time by users. Consequently, temporal links have a wide variety of potential uses, including supporting post-production tools for virtual environments, post-exercise debriefing in training simulators, and asynchranous communication such as VR email, as well as providing new forms of content for virtual worlds that refer to past activity. We define temporal links and their properties and describe their implementation in the MASSIVE-3 Collaborative Virtual Environment (CVE) system, focusing on the underlying record and replay mechanisms. We also demonstrate applications for adding new content to an existing virtual world, and a VR post-production editor.

introduction Free Access Share on Introduction to the special issue on human-computer interaction and collaborative virtual environments Authors: Steve Benford Univ. of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK Univ. of Nottingham, Nottingham, UKView Profile , Paul Dourish Univ. of California, Irvine Univ. of California, IrvineView Profile , Tom Rodden Univ. of Lancaster, Lancaster, PA Univ. of Lancaster, Lancaster, PAView Profile Authors Info & Claims ACM Transactions on Computer-Human InteractionVolume 7Issue 4Dec. 2000 pp 439–441https://doi.org/10.1145/365058.365080Online:01 December 2000Publication History 3citation1,240DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations3Total Downloads1,240Last 12 Months31Last 6 weeks2 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteeReaderPDF

Inhabited television combines collaborative virtual environments (CVEs) with broadcast television so that on-line audiences can participate in television shows within shared virtual worlds. We describe a series of experiments with inhabited television, beginning with the NOWninety6 poetry performance, The Mirror, and Heaven & Hell—Live. These early experiments raised fundamental questions for inhabited television concerning the extent to which it is possible to establish fast-paced social interaction within a CVE, and to which it is possible to produce a coherent and engaging broadcast of this action. We then present a fourth more recent experiment, Out of This World, that directly addressed these questions. We describe how the formulation of inhabited television design principles, combined with the use of dedicated production software for scripting and directing a show and for controlling virtual cameras, enabled us to create a fast-moving and more coherent experience.

This paper explores and evaluates the support for object-focused interaction provided by a desktop Collaborative Virtual Environment. An experimental “design” task was conducted, and video recordings of the participants' activities facilitated an observational analysis of interaction in, and through, the virtual world. Observations include: problems due to “fragmented” views of embodiments in relation to shared objects; participants compensating with spoken accounts of their actions; and difficulties in understanding others' perspectives. Implications and proposals for the design of CVEs drawn from these observations are: the use of semidistorted views to support peripheral awareness; more explicit or exaggerated representations of actions than are provided by pseudohumanoid avatars; and navigation techniques that are sensitive to the actions of others. The paper also presents some examples of the ways in which these proposals might be realized.

A vital component of any application or environment is security, and yet this is often one of the lower priorities, losing out to performance and functionality issues, if it is considered at all. This paper considers a spatial approach to enabling, understanding and managing access control that is generally applicable across a range of collaborative environments and applications. Access control is governed according to the space within which subjects and objects reside, and the ability to traverse space to get close to an object. We present a framework that enables the SPACE access model [4], previously presented as an access model solely for collaborative virtual environments, to be applied across a number of collaborative systems. This framework is exemplified through mappings of the model to 3D and 2D collaborative environments, namely Spline [1], TeamRooms [19] and Orbit [16]. One particularly interesting feature of the model is the way in which it handles group access by considering how group credentials are determined. These credentials are presented to the model in the usual manner. We conclude by presenting some limitations of our approach, and workarounds.

We present a QoS architecture for collaborative virtual environments (CVEs), focusing on the management of streamed video within shared virtual worlds. Users express QoS requirements by negotiating levels of mutual awareness using our previously defined spatial model of interaction. The architecture uses these awareness values as part of dynamic QoS management. A key aspect of the architecture is that it maintains a balance between the needs of a group of users as a whole (e.g., which streams are admitted onto a shared network) versus those of individual users within the group (e.g., which streams are subscribed to by a local host). We walk through a demonstration scenario, a virtual shopping mall, to show the architecture at work.

Inhabited Television" combines multiuser virtual environments with television, so that online audience-members can participate in TV shows staged in a virtual world.It is presented simultaneously both to conventional passive viewers and to online participants.In many cases it benefits from being broadcast live.This paper is based on our fourth major experiment with Inhabited TV, a live virtual game show called "Out Of This World".For this event we adopted non-automated approaches to camera control and mixing to allow an exploration of appropriate forms of presentation for inhabited television.We describe the techniques which were used to create and enhance the live video output which was produced during the show: appropriate world design; dynamic constraints on participant movements; and a performance-oriented virtual camera control interface.This camera control interface includes explicit support for a range of spatial and temporal control styles.We also give evaluative feedback on the camera control interface and the event's (television-based) approach to mixing and directing, drawing on a social scientific field study conducted on-site during the preparation for, and performances of, the show.

This paper explores interfaces to virtual environments supporting multiple users. An interface to an environment allowing interaction with virtual artefacts is constructed, drawing on previous proposals for 'desktop' virtual environments. These include the use of Peripheral Lenses to support peripheral awareness in collaboration; and extending the ways in which users' actions are represented for each other. Through a qualitative analysis of a design task, the effect of the proposals is outlined. Observations indicate that, whilst these designs go some way to re-constructing physical co-presence in terms of awareness and interaction through the environment, some issues remain. Notably, peripheral distortion in supporting awareness may cause problematic interactions with and through the virtual world; and extended representations of actions may still allow problems in re-assembling the composition of others' actions. We discuss the potential for: designing representations for distorted peripheral perception; and explicitly displaying the course of action in object-focused interaction.

Inhabited Television takes traditional broadcast television and combines it with multiuser virtual reality, to give new possibilities for interaction and participation in and around shows or channels. “Out Of This World” was an experimental inhabited TV show, staged in Manchester, in September 1998, using the MASSIVE-2 system. During this event we captured comprehensive records of network traffic, and additional logs of user activity (in particular movement and speaking). In this paper we present the results of our analyses of network and user activity in these shows. We contrast our results with those obtained from previous analyses of teleconferencing-style scenarios. We find that the inhabited television scenario results in much higher levels of user activity, and significant bursts of coordinated activity. We show how these characteristics must be taken into account when designing a system and infrastructure for applications of this kind. In particular, it is clear that any notion of strict turn-taking (and associated assumptions about resource sharing) is completely unfounded in this domain. We also show that the concept of “levels of participation” is a powerful tool for understanding and managing the bandwidth-requirements of an inhabited television event.

In this paper, we describe formations, a means for the explicit support of groups and group effects in Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVEs). Being part of a formation affects a participant's experience of a virtual environment. We introduce a framework that defines the components of a formation, including an object of interest, members, non-members and leaders. We describe how formations may be applied, using the concept of Inhabited TV as a basis.

Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVEs) are shared virtual spaces designed to enhance collaboration between the - usually remote - participants. The deployment of Collaborative Virtual Environments over wide area networks increases typical network delays, potentially breaking the consistency between the replicated versions of an environment at the participants' sites. This paper presents our qualitative observations of an experiment involving two players engaged in a virtual ball game in the presence of increasing network delays. It also describes how network delay affected the participants' behaviour and produced collaboration breakdowns. We observed that, as the network delay increases, the users modify their playing strategies in an attempt to cope with the situation, presenting several types of adaptation strategy. Knowledge of the presence and effect of delays is a major factor in allowing users to adopt strategies for coping with inconsistencies. We propose that if the participants were made more aware of the behaviour of the system, e.g. the presence of delays, then they might be able to improve their performance. Consequently, we propose a number of techniques to increase the user's knowledge of infrastructural characteristics such as delay.

We extend previous work on texture mapping video streams into virtual environments by introducing awareness driven video QoS.This uses movements within a shared virtual world to activate different video services.In turn, these services have different settings for underlying QoS parameters such as frame-rate, resolution and compression.We demonstrate this technique through a combined conferencing!mediaspace application which uses awareness driven video for facial expressions and for views into remote physical environments.We reflect on the issues of spatial consistency, privacy, seamless shifts in mutual involvement and making underlying QoS mechanisms more visible, malleable and flexible.

~s paper explores and evaluates the support for objectfocused cotiaboration provided by a destiop CoUaborative Virtual Environment me system was usd to support an experimental 'design' task.Video recordings of the participants' activities factitated an observationrd analysis of interaction in, and through, the virtual world.Observations include problems due to tigmented views of embodiments in relation to shared objects; participants compensating with spoken accounts of their actions; and difficulties in understanding otiers' perspectives.Design impXcations include: more expficit representations of actions than are provided by pseudo-humanoid embodiments; and navigation techniques that are sensitive to the actions of others.

Illustrates the application of a 3D multiple dataset visualisation tool to a small relational database. The system itself is built around the concept of data containers. These are dynamic regions in 3D space which provide the ability to view multiple datasets using alternate visual paradigms in a dynamic visual querying environment. This system therefore proposes a technique for the exploration of databases through the use of a navigable 3D space. Key concepts under demonstration include multiple dataset visualisation, nesting of alternate visual representations and zooming of detail through the use of aggregates. It is also shown how the containers may be used to develop query chains and to construct meaningful 3D representations of dataset collections.

We propose an approach to creating shared mixed realities based on the construction of transparent boundaries between real and virtual spaces. First, we introduce a taxonomy that classifies current approaches to shared spaces according to the three dimensions of transportation, artificiality, and spatiality. Second, we discuss our experience of staging a poetry performance simultaneously within real and virtual theaters. This demonstrates the complexities involved in establishing social interaction between real and virtual spaces and motivates the development of a systematic approach to mixing realities. Third, we introduce and demonstrate the technique of mixed-reality boundaries as a way of joining real and virtual spaces together in order to address some of these problems.

We introduce a framework for supporting crowds of participants in collaborative virtual environments (CVEs). The framework is realised as an extension to our previous spatial model of interaction and aims to provide greater scaleability and flexibility for communication between the inhabitants of virtual worlds. Our framework introduces an explicit crowd mechanism into CVEs in order to support the formation and activation of different kinds of crowd with different effects on mutual awareness and communication (achieved through the use of aggregation techniques combined with awareness adaptation). We present a demonstration application called the Arena - a shared space for staging on-line performances in front of a live audience. Keywords CSCW, Virtual Reality, Crowds INTRODUCTION Our aim is to introduce and demonstrate a framework for supporting crowds in collaborative virtual environments (CVEs). This framework is intended to support the development of more scaleable CVEs than has bee...

This paper addresses the design of Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVEs).More specifically, it considers key design issues concerning the use of either real world 'facsimile' representations or more abstracted means of delivering CVEs.We suggest that the use of ethnographic studies of the context-of-use of the CVE under development is a useful means of informing these design issues in contrast to more in-principle means of drawing conclusions.This approach is illustrated by informing the development of a virtual environment from and ethnographic study of work.

Article Access control in virtual environments Share on Authors: Adrian Bullock Department of Computer Science The University of Nottingham, Nottingham NG7 2RD, UK Department of Computer Science The University of Nottingham, Nottingham NG7 2RD, UKView Profile , Steve Benford Department of Computer Science The University of Nottingham, Nottingham NG7 2RD, UK Department of Computer Science The University of Nottingham, Nottingham NG7 2RD, UKView Profile Authors Info & Claims VRST '97: Proceedings of the ACM symposium on Virtual reality software and technologySeptember 1997 Pages 29–35https://doi.org/10.1145/261135.261142Online:01 September 1997Publication History 7citation446DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations7Total Downloads446Last 12 Months3Last 6 weeks2 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteGet Access

We review current spatial approaches to CSCW (mediaspaces, spatial video conferencing, collaborative virtual environments and telepresence)and classify them along the proposed dimensions of transportation, artificiality and spatiality.This classification leads us to identify new shared space application so called mixed realities.We present an example of a mixed reality called the Internet Foyer, an application which provides a unified entry point into an organisation's physical and electronic environments and which supports awareness and chance encounters between the occupants of physical and synthetic space.

Urban planners have developed many theories of how urban design affects people's experience of real-world cities. This paper considers how this body of work might be applied to the design of virtual environments. The paper presents and compares two pieces of research, each proposing algorithms for automatically enhancing or generating virtual environments and each inspired by a different theory of urban design. The first describes how Kevin Lynch's work on the legibility of cities can be applied to improve the navigability of three dimensional information visualisations. The paper describes the design, construction and experimental evaluation of a system called LEADS which implements some general purpose legibility enhancing algorithms. The second describes how Hillier and Hansen's work on the social logic of space has been applied to the construction of multi-user virtual cities. The paper describes the design, implementation and experimental evaluation of a city generation system called The Virtual City Builder (VCB). It then describes simulation experiments with VCB which uncover relationships between different city layouts and opportunities for navigation and social encounter. The paper concludes by comparing both pieces of work and by outlining possibilities for their future integration.

This paper shows how previous research into navigation through urban environments, which has emerged from the discipline of urban planning, can be adapted to enhance the design of information visualizations. The paper draws on Kevin Lynch's seminal work on the legibility of urban landscapes in order to propose a set of general techniques which can be applied to the task of information visualization. It describes a specific instantiation of these techniques called LEADS, a legibility system which post-processes the output of a range of existing visualization systems in order to enhance their legibility. The paper provides four examples of the application of LEADS to different information visualizations. Following this, it discusses experimental work, the conclusions of which provide some tentative support for the likely success of this approach. The outcomes of this work are both a recognition of the important relationship between the disciplines of urban planning and the design of information visualizations as well as more concrete algorithms to be used by the designers of such visualizations.

This paper explores the issue of user embodiment within collaborative virtual environments. By user embodiment we mean the provision of users with appropriate body images so as to represent them to others and also to themselves. By collaborative virtual environments we mean multi-user virtual reality systems which explicitly support co-operative work (although we argue that the results of our exploration may also be applied to other kinds of collaborative system). The main part of the paper identifies a list of embodiment design issues including: presence, location, identity, activity, availability, history of activity, viewpoint, actionpoint, gesture, facial expression, voluntary versus involuntary expression, degree of presence, reflecting capabilities, physical properties, active bodies, time and change, manipulating your view of others, representation across multiple media, autonomous and distributed body parts, truthfulness and efficiency. Following this, we show how these issues are reflected in our own DIVE and MASSIVE prototype systems and also show how they can be used to analyse several other existing collaborative systems.

MASSIVE is a distributed virtual reality system. It provides rich facilities to support user interaction and cooperation via text, audio and graphics media and interaction is controlled by a spatial model of interaction. The communications architecture is based on processes communicating via typed connections which have interfaces on both ends and which integrate RPCs, attributes and streams in a common context. A spatial interface trading service, the aura manager, has been developed to support interface trading in a spatial context. The concepts embodied in the aura manager can be useful in other interface trading situations, especially where notions of "space" and "meeting" may be applied.

Navigation in computer generated information spaces may be difficult, resulting in users getting "lost in hyperspace". This work aims to build on research from the area of city planning to try to solve this problem. We introduce the concepts of legibility and cognitive maps and the five features of urban landscape with which they are associated. Following this will be descriptions of techniques and algorithms which we have developed to allow these features to be introduced to three dimensional spaces for information visualisation. Next we describe a specific application of these techniques in the visualisation of the World Wide Web and conclude with a look at future development of the system.

Abstract We present a virtual reality application called VR‐VIBE which is intended to support the co‐operative browsing and filtering of large document stores. VR‐VIBE extends a visualisation approach proposed in a previous two dimensional system called VIBE into three dimensions, allowing more information to be visualised at one time and supporting more powerful styles of interaction, The essence of VR‐VIBE is that multiple users can explore the results of applying several simultaneous queries to a corpus of documents. By arranging the queries into a spatial framework, the system shows the relative attraction of each document to each query by its spatial position and also shows the absolute relevance of each document to all of the queries. Users may then navigate the space, select individual documents, control the display according to a dynamic relevance threshold and dynamically drag the queries to new positions to see the effect on the document space. Co‐operative browsing is supported by directly embodying users and providing them with the ability to interact over live audio connections and to attach brief textual annotations to individual documents. Finally, we conclude with some initial observations gleaned from our experience of constructing VR‐VIBE and using it in the laboratory setting.

We describe a prototype virtual reality teleconferencing system called MASSIVE which has been developed as part of our on-going research into collaborative virtual environments. This system allows multiple users to communicate using arbitrary combinations of audio, graphics, and text media over local and wide area networks. Communication is controlled by a so-called spatial model of interaction so that one user's perception of another user is sensitive to their relative positions and orientations. The key concept in this spatial model is the (quantitative) awareness which one object has of another. This is controlled by the observing object's focus and the observed object's nimbus , which describe regions of interest and projection, respectively. Each object's aura defines the total region within which it interacts. This is applied independently in each medium. The system (and the spatial model which it implements) is intended to provide a flexible and natural environment for the spatial mediation of conversation. The model also provides a basis for scaling to relatively large numbers of users. Our design goals include supporting heterogeneity, scalability, spatial mediation, balance of power, and multiple concurrent meetings; MASSIVE meets all of these goals. Our initial experiences show the importance of audio in collaborative VR, and they raise issues about field of view for graphical users, speed of navigation, quality of embodiment, varying perceptions of space, and scalability.

This paper explores the use of multi-actor virtual reality systems to support communication and cooperation between groups of people. In particular, it introduces a spatial model of interaction which aims to support people in using their natural social communication skills when working together. First, we briefly review some of the social science background which has informed the development of this model. Next, we define the model's main concepts, i.e. aura, awareness, focus, nimbus, adapters and boundaries. We also explore the issues of user embodiment and spatial structure, the latter leading to the concept of Populated Information Terrains. We then show how a few simplifying assumptions results in the notion of awareness states and discuss how these link to the results of previous studies of cooperative work. Following this, we present some early prototypes which realise our concepts within the DIVE distributed virtual reality system. In the first of these, a simple discrete version of the spatial model has been constructed based on the notion of awareness states. The second, Q-PIT, demonstrates an early Populated Information Terrain. Finally, we briefly reflect on the relationship between this work and other CSCW systems based on the metaphor of shared space.

Room metaphors have become increasingly popular as a basis for CSCW systems. The paper describes how such metaphors might be extended to support large scale communication through the introduction of a spatial model for mediating conversations in virtual computer spaces. The model is described in terms of an abstract mathematical framework and the paper then outlines how this might be applied to various kinds of CSCW system. As a next step, the combination of rooms into larger virtual structures is considered and this results in proposals for structuring, navigating and mapping a large virtual Cyberspace for cooperation. Finally, the paper describes a current prototype application and reflects on some of the architectural issues involved in its realisation as a distributed system.

Mechanisms are specified for achieving integrity controls over entries and attributes within a directory information base to facilitate the dynamic management of directory information. The existence of the commonly understood directory data and architectural models is assumed. Two directory objects, attribute definitions and entry definitions, are described; they specify the structure of classes of entries and attributes, respectively. The issues of scope and dynamic creation of definitions are given particular attention. A solution is proposed for problems directory management, which is not covered by present standards.>